No Rock And Roll Fun

BACK WHEN I WAS YOUNG: I took a course while at university in Pop. One of the highlights was being given a tape with White Riot on it, while someone declaimed "A... B... A... B... C" over the top. It was splendid, because even although the person who'd produced it (someone from the Open University, I believe) had clearly a wide and deep musical knowledge, and could probably transcribe a song in musical notation merely from watching the nodding head of a record player pick-up arm as it travelled along the vinyl, he clearly had no understanding that what made White Riot White Riot wasn't the cadence of the beat or the chord changes, but the trousers and the sneer. And the pogoing. I thought of this tape again when I read this on kuro5hin.org, an attempt to boil pop down to its barest bones. In a sense, Vox Lobster is spot on - yes, Britney and the others are little more than a bunch of arpeggio and phrasing, and can be examined as such. But that's a little bit like exploring the new Zadie Smith by considering the font and colour of inks used on the cover. To try and pin pop down into the piece of music itself is to miss the essence of what pop is - a shared experience, a bunch of common assumptions, a spot of lust, a phrase that gets caught bouncing between two of your synapses for a day. You won't find pop in the mechanics; it lives in its usage.
And maybe if there is a place where 'classical' stops and 'pop' begins, it's the line where the music moves from being purely of itself, into being of the world.
[hearty thanks to soundspy for the original link]