Music Pop Styles

  • Added:
    Feb 09, 2013
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Elvis Presley cor 04
Elvis Presley cor 04
Photo by Luiz Fernando / Sonia Maria

Music is a therapy because it reduces stress and has a positive impact on human behavior. It is a powerful medicine because it improves emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual health. Music allows our emotions of sadness and happiness to arise. I enjoy listening to almost all kinds of popular music.

When I am sad, I listen to blues and when I am happy I listen to rock `n` roll or country music. However, contemporary popular music has many other styles.    Blues is a traditional black American music. ‘Blue’ means ‘sad’, and many blues songs are about how hard life was for black people. Gospel is a religious music sung in churches in the southern USA. Rhythm and Blues was played by black workers in the USA who moved from farms to the cities. They played the blues with electric guitars and this became ‘rhythm and blues’. Country and Western is the music of poor white Americans in the 1930s and 1940s. It is still the most popular music in the southern USA.

Many radio stations in the USA in the 1950s would not play ‘black’ music. Elvis Presley was one of the first white singers to mix ‘rhythm and blues’ and ‘country and western’. The result was ‘rock ‘n’ roll’. Soul is a mixture of ‘gospel’ and ‘rhythm and blues’. The most successful soul singers are probably Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson.

Heavy Metal is a style based on ‘rhythm and blues’, but with the instruments amplified so they are extremely loud. Led Zeppelin was one of the first groups to do this.

Reggae music originated in Jamaica during the late 1960s. Bob Marley made it popular.  It is a mixture of African styles and ‘rhythm and blues’. In the 1980s, disc-jockeys in dance clubs began half singing and half talking over instrumental music and ‘rap’ music was born.

In the 1990s house was a dance music based on very fast rhythms and modern electrical sounds. There are now various sub-styles of ‘house music’, such as ‘techno pop’, ‘trance’ and ‘jungle’. In my opinion, music is a learning, a therapy and a teaching tool. If we want to lead a healthy life, we need to incorporate music. It has a profound effect on the emotional, social, intellectual and physical aspects of a person.

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