| Art pop | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Mid-1960s, United Kingdom and United States |
| Derivative forms | |
| Other topics | |
Art pop is a loosely defined style ofpop music[1] that emerged in the mid-1960s, influenced byart theories[7] as well as ideas from other art mediums, such asfashion,fine art,cinema,contemporary art andavant-garde literature.[3][8] The genre draws onpop art's integration ofhigh andlow culture, and emphasizes imagery, style, and gesture over personal expression.[7][9] Art pop musicians may deviate from traditional pop audiences androck music conventions,[10] instead exploringpostmodern approaches and ideas such as pop's status ascommercial art, notions of artifice and theself, and questions ofhistorical authenticity.
During the mid-1960s, British and American pop musicians such asBrian Wilson,Phil Spector, andthe Beatles began incorporating the ideas of the pop art movement into their recordings.[1] English art pop musicians drew from theirart school studies,[8] while in America the style drew on the influence of pop artistAndy Warhol and the affiliated bandthe Velvet Underground.[11] The style would experience its "golden age" in the 1970s amongglam rock artists such asDavid Bowie,10cc,Roxy Music, andSparks, who embraced theatricality andthrowaway pop culture.[4]
Art pop's tradition continued in the late 1970s and 1980s through styles such aspost-punk andsynthpop as well as the BritishNew Romantic scene,[5][10] developing further with artists who rejected conventional rock instrumentation and structure in favor ofdance styles and thesynthesizer.[10] The 2010s saw new art pop trends develop, such aship hop artists drawing onvisual art andvaporwave artists exploring the sensibilities ofcontemporary capitalism and theInternet.
Art pop draws onpostmodernism's breakdown of the high/low cultural boundary and explores concepts of artifice and commerce.[12][nb 1] The style emphasizes the manipulation ofsigns over personal expression, drawing on an aesthetic of the everyday and the disposable, in distinction to theRomantic and autonomous tradition embodied byart rock orprogressive rock.[13][nb 2]SociomusicologistSimon Frith has distinguished the appropriation of art into pop music as having a particular concern withstyle,gesture, and the ironic use of historical eras andgenres.[16] Central to particular purveyors of the style were notions of theself as a work of construction and artifice,[10] as well as a preoccupation with the invention of terms, imagery, process, and affect.[17]The Independent's Nick Coleman wrote: "Art-pop is partly about attitude and style; but it's essentially about art. It is, if you like, a way of making pureformalism socially acceptable in a pop context."[18]
Cultural theoristMark Fisher wrote that the development of art pop evolved out of the triangulation of pop, art, andfashion.[10] Frith states that it was "more or less" directly inspired byPop art.[2][3][nb 3] According to criticStephen Holden, art pop often refers to any pop style which deliberately aspires to theformal values of classical music and poetry, though these works are often marketed bycommercial interests rather than respected cultural institutions.[1] Writers forThe Independent and theFinancial Times have noted the attempts of art pop music to distance its audiences from the public at large.[20][21]Robert Christgau wrote inThe Village Voice in 1987 that art-pop results "when a fascination with craft spirals up and in until it turns into an aestheticist obsession."[22]
What seems clearer in retrospect [...] is a distinction between the first wave of art school musicians, the London provincialr & b players who simply picked up thebohemian attitude and carried it with them into progressive rock, and a second generation, who applied arttheories to pop music making
The boundaries between art and pop music became increasingly blurred throughout the second half of the 20th century.[24] In the 1960s, pop musicians such asJohn Lennon,Syd Barrett,Pete Townshend,Brian Eno, andBryan Ferry began to take inspiration from their previousart school studies.[3] Frith states that inBritain, art school represented "a traditional escape route for the bright working class kids, and a breeding ground for young bands likethe Beatles and beyond".[12] In North America, art pop was influenced byBob Dylan and theBeat Generation, and became more literary throughfolk music's singer-songwriter movement.[1] Before progressive/art rock became the most commercially successful British sound of the early 1970s, the 1960spsychedelic movement brought together art and commercialism, broaching the question of what it meant to be an "artist" in a mass medium.[25]Progressive musicians thought that artistic status depended on personal autonomy, and so the strategy of "progressive" rock groups was to present themselves as performers and composers "above" normal pop practice.[26]
Another chief influence on the development of art pop was the Pop art movement.[1] The term "pop art", first coined to describe the aesthetic value of mass-produced goods, was directly applicable to the contemporary phenomenon ofrock and roll (includingElvis Presley, an early Pop art icon).[27] According to Frith: "[Pop art] turned out to signal the end of Romanticism, to be an art without artists. Progressive rock was the bohemians' last bet [...] In this context the key Pop art theorist was not[Richard] Hamilton or any of the other British artists who, for all their interest in the mass market, remained its academic admirers only, butAndy Warhol. For Warhol the significant issue wasn't the relative merits of 'high' and 'low' art but the relationship betweenall art and 'commerce'."[28] Warhol'sFactory house bandthe Velvet Underground was an American group who emulated Warhol's art/pop synthesis, echoing his emphasis on simplicity, and pioneering a modernist avant-garde approach to art rock that ignored the conventional hierarchies of artistic representation.[29][nb 4]
Holden traces art pop's origins to the mid 1960s, when producers such asPhil Spector and musicians such asBrian Wilson of theBeach Boys began incorporating pseudo-symphonic textures to their pop recordings, as well as the Beatles' first recordings with a string quartet.[1][nb 5] In the words of author Matthew Bannister, Wilson and Spector were both known as "eremitic studio obsessives [...] [who] habitually absented themselves from their own work", and like Warhol, Spector existed "not as presence, but as a controlling or organising principle behind and beneath the surfaces of media. Both vastly successful commercial artists, and both simultaneously absent and present in their own creations."[35]
WriterErik Davis called Wilson's art pop "unique in music history",[36] while collaboratorVan Dyke Parks compared it to the contemporaneous work of Warhol and artistRoy Lichtenstein, citing his ability to elevate common or hackneyed material to the level of "high art".[37][nb 6] In his 2004 bookSonic Alchemy: Visionary Music Producers and Their Maverick Recordings, David Howard credits the Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations" with launching the "brief, shining moment [when] pop and art came together as unlikely commercial bedfellows."[41]
In a move that was indicated by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Phil Spector, andFrank Zappa,[42] the dominant format of pop musictransitioned from singles to albums, and many rock bands created works that aspired to make grand artistic statements, where art rock would flourish.[1] Musicologist Ian Inglis writes that the cover art for the Beatles' 1967 albumSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was "perceived as largely responsible for the connections between art and pop to be made explicit".[43] AlthoughSgt. Pepper's was preceded by several albums that had begun to bridge the line between "disposable" pop and "serious" rock, it successfully gave an established "commercial" voice to an alternative youth culture.[44] Author Michael Johnson wrote that art pop music would continue to exist subsequent to the Beatles, but without ever achieving their level of popular success.[33][nb 7]
The Who was labelled "the first pop art band" by their manager, while member Pete Townshend explains: "We stand for pop art clothes, pop art music and pop art behaviour [...] we don't change offstage; we live pop art."[46] Frith considers their albumThe Who Sell Out (December 1967) "perhaps the Pop art pop masterpiece", the Who using the "vitality" of commerce itself, a tactic echoed byRoy Wood'sthe Move and, later,Kevin Godley andLol Creme of10cc.[46] Townshend's ideas were notable for their emphasis on commercialism: "[His] use of Pop art rhetoric [...] referred not to music-making as such – to the issue of self-expression – but to commercial music-making, to issues of packaging, selling and publicizing, to the problems of popularity and stardom."[46] In a May 1967 interview, Townshend coined the term "power pop" to describe the music of the Who,the Small Faces, and the Beach Boys. Power pop later developed as a genre known for its reconfiguration of 1960s tropes. Music journalistPaul Lester argued that this component could ratify power pop as one of the first postmodern music genres.[47]
Music journalistPaul Lester locates "the golden age of adroit, intelligent art-pop" to when the bands10cc,Roxy Music andSparks "were mixing and matching from different genres and eras, well before the term 'postmodern' existed in the pop realm."[4] The effect of the Velvet Underground gave rock musicians likeIggy Pop ofthe Stooges a self-consciousness about their work. Iggy was inspired to transform his personality into an art object, which would in turn influence singerDavid Bowie, and led to the Stooges' role as the group linking 1960shard rock to 1970spunk.[11] In the 1970s, a similarly self-conscious art/pop community (which Frith calls "the most significant" of the period) began to coalesce in theMercer Arts Center in New York. The school encouraged the continuation of the kinds of collaboration between high and low art once exemplified by the Factory, as drummerJerry Harrison (later ofTalking Heads) explained: "it started with the Velvet Underground and all of the things that were identified with Andy Warhol."[11][nb 8]
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Theglam rock scene of the early 1970s would again draw widely on art school sensibilities.[12] Inspired partly by the Beatles' use of alter egos onSgt. Pepper's,[48] glam emphasized outlandish costumes, theatrical performances, and allusions tothrowaway pop culture phenomena, becoming one of the most deliberately visual phenomena to emerge in rock music.[49] Some of its artists, like Bowie, Roxy Music, and ex-Velvet Underground memberLou Reed, would continue the practices associated with the modernist avant-garde branch of art rock.[14][nb 9]
Bowie, a former art-school student and painter,[12] made visual presentation a central aspect of his work,[52] deriving his concept of art pop from the work and attitudes of Warhol and the Velvet Underground.[53] Roxy Music is described by Frith as the "archetypical art pop band."[12] Frontman Bryan Ferry incorporated the influence of his mentor, pop art pioneerRichard Hamilton[49][54] while synthesizer playerBrian Eno drew on his study ofcybernetics and art under theoristRoy Ascott.[55][nb 10] Frith posits that Ferry and Bowie remain "the most significant influences in British pop", writing they were both concerned with "popas commercial art", and together made glam rock into an art form to be taken seriously, unlike other "camp" acts such asGary Glitter. This redefined progressive rock and revitalized the idea of the Romantic artist in terms of media fame.[57] According to Armond White, Roxy Music's engagement with pop art practices effectively "showed that pop's surface frivolity and deep pleasure were legitimate and commanding pursuits."[17] After leaving Roxy Music in 1973, Eno would further explore art pop styles on a series of experimental solo albums.[58][nb 11] For the rest of the decade, he developed Warhol's arguments in a different direction from his contemporaries, and collaborated with a wide range of popular musicians of the era.[57]
Cultural theoristMark Fisher characterized a variety of musical developments in the late 1970s, including post-punk,synthpop, and particularly the work of German electronic bandKraftwerk,[60] as situated within art pop traditions.[5] He states that Bowie and Roxy Music's English style of art pop "culminated" with the music of the British groupJapan.[8]The Quietus characterized Japan's 1979 albumQuiet Life as defining "a very European form of detached, sexually-ambiguous and thoughtful art-pop" similar to that explored by Bowie on 1977'sLow.[61] Brian Eno and John Cale would serve a crucial part in the careers of Bowie, Talking Heads, and many key punk andpost-punk records.[57] Following the amateurism of thepunk movement, post-punk era saw a return to the art school tradition previously embodied by the work of Bowie and Roxy Music,[62][5] with artists drawing ideas fromliterature,art,cinema, andcritical theory into musical and pop cultural contexts while refusing the common distinction betweenhigh art and low culture.[63][64][nb 12] An emphasis onmultimedia performance and visual art became common.[64]
Fisher characterized subsequent artists such asGrace Jones, theNew Romantic groups of the 1980s, andRóisín Murphy as a part of an art pop lineage.[10] He noted that the development of art pop involved the rejection of conventionalrock instrumentation and structure in favor ofdance styles and thesynthesizer.[10]The Quietus names English New Romantic actDuran Duran, who were formatively influenced by the work of Japan, Kraftwerk and David Bowie, as "pioneering art pop up to arena-packing level", developing the style into "a baroque, romantic escape."[61] CriticSimon Reynolds dubbed English singerKate Bush "the queen of art-pop", citing her merging of glamour, conceptualism, and innovation without forsaking commercial pop success during the late 1970s and 1980s.[68]
Icelandic singerBjörk was a prominent purveyor of art pop[69] for her wide-ranging integration of disparate forms of art and popular culture.[70] During the 1990s, she became art pop's most commercially successful artist.[71] Discussing Björk in 2015, Jason Farago ofThe Guardian wrote: "The last 30 years inart history are in large part a story of collaborative enterprises, of collapsed boundaries between high art and low, and of the end of divisions between media. Few cultural figures have made the distinctions seem as meaningless as the Icelandic singer who combinedtrip hop with12-tone, and who brought the avant garde toMTV just before both those things disappeared."[72]
According to Barry Walters ofNPR, 1990s rap groupP.M. Dawn developed a style of "kaleidoscopic art-pop" that was initially dismissed byhip hop fans as "too soft, ruminative and far-ranging" but would eventually pave the way for the work of artists likeDrake andKanye West.[74] In 2013,Spin noted a "new art-pop era" in contemporary music, led by West, in which musicians draw on visual art as a signifier of wealth and extravagance as well as creative exploration.[75]Fact labels West's 2008 album808s & Heartbreak as an "art-pop masterpiece" which would have a substantive influence on subsequent hip hop music, broadening the style beyond its contemporary emphasis on self-aggrandizement and bravado.[76]The New York Times'Jon Caramanica described West's "thought-provoking and grand-scaled" works as having "widened [hip hop]'s gates, whether formiddle-class values orhigh-fashion and high-art dreams."[77]
Contemporary female artists who "merge glamour, conceptualism, innovation and autonomy," such asGrimes,Julia Holter,Lana Del Rey andFKA twigs, are frequently described as working in the tradition of Kate Bush.[68] Grimes is described by theMontreal Gazette as "an art-pop phenomenon" and part of "a long tradition of fascination with the pop star as artwork in progress", with particular attention drawn to role of theInternet and digital platforms in her success.[78]
In a 2012 piece forDummy, critic Adam Harper described anaccelerationist zeitgeist in contemporary art-pop characterized by an ambiguous engagement with elements of contemporary capitalism.[6] He mentions the Internet-based genrevaporwave as consisting of underground art-pop musicians likeJames Ferraro andDaniel Lopatin "exploring the technological and commercial frontiers of 21st century hyper-capitalism's grimmest artistic sensibilities".[6] Artists associated with the scene may release music via online pseudonyms while drawing on ideas of virtuality and synthetic 1990s sources such as corporatemood music,lounge music, andmuzak.[6]
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| Related genres/scenes | |
| Associated theories | |
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