Word: popped
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...were they a problem? The Beatles were the first superstar pop group to simply cease to exist except on record. As late as the 1940s, pop music was what bands played when people went out dancing. The records were just what you listened to at home. The Beatles were the first group to realize that pop had become records, and that they never needed to step on a stage again in their lives. That's a huge shift, and [although] I think it would have happened without them, they were the catalysts...
...thing I'm not at all sure would have happened without them is the racial split. American pop music has always been an interaction between black and white musicians - and it's often oversimplified into black musicians creating and white musicians stealing. But black musicians always kept up with what the white musicians were doing, just the way that white musicians tried to keep up with what the black musicians were doing. By 1963, the pop charts really were intensely integrated. Billboard magazine stopped having a separate pop and R&B chart because the two charts were virtually identical...
...think they never appealed to black Americans in the same way? It's about rhythm. In all of pop music up to the arrival of the Beatles, whenever we talk about a hot new trend - from ragtime to jazz to swing to R&B to rock 'n' roll - what we're talking about is new dance rhythm coming in. The British bands were modern in their harmonies and songwriting, their song forms were very interesting and they did new things with instruments. But their rhythms were steadily old-fashioned...
...their iPods that they've made themselves. Everybody is now writing down what kind of music they like and what they like about it, and if it is possible to collate all of that, it's very possible that for the first time we could actually get what pop music looks like from the point of view of the people listening to it. But my guess is that if you look at all the bloggers, you would find that they are still disproportionately white and middle class...
...Pop quiz: what source of power doesn't come out of the ground, doesn't burn and isn't radioactive? Hint: it contributed the most new electricity generation to the U.S. grid...