Talk:Traditional pop

Choice of label

Hi, I linked to this article because it was necessary to set off the words "popular classic" in the middle of a quote, to keep it from being confusing, and (just coming upon it sight unseen and unaware of what's going on here) think it might help solve your problem in this regard. Also added the name Victor Herbert (Prolific composer remembered for Babes in Toyland by about everyone in my generation of Americans, who heard the songs in movies and in school.) under Origins, Classic Pop embraces... BruceWHain (talk) 19:09, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi user:Dickparker1933. For a start, pleae list your objections to the term "traditional pop music"? Then perhaps you could suggest an alternative. Thanks. -- Viajero 11:07, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

In the American context at least, "traditional pop music" should really be stuff by Stephen Foster and Dan Emmett, shouldn't it? — Amcaja 17:26, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

what are American Standards supposed to be? this is a very myopic view of music, suggest renaming this category

I agree, this is a bit of a mess. Of course all definitions of this sort are always going to be fuzzy round the edges, but it does seem a little bizarre to find Rod Stewart and Linda Ronstadt mentioned as being of any significance in an article about Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Warren/Dubin, etc. I would have thought a more significant aspect of this kind of music, not mentioned in the article so far, is its joint roots in (a) East European Jewish music, (b) Viennese operetta, and (c) jazz, with particular reference to the very high proportion of its originators who were either only one generation away from central or eastern Europe, and/or (mostly "and") Jewish. Woblosch 23:22, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Woblosch's point on origins if not that on more recent exponents. However, I find the use of the word "traditional" in the context of mass-market music extremely strange! With any tradition, one can always point out a group of people the tradition can be said to "belong to". So, this music is a tradition of whose, exactly?

I suggest that these perennially favourite songs are better known as popular standards, since they are well-known and unexceptionable. They are likely to be performed by any new singer trying to get established; they also represent a safe, middle-of-the-road choice for musicians who are paid primarily to provide entertaining background music in clubs and restaurants. 124.191.50.164 09:39, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I should add that the label "classic pop" seems to me to better suit the entire genre, than any name including the word "traditional" could possibly do. 124.191.50.164 14:45, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree that this article needs a LOT of revision - starting from the version as at 9 April 2007, before a huge amount of extremely POV stuff about Linda Ronstadt et al was put in. I've taken some of that out, but it needs a lot more work - eg to add in the points made by Woblosch. I find the idea that Joni Mitchell, for example, writes "traditional pop" utterly bizarre - she writes high quality classic music which may well be appreciated by some admirers of Sinatra etc, but that is not the same thing. There is a good article to be written here, which looks at the "pre-rock" (and non-jazz/blues/R&B) elements and history of Western (US/UK etc) popular music, its relationship with theatre, movies, etc, and the latterday examples of that approach (inc Ronstadt, Rod Stewart etc), but the current article is not a good starting point.Ghmyrtle 15:01, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

I compiled a music classification for my own use back in the early 60s. Apart from other classes like jazz and folk music, I had two classes for popular music. One, of course, was pop music. The definition I had in mind was much like the current Collins Dictionary definition. music of general appeal, esp among young people, that originated as a distinctive genre in the 1950s. It is generally characterized by a strong rhythmic element and the use of electrical amplification. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/pop-music The other class name I used, for pre-pop popular music - Gershwin, Porter, Shelton Brooks, Fred Fisher, Styne and many others - was, exactly, 'popular music'. I certainly would not have called it pop music as it in no way conformed with the definition I just quoted, I bought two guides to the subject back in the late 50s. One was 'A Guide to Popular Music' by the Brit. Peter Gammond. The other was 'A History of Popular Music' by the American David Ewen. So I was shocked when I first looked up the subject on Wiki and found it called 'Traditional Pop'; shocked because the music is different from what I grew up calling pop music. Therefore I would be far happier if 'Traditional Pop' was replaced by 'Popular Music'. Uranrising (talk) 10:12, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

My only comments are that categories determined 50-60 years ago are not particularly relevant now; and that there is a need to disambiguate clearly between "popular music" and "pop music". But, I'm not overly keen on using the word "traditional" in the article title. Ghmyrtle (talk) 10:23, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Idiom

Resolved

 – Fixed in text. Larger issue of tone raised in new thread.

Under the heading "The advent of Rock and Roll", the second-last paragraph ends with: "... all made forays into this once shied upon territory." My understanding of the idioms involving the verb "shy" is that people "shy away from {territory, etc}" rather than "shy upon {territory, etc}". What do others think? 124.191.50.164 09:39, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it's "away from", not "upon". And that's been fixed in the text. But the real problem is that language like that doesn't belong in an encyclopedia at all. That's journalism- and essay-style writing, and is completely inappropriate here. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 23:06, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Last date

A question to ponder: Is there a last date acceptable for a song to classify as belonging to the "classic pop" genre? I'm thinking particularly of songs like The Beatles' "Till There Was You", which strikes me as very much of the same type, even though performed by a band more usually labelled "rock". Your opinions, please? 124.191.50.164 14:53, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I now discover that "Till There Was You" was written by Meredith Willson, composer and lyricist of the famous Broadway musical "The Music Man". Duh! ;-) But the question stands, even if my first example was totally inappropriate. For example, do we include the songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim? or the ballads (clearly not rock) of Elton John & Bernie Taupin, eg "Candle in the Wind"? 124.191.50.164 03:48, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Jobim's roots were in jazz and Brazilian folk music. With the combined influences came bosanova, which is essentially a hybrid of "cool" jazz and samba. The music has commonality with the works of Kern, Porter, etc. It has no homage to rock.

The ballads of Elton John are rock music. John is a rock singer. He phrases like The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, etc. As opposed to Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Jack Jones, etc. Plus, John's arrangements are performed by the rythem/keyboard instruments associated with rock, not the brass and woodwind instruments normally associated with traditional pop music.

A truer grey area is the music of Burt Bacharach.

Eelb53 (talk) 07:45, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

External sources and authenticity

Do we have external sources that use either of the labels "classic pop" or "traditional pop"? If not, doesn't this article violate Wikipedia guidelines? 124.191.50.164 14:53, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, AllMusic.com uses the term "traditional pop". (It is the first external source listed at the bottom of the page.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.50.4.7 (talk) 02:50, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

The people who care about this music call it "American popular song" and would never say "pop". Actually, I don't know this, but my source is Alec Wilder's radio program, based on his book, supplemented by Marian McPartland's "Piano Jazz" radio program. I quote from the Alec Wilder WP article (which is infinitely better written, more encyclopedic in style, and more authoritative than this sloppy article): "Wilder wrote the definitive book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 (1972). He was also featured in a radio series based on the book, broadcast in the middle to late 1970s."

I think this article needs total replacement. The title is wrong, the time period is wrong, the terminology is wrong [but see following correction!]. Zaslav (talk) 20:03, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Correction to my preceding post: The article is not so bad but it should not be linked from Pop standard. It fails to be the right article for that topic; that is what I was trying to say above. "Pop" is the right name for the music of this article, but "standard" means a much wider time range and a different selection of songs. Zaslav (talk) 20:10, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Needs a top-to-bottom total rewrite - violates at least 3 policies, and various guidelines

This article is in flagrant violation of WP policy, specifically WP:No original research and WP:Neutral point of view, and WP:Verifiability, as well as guidelines like WP:Reliable sources, WP:Manual of Style, and WP:How to write a good article. It has far too few sources, and is chock full of emotive, personal-opinion-pushing language more suited for People magazine. It is written pretty much in the style of a high school or freshman university essay for an English composition class. It's tone, and the leaps it makes in asserting as fact all sorts of things for which we have no cited sources, is grossly inappropriately for an encyclopedia. That said, the breadth of coverage is good. It just needs to be reined in and cleaned up. A lot. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 23:14, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree it definately needs a clean up. I think a back to the sources approach will be needed. Do you want to do this one or shall I put it on my to do list?--SabreBD (talk) 23:56, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

The problem with all of these articles that venture into the definition of pre-rock era popular music, is that they all appear written by captives of modern pop culture, with a decidedly pro-rock agenda. The music is always discussed in the context of pop culture history, and not from a musical point of view. eelb53Eelb53 (talk) 16:13, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

Touch of Schmilsson

I'm not well-informed about this article's subject — but maybe the article should mention the following (which predated Ronstadt's album of standards by a decade):

A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night108.36.209.26 (talk) 02:37, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

removing POV tag with no active discussion per Template:POV

I've removed an old neutrality tag from this page that appears to have no active discussion per the instructions at Template:POV:

This template is not meant to be a permanent resident on any article. Remove this template whenever:

1. There is consensus on the talkpage or the NPOV Noticeboard that the issue has been resolved
2. It is not clear what the neutrality issue is, and no satisfactory explanation has been given
3. In the absence of any discussion, or if the discussion has become dormant.

Since there's no evidence of ongoing discussion, I'm removing the tag for now. If discussion is continuing and I've failed to see it, however, please feel free to restore the template and continue to address the issues. Thanks to everybody working on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 12:18, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Requested move 15 February 2019

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved. Hopefully nobody will confuse this with the Coca-Cola Classic fiasco. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:14, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

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Traditional pop music → Traditional pop – "Music" isn't needed. We don't say "hard rock music" or "classic hip hop music". Unreal7 (talk) 15:38, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Comment. We say Pop music (not pop), Rock music, Hip hop music, Heavy metal music, Dance music, etc. etc. I'm not necessarily opposed if there are good reasons, but don't see any overriding need to change the current title. Ghmyrtle (talk) 16:19, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

• Weak support. I see "pop music" is used for the title of the parent genre's article and related category, so I see no harm in retaining the current title. However, since most other articles in the category seem to just use "pop", I'll weakly support the move on the basis of consistency with like articles. ╠╣uw [talk] 10:39, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
• Support per WP:CONCISE. We say pop music and rock music because pop and rock have numerous other meanings requiring disambiguation. Genres that do not have this issue, such as jazz, blues, and ragtime, and subgenres of pop music such as art pop, bubblegum pop, experimental pop, operatic pop, progressive pop, and teen pop, do not incorporate the term "music". bd2412 T 15:46, 22 February 2019 (UTC)