Pop Subdivisions of Popular Music:

Pop

Subdivisions of Popular Music: Country, R&B and Hard Rock

Popular music is a catch-all idiom for the general gamut of music which is neither folk nor classical, but which is instead composed, recorded and produced with the intention of being consumed by an audience. Naturally, audiences are widely segmented in term of taste, which will vary heavily across race, age, gender, ethnicity and region, to name just a few features that help to define genre.

It is thus that popular music is splintered into infinite subdivisions. Though these do not necessarily constitute hard and fast rules into which every example of popular music fits neatly and without deviation. However, some general subdivisions do help us to understand the way that the pop music market is segmented according to demographic interests. Some of the broadest popular music categories due for consideration are Country Music, R&B and Hard Rock.

Country Music, history known as Counter & Western (c&w) is a market that caters to the Southern and Midwestern regions of the United States in particular. Elements of this genre include a fashion which reflects a 'cowboy' aesthetic, which features singers in denim, cowboy hats, boots and pick-up trucks. These stylistic conceits are accompanied by a sound that is best characterized by its 'twang.' This is a quality both of vocal accent and guitar or pedal steel bending that reflects the rural traditions present in the music of such historical figures as Roy Acuff, Bob Wills and, thereafter, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash.

With figures such as Cash, the genre would take a step closer to the rock music that would increasingly come to define the dominant incarnation of popular music from the 1950s through to the 1990s. During this period, the most successful country music would retain the above-noted aesthetic and artistic elements, and would still contemplate themes specific to the genre concerning dysfunctional love, alcoholism, gambling, traditional American values and patriotism. In spite of this, the most successful country music would also sound as much like rock music (albeit distinctly mainstream in its conventions) as country music. Examples such as the wildly popular Garth Brooks and, consequently, Shania Twain, Toby Keith and Taylor Swift, would come to reflect the blurring of lines between the country genre and rock music. In the above-noted examples, it is increasingly clear that the notion of a 'country' subdivision is more a concept of marketing targets than artistic distinctions.

As noted in the discussion above, rock music would be the primary medium for popular music during the second half of the 20th century. This could be roughly (and admittedly unempirically) book-ended by the arrival of The Beatles in America in 1964 and the suicide of Kurt Cobain in 1994. In the periods before and after, a genre once called Rhythm & Blues and today called R&B would be the dominant form. Today sometimes also referred to as 'urban' music, R&B was originally a euphemistic way of referring to the boogie woogie blues-based music of African-Americans in the 40s and 50s. In some circles, these would be referred to as 'race records.' When white musicians like Elvis Presley began recording these songs, the term Rock and Roll was coined. This transition would not render the R&B genre moot, but would instead apply it to most music made by African-Americans. Over the years, this would come to serve as a Billboard Chart classification for forms such as Soul, Funk, Disco and many modes of Hip Hop.

Quite in fact, today, R&B may be said to be the dominant form in popular music once again, with its permeation of the variant of popular forms impacting the sound of music today in the same way that rock would for decades. Particularly in the type of Hip Hop and Rap music which have achieved mainstream popularity, the vocal histrionics, club beats and slick arrangements that are omnipresent may be said to be characteristics of R&B. This genrification is of course made with no small recognition of the way that pop music markets are segmented by race.