Style

In the past three chapters I have endeavoured to lay out the important musical norms within which recorded popular song operates, and to identify what assumptions are useful. ¹ But before heading into the territory of interpretation, it seems wise to provide at least an outline of the way styles of popular music have changed during the era of recordings. It is quite possible, of course, to make an interpretation without any reference whatever to history, but since a dominant feature of what I have presented in the previous chapters concerns whether something is normative or not, we need to have a sense of what those norms are. And norms do not arise out of nothing – they are historically located. General histories of popular song exist ² but their perspective is exclusively North American (dealing with non-North American artists only where they impinge on the North American market). My approach here is, necessarily, equally geographically biased, in that I am exploring styles from a British perspective, in the understanding that more styles of popular song are apparent from this perspective (not only British, but North American too). The survey that follows is not strictly chronological, but groups styles in terms of their advent.