Some chapters of this article have been released in advance as free articles for trial reading.Introduction: Don't Turn Music ...

Artists like Minnie Riperton, Queen, the Isley Brothers, War, and Van McCoy all had big pop hits in 1975 that defined the year. Here's a look.

Music history is dotted with records that actually made it out, but the shadow history underneath it is just as compelling. Across rock, pop, soul, and beyond, there's a shadow history of records that ...

Pop songs aren’t often disturbing. But sometimes, a song will make it to the top of the pop charts that boasts a particularly strange or unsettling backstory. Let’s look at a few examples, shall we?

Just because bands and musicians are one-hit wonders, doesn’t mean that can’t leave an important mark on pop music history. These four artists shined bright and fizzled out pretty quickly, but their ...

Introduction. They never even knew. What is a popular music genre? ; Music/Identification ; Charting popularity -- Foreign music and the emergence of phonography. Sound recording and new modes of the ...

Today marks a milestone in pop music history. Forty years ago, on January 23, 1985, Madonna released "Material Girl," the second single from her groundbreaking album Like a Virgin. The song, with its ...

In a 1998 interview in the New York Times, David Bowie remarked on the prevalence of British musicians who went to art school: You know, 25 years ago there were a whole crop of us that tried to drag ...

What is pop music? Musicologists Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding argue in their book, Switched on Pop, that “pop isn’t a genre; it’s a marketing category that encompasses everything that is ...