Description
Small town Boy karaoke piano
Bronski Beat
listen to demo version
“Smalltown Boy” is a song by the British synth-pop group Bronski Beat. It was released in 1984 and appeared on the band’s debut album The Age of Consent, released in December 1984.
The song is a popular gay anthem and was a big commercial success, reaching number 3 in the band’s native UK. It was also a number one hit in the Netherlands and Belgium, and hit the top 10 in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy and Switzerland. The track reached number 48 in the US pop chart and was a number one US dance hit.
The song was released again in December 2013 after featuring in a Christmas advertising campaign for Boots UK. Smalltown Boy was also re-recorded by Jimmy Somerville and released as Smalltown Boy Reprise (2014) for the 30th anniversary of its initial release. Small town Boy karaoke piano
The song addresses key issues in 1980s LGBT culture. It addresses family rejection for being homosexual and homophobia in British society. It also deals with loneliness and bullying through societal and familial rejection.
An official music video was shot and released later in 1984. The narrative video features band member Jimmy Somerville as the boy who has experienced the issues described in the lyrics. Seen on a train, he is contemplating his childhood through flashbacks and the events that have caused him to leave his parents’ home.
At a swimming pool, his friends (played by band members Larry Steinbachek and Steve Bronski) dare him to approach a boy that he is attracted to, for which he is later attacked in an alley by a homophobic gang led by the young man he had approached at the swimming pool. A police officer brings him back to his home. It is implied that the boy’s parents learn of his homosexuality for the first time through this incident and are shocked, but only the father seems unsupportive. The boy is then shown hugging his mother goodbye and catching a train to London, on which he is reunited with his friends.
Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form in the Western world during the 1950s and 1960s[not verified in body] as a softer alternative to rock and roll. The terms “popular music” and “pop music” are often used interchangeably, although the former describes all music that is popular and includes many styles. “Pop” and “rock” were synonymous terms until the late 1960s, when they were increasingly used in opposition from each other.
Although pop music is seen as just the singles charts, it is not the sum of all chart music. Pop music is eclectic, and often borrows elements from other styles such as urban, dance, rock, Latin, and country; nonetheless, there are core elements that define pop music. Identifying factors include generally short to medium-length songs written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure), as well as the common use of repeated choruses, melodic tunes, and hooks.
David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop music as “a body of music which is distinguishable from popular, jazz, and folk musics”.According to Pete Seeger, pop music is “professional music which draws upon both folk music and fine arts music”. Although pop music is seen as just the singles charts, it is not the sum of all chart music. The music charts contain songs from a variety of sources, including classical, jazz, rock, and novelty songs. Pop music, as a genre, is seen as existing and developing separately. Thus “pop music” may be used to describe a distinct genre, aimed at a youth market, often characterized as a softer alternative to rock and roll. Musicologist Allan Moore surmises that the term “pop music” itself may have originated from Pop art. Additionally, it’s important to note that pop music is always evolving, which means that the definition of pop music can change, too. It’s also important to be cognizant of the distinction between pop music and popular music. According to The New Grove Dictionary Of Music and Musicians, popular music is defined as “the music since industrialization in the 1800’s that is most in line with the tastes and interests of the urban middle class.”
The Oxford Dictionary of Music states that the term “pop” refers to music performed by such artists as the Rolling Stones (pictured here in a 2006 performance) Small town Boy karaoke piano
The term “pop song” was first recorded as being used in 1926, in the sense of a piece of music “having popular appeal”.However,[editorializing] the term was in mainstream use[not in citation given] at least ten years earlier. Hatch and Millward indicate that many events in the history of recording in the 1920s can be seen as the birth of the modern pop music industry, including in country, blues and hillbilly music.
According to the website of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, called Grove Music Online, the term “pop music” “originated in Britain in the mid-1950s as a description for rock and roll and the new youth music styles that it influenced”. The Oxford Dictionary of Music states that while pop’s “earlier meaning meant concerts appealing to a wide audience … since the late 1950s, however, pop has had the special meaning of non-classical mus[ic], usually in the form of songs, performed by such artists as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, ABBA, etc”. Grove Music Online also states that “… in the early 1960s [the term] ‘pop music’ competed terminologically with beat music [in England], while in the USA its coverage overlapped (as it still does) with that of ‘rock and roll'”. Small town Boy karaoke piano
From about 1967, the term was increasingly used in opposition to the term rock music, a division that gave generic significance to both terms.Whereas rock aspired to authenticity and an expansion of the possibilities of popular music, pop was more commercial, ephemeral and accessible. According to British musicologist Simon Frith, pop music is produced “as a matter of enterprise not art”, is “designed to appeal to everyone” and “doesn’t come from any particular place or mark off any particular taste”. It is “not driven by any significant ambition except profit and commercial reward … and, in musical terms, it is essentially conservative”. It is, “provided from on high (by record companies, radio programmers, and concert promoters) rather than being made from below … Pop is not a do-it-yourself music but is professionally produced and packaged”. Small town Boy karaoke piano
, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” ranks as the most frequently played song in US radio history, described by music writers Nick Logan and Bob Woffinden as “the ultimate pop record”.
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According to Frith, characteristics of pop music include an aim of appealing to a general audience, rather than to a particular sub-culture or ideology, and an emphasis on craftsmanship rather than formal “artistic” qualities.[6] Music scholar Timothy Warner said it typically has an emphasis on recording, production, and technology, rather than live performance; a tendency to reflect existing trends rather than progressive developments; and aims to encourage dancing or uses dance-oriented rhythms.
The main medium of pop music is the song, often between two and a half and three and a half minutes in length, generally marked by a consistent and noticeable rhythmic element, a mainstream style and a simple traditional structure. Common variants include the verse-chorus form and the thirty-two-bar form, with a focus on melodies and catchy hooks, and a chorus that contrasts melodically, rhythmically and harmonically with the verse. The beat and the melodies tend to be simple, with limited harmonic accompaniment. The lyrics of modern pop songs typically focus on simple themes – often love and romantic relationships – although there are notable exceptions.
Harmony and chord progressions in pop music are often “that of classical European tonality, only more simple-minded.” Clich?s include the barbershop quartet-style harmony (i.e. ii – V – I) and blues scale-influenced harmony. There was a lessening of the influence of traditional views of the circle of fifths between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, including less predominance for the dominant function.
Throughout its development, pop music has absorbed influences from most other genres of popular music. Early pop music drew on the sentimental ballad for its form, gained its use of vocal harmonies from gospel and soul music, instrumentation from jazz, country, and rock music, orchestration from classical music, tempo from dance music, backing from electronic music, rhythmic elements from hip-hop music, and has recently[when?] appropriated spoken passages from rap. According to Robert Christgau in 2014, pop music worldwide is permeated by electronic dance music.
A Scientific Reports study that examined over 464,000 recordings of popular music recorded between 1955 and 2010 found less variety in pitch progressions, growing average loudness levels, less diverse instrumentation and recording techniques, and less timbral variety, which declined after reaching a peak in the 1960s. Scientific American’s John Matson reported that this “seems to support the popular anecdotal observation that pop music of yore was better, or at least more varied, than today’s top-40 stuff.” Small town Boy karaoke piano
Left, Michael Jackson in 1984; right, Madonna in 2008
In the 1940s improved microphone design allowed a more intimate singing style and ten or twenty years later inexpensive and more durable 45 r.p.m. records for singles “revolutionized the manner in which pop has been disseminated” and helped to move pop music to ‘a record/radio/film star system’. Another technological change was the widespread availability of television in the 1950s; with televised performances, “pop stars had to have a visual presence”.In the 1960s, the introduction of inexpensive, portable transistor radios meant that teenagers could listen to music outside of the home.Multi-track recording (from the 1960s); and digital sampling (from the 1980s) have also been utilized as methods for the creation and elaboration of pop music. By the early 1980s, the promotion of pop music had been greatly affected by the rise of music television channels like MTV, which “favoured those artists such as Michael Jackson and Madonna who had a strong visual appeal”.
The latter half of the 20th-century included a large-scale trend in American culture in which the boundaries between art and pop music were increasingly blurred.[27] Between 1950 and 1970, there was a debate of pop versus art.[28] Since then, certain music publications have embraced its legitimacy. According to Popmatters’ Robert Loss: “There’s a strong argument for the ‘rockist’ mode in music criticism—that it exists, and that it’s harmful—and poptimism has positioned itself as a corrective, an antidote. … In general the Old Guard of rock critics and journalists is depicted as a bunch of bricklayers for the foundations of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. True in part, which is to say, false. Like film studies, rock criticism of the late ‘60s and the ‘70s was an attempt to make popular music worthy of study; it was poptimism before its day.” Small town Boy karaoke piano
The story of pop music is largely the story of the intertwining pop culture of the United States and the United Kingdom in the postwar era.
Pop music has been dominated by the American and (from the mid-1960s) British music industries, whose influence has made pop music something of an international monoculture, but most regions and countries have their own form of pop music, sometimes producing local versions of wider trends, and lending them local characteristics. Some of these trends (for example Europop) have had a significant impact of the development of the genre.
According to Grove Music Online, “Western-derived pop styles, whether coexisting with or marginalizing distinctively local genres, have spread throughout the world and have come to constitute stylistic common denominators in global commercial music cultures”. Some non-Western countries, such as Japan, have developed a thriving pop music industry, most of which is devoted to Western-style pop, has for several years produced a greater quantity of music of everywhere except the USA. The spread of Western-style pop music has been interpreted variously as representing processes of Americanization, homogenization, modernization, creative appropriation, cultural imperialism, and/or a more general process of