![]() ![]() ![]() So ‘popular’ that it’s universal, pop, like weather, is simply there.Īnd yet this becoming-background is exactly what has allowed pop to insinuate itself into our nearest, our innermost worlds. ![]() From the garrulous morning DJ on the radio, to the muzak of shops and offices, to the atmosphere in clubs, bars, and restaurants, pop music gives the day its shape, and a day completely devoid of it is rare to the point of aberration. Pop is as inescapable as the day, and it establishes its rhythm. It would be like trying to find your way out of the world’s largest mall, or rather the world-as-mall, for pop has played its part in converting the globe into a brightly-lit park of productised pleasure. ![]() It’s barely an exaggeration to say that pop is the day - and as Philip Larkin once rhetorically questioned, where can we live but days? To get to a place entirely beyond the precinct of pop and its merchandise, one would have to travel for weeks and perhaps into the remote past or far future. ‘Pop’ has mutated into pop - as ubiquitous, abundant and invisible as electricity. In the half century of ‘pop’, of broadcast popular music that doesn’t require a big band to make it swing, pop has slipped from being a prodigious irruption into an otherwise restrained culture to becoming that culture itself. Over time, what was foreground becomes background. ![]()
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