Let’s get one myth out of the way
before we start this trip: pop music did not start with rock’n’roll.
It did not start with Elvis. Or
Chuck Berry. Or “Rock Around The Clock” or whatever bollocks your boomer
parents or grandparents or whoever told you.
Pop music started waaaaay
before all of that.
There were entire decades of pop
music before all of that! TWO WHOLE BOOKS WORTH OF POP MUSIC BEFORE ALL OF THAT!!
That’s multiple worlds of pop music for us to explore together!!!!
Some of those worlds were really
weird!
I don’t mean “weird” in the way
that the past always seems weird – what do you mean the biggest band
at the turn of the century was a military marching band!? Or that the
first hit record - “The Laughing Song” - consisted of little more than a Black
man named George W. Johnston laughing?! – or that the values and tastes of
the people that lived back then were more than just a little bit
difficult to understand. And yes, I am referring to “blackface”, but I’m not only
referring to “blackface.” I’m also referring to the fact that “tootsie-wootsie”
was once considered both a flattering term of endearment and an entirely viable
pop lyric!
Music has always been around.
Probably even before there were birds in the trees. We can’t know for certain,
but surely dinosaurs roared out dinosaur calls to attract mates. Even if we
limit ourselves to human history there has always been people banging
sticks together whilst other people chanted along. Throughout the 19th
century there were professional song writers, like Stephen Foster, whose tunes
were famous across America, and - to a lesser extent - large chunks of the rest
of the world. Such songs were made famous via a combination of travelling
minstrels and sheet music, both of which would continue to be the dominant
means of commercial music production and consumption for the first couple of
decades of our story.
But this is a “Record(ed)
History”, so we are starting with the very first records, and the songs they
contained. On those occasions that the records contained songs. They didn’t
always contain songs. So we can add that to the list of weird things about early
pop records.
So if you’ve read a pop music
history before, and if you think that pop music history started with Elvis or
Chuck Berry or “Rock Around The Clock” or whatever, and you think you
know the pop music cannon… you don’t! There is so much more to the story…
We start our story at about 100
B.C. (Before Chuck)
Note: As I tell this story, I
shall, like any good music nerd, be rating each record out of ten. To help you
decide which of these many, many, many records you should bother listening to,
either because you are in search of good tunes, or you have a perverted sense
of humour and want to listen to the WORST RECORDS OF ALL TIME! Feel free then
to complain and say things like “I can’t believe you gave ______ a 7, it’s at
least a low 8!”
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