A Global Perspective Of Pop

The appeal of British and American pop music cross many language barriers, since English is a language that is practiced worldwide, through a number of processes of convergence. For example, music, television, film, and radio. This has given the UK and America a strong global presence, and has improved the income of the pop genre in the music industry.

Here is a map illustrating areas around the world, which have a dominant pop music presence.

Michael Jackson’s hit ‘You Rock My World’ created a worldwide pop craze, and topped charts from Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Amsterdam, America, Britain, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand.

On the other hand, ‘O Janna Raaz’ was Bollywood’s 2008 most successful pop song, winning a number of music and video awards however, it was only recognised in a few Hindi speaking countries in Asia, revealing a large language barrier for the Bollywood pop music industry. This also results in the restriction of production in Bollywood pop, since most videos are produced and consumed in Asia.

Central Learning Centre

Today the whole media class had a trip to the Enfield’s Central Learning Centre to learn how to use Garage Band on Mac Computers. Since we are not authorized to use music from other artists, it is a required that each group creates a song using the prestigious Garage Band software. The Central Enfield City Learning Centre offered a comfortable environment for us to access the latest developments that could enhance our portfolios. We learned how to:

• Create new songs.
• Search through and apply pre-recorded loops of different instruments.
• Change the characteristics of the loop.
• Record own instruments.
• Arrange and mix songs and loops.
• Apply, or record own singing.

During the tutorial for Garage Band, I learned additional characteristics of ‘Pop’ music. Firstly, the tutor reinforced the idea of choruses and verses, the chorus is the "sing along" part while verse is the "story". The chorus tends to repeat for several times and for each time, the lyrics and melody are exactly the same or just change a little bit. The Verse tends to change every time, It tells the story. For verse, the lyrics and story expands, while keeping the same melody. In pop music, there are other parts. For example: intro, bridge (transition from chorus to another verse, sometimes is an instrument solo), outro. It was also stressed that most pop songs have a relative strong beat, and usually follow 4/4 time signature.

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