How Pop Music Culture Has Shaped Our Lives

Pop culture more or less helped me teach myself American culture since I didn’t have existing reference points from my parents. There are still lots of gaps in my knowledge: references I have to look up, work I’m not familiar with because it predated me and wasn’t something my parents would have known about because they didn’t grow up here. Watching movies and television, reading books and listening to music were like steps toward assembling an identity for myself. I was putting together some building blocks to understand a culture unfamiliar to me and my parents.

I thought I was alone with this approach. But over the years, I’ve seen that it’s a common experience for many immigrants and their children. For instance, when actor and comedian Bob Saget died earlier this year, I spoke to a range of immigrants and children of immigrants about how his work on “Full House” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos” — two ubiquitous and widely appealing shows of the 1980s and 1990s — were formative for them. (And somehow, the story I wrote ended up in John Stamos’ eulogy for his dear friend and colleague.)

By the 2000s, pop was a genre with endless roads for artists to travel down, each with its own flair and twist to the classic traditions of pop music. Teen pop was existing in the music of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera; pop rock and power pop were making a comeback in the sounds of Blink 182’s “All the Small Things”, opening up a gate for the musicians that would come to be pivotal within the pop-punk genre, like Simple Plan and Fall Out Boy. Towards the end of the first decade of the 2000s, pop was again being influenced with hip hop and R&B sounds through Rihanna’s music, and electronic sounds made themselves known in Lady Gaga’s sounds from her album, Poker Face, which went on to win two Grammys. Pop music had become an electric melting pot of subgenres and sounds that all shared the common tropes of a pop song.

All of that got me thinking about how lots of us have a story to tell about a movie, TV show, book, song, artist or album that unlocked something in us, helped us fit in, taught us something or became an entry point to something bigger. Maybe it was something we consciously sought out, or maybe it was simply whatever was available to us. Maybe it was something that, upon reflection in adulthood, we realize was imperfect or deeply flawed. Maybe it was something we haven’t thought about in a long time, something buried deep in the recesses of our minds. Or maybe it was something that still plays on a loop in our heads, making us wonder: “Do other people think about this too?”

Due to the genre’s ever-changing nature, the definition of pop music is dynamically pliable. In its application, pop music is a version of popular music that runs the highest hits. Pop is basically a form of contemporary music that distinguishes itself from folk, art, and classical styles of music.

Some of the elements that create a variance between pop music and the subgenres of popular music include repetitive structure, simple melodies, and danceable rhythm. Instruments used in pop music have a defining force of what goes around the genre.