Friday 2 December 2011

Music genre styles and conventions

Pop music

Pop is the largest selling genre today.It signifies any music that is commercially produced, with the sole intention of selling more records and reaching a larger audience as possible. Pop music is mainly targeted at teenagers and young youths, though many people associate pop music with the genre of rock, this can be argued. The use of various electronic devices is also widespread in this genre, but this is a very different genre, vis-a-vis trance, which also heavily utilizes electronic sounds. Pop videos tend to use special effects and bright colours, to give a feel good feel, but have the widest range of music video styles with in this genre and can vary between narrative, performance and mixed. This makes it hard to set a list of forms and conventions for this genre as a whole. However, music videos usually have a lot of jump cuts.


County music

Country music is one of the oldest genres of music to date. It originated in the 1920s in Southern parts of the US, and it has slowly spread to all parts of the world. Country music is the most popular genre throughout the United States and often wins Grammy awards over the majority of other genres that we would consider 'mainstream'. The defining characteristic of country music is an acoustic guitar, with just the vocals of the singer to accompany it. Country music has changed over the years, adopting a more modern style, mixing with other genres in order to attract a larger and more diverse audience. 


Hip hop and Rap music

The primary focus of Hip Hop is on beatboxing and DJ scratching. Rap music is another subset of this genre, and it revolves around the artist rapping to a fixed beat. Though this genre evolved in the ghettos of the United States, today it has spread to mainstream culture all around the world, and has become a multi million dollar industry. This genre of hip hop songs started involving more and more people during the 1970s. You tend to find a mixture of narrative and performance based music videos for Hip Hop and Rap. The majority of music videos for this style tend to be set in a lower class area, on the streets. You find a wide range of different settings and styles for these genres however they are predominantly set in lower class areas.
Artists tend to feature within their own videos.


Rock music

Rock music came around in the 1960’s, it evolved as a subset of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, classical and folk music, these have been around since the 1940’s. Primary focus in rock music is on the electric guitar and the many solos that can be created with it. Also the bass guitar and drums are highly in focus. The popularity of Rock music had led to combination of rock with various other genres.
Rock music is something that is omnipresent in all cultural references today, and it is no secret that we associate rock musicians with a rebellious lifestyle, substance abuse and huge fan bases all around the world. Rock videos usually display the band performing on stage, have uneasy camera movements, dark colours, and wide use of special effects. 


Reggae music

Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.
Reggae is based on a rhythmic style characterized by accents on the off-beat, known as the 'skank'. Reggae is normally slower than both ska and rocksteady. Reggae usually accents the second and fourth beat in each bar, with the rhythm guitar also either emphasising the third beat or holding the chord on the second beat until the fourth is played. It is mainly this "third beat", its speed and the use of complex bass lines that differentiated reggae from rocksteady, although later styles incorporated these innovations separately. 
It is unusual to find a reggae genre music video with a narrative, however it is becoming more common as pop is mixing with reggae, for example, Rihanna is known to cover various genres of music from R'n'b to pop, electric dance and her song 'man down' is influenced heavily by reggae and has a narrative storyline. Locations tend to be set in jamaica, and they are usually cheerful music videos with bright colours and dancing. 


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