THE HISTORY OF ROCK AND POP "POP" is short for "popular" and there has always been popular

music. But until the 1950s there wasn't a style of music just for young people. That all changed when rock and roll began. Since then, hundreds of styles and stars have come and gone. Musical technology has changed a lot too. Here, we look at the highlights of rock and pop's forty-year history. The '50s Rock and roll began in America. Some of its first big stars were black - for example Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Little Richard. They brought traditional "rhythm and blues" to a big new TV audience. Then, white singers began to copy them. One of the first was Bill Haley. He and his band, The Comets, recorded an early rock and roll classic, "Rock Around The Clock". There were other white "rockers", too, like Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly. But the most popular of them all was Elvis Aaron Presley. Elvis wasn't like the American singers of the '40s and early '50s. He wasn't neat, sweet and safe. He was rough, tough and dangerous. His music was dangerous, too. He called himself "The King of Rock and Roll" and played an electric guitar. Teenagers all over the world fell in love with this new style. They bought millions of his records. Suddenly the younger generation didn't just have money, cars and televisions - they had a hero, too. The '60s Pop exploded in the '60s. After Elvis, hundreds of new groups and singers appeared. In Britain, two groups quickly became more popular than all the others. One was the Rolling Stones. They played hard aggressive rock and roll. The other group played a mixture of rock and pop. They came from Liverpool and the newspapers called them "The Fab Four". Their real name was the Beatles. Together, the Beatles and the Stones led a British "invasion" of the American charts. Thanks to them, pop became Transatlantic. But what about America itself during the '60s? What was happening there? Well, in Detroit, producer Berry Gordy started a new record label - Motown. Stars on the Motown label included Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and the Jackson Five (including the youngest of the Jackson brothers, Michael). Singer/songwriters were also popular in America during the '60s. These were stars who mixed folk music with rock and pop styles. Bob Dylan was the most famous, but there were lots of others too - like Joan Baez, James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel. Finally, there was "hippy" rock. This was the time of "flower power" and protests against the Vietnam War. It was also the time when rock festivals became important. The biggest, in 1969,was on a farm in New York State called "Woodstock". The '70s Two groups show the different sides of '70s pop - Abba and The Sex Pistols. Sweden's Abba worked with the latest technology. Their songs were popular with people from 8 to 80. They were rich. They made videos. They were, in fact, superstar entertainers. And they werent alone. There were a lot of other '70s superstars, too - Elton John, David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Queen. By the mid-'70s, music was a billion-dollar industry and artists like these controlled it. But not everybody was happy with superstar pop. For many people it didn't take enough risks. Some of them decided to play a new, more dangerous kind of music - punk rock. The punk revolution began in small clubs. One of them was the "The 100 Club" in London's Oxford Street. That's where bands like The Sex Pistols used to appear in the late '70s. Everything about their clothes and music was different. They didn't look happy and rich. They looked poor and angry. They didn't smile - they spat. They weren't good musicians - many of them couldn't play their instruments at all. Groups like The Sex Pistols brought new energy to music. Suddenly it belonged to the kids again. But not for long. Punk started as a revolution ... by 1980 it was a fashion. The '80s The most important musical event of the '80s was "Live Aid". The man who organised it was Bob Geldof. He started to raise money for the starving people of Ethiopia in 1984. First, there was the "Band Aid" record "Do They Know It's Christmas?". Then he decided to organise a huge rock concert with many of the world's top stars. That dream came true on 13 July, 1985. For 16 hours, 1.5 billion people watched the best of British and American music "live" from London and Philadelphia. (Live Aid's stars included Sting, Sade, U2, Bob

Dylan, David Bowie, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, The Beach Boys and Paul McCartney). The concert raised over $100 million. It showed that top musicians and their fans could "change the world". Something else changed in the 80s, too - musical technology. In less than ten years video, compact discs and computers all became important in the pop industry. Thanks to video, every single suddenly had its own three-minute film. Thanks to compact discs, the quality of recorded sound was better than ever. Thanks to computers it was possible to play and record thousands of new sounds.

THE LANGUAGE OF ROCK MODERN pop began with rock 'n' roll in the middle fifties and, basically, it was a mixture of two traditions Negro rhythm 'n' blues and white romantic crooning, coloured beat and white sentiment. What was new about it was its aggression, its sexuality, its sheer noise and most of this came from its beat. This was bigger and louder than any beat before it, simply because it was amplified. Mostly, pop boiled down to electric guitars. ROCK 'n' roll was very simple music. All that mattered was the noise it made, its drive, its aggression, its newness. All that was taboo was boredom. The lyrics were mostly non-existent, simple slogans one step away from gibberish. This wasn't just stupidity, simple inability to write anything better. It was a kind of teen code, almost a sign language, that would make rock entirely incomprehensible to adults. For instance, the first record I ever bought was by Little Richard and, at one throw, it taught me everything I ever need to know about pop. The message went: "Tutti frutti all rootie, tutti frutti all rootie, tutti frutti all rootie, awopbopaloobop alopbamboom!" As a summing up of what rock 'n' roll was really all about, this was nothing but masterly. Nik Cohn, novelist I like pop as I like Coca-Cola or wrapped bread or fish fingers. They're instant and they give an illusion of nourishment. But I get very frightened when intellectuals start elevating pop to the level of important art. When they say such and such a record is great, I have to say, well Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is great. Tristan and Isolde is great, Mahler's Song of the Earth is great; do they mean great in the same way? I presume they must. They must be making out that pop contains the same elements of emotional satisfaction and intellectual complexity as Beethoven, Brahms, or Wagner. This doesn't seem to me to be possible. Anthony Burgess, novelist, composer, critic Was one to believe, for example, that the technical virtuosity of a guitarist such as Jimi Hendrix and the musical illiteracy of a group like The Love Affair should both be described as "pop music"? They are totally different not only in degree but in kind. Was one to say that a singer with the spine-chilling anger of Bob Dylan was in the same world, let alone the same league, as a singer with the raucous, tear-jerking tastelessness of Vikki Carr? Yet, for better or worse, all four are categorised as "pop music". Pop is more misunderstood, misquoted, misrepresented and maligned than any other comparable phenomenon today. Its products are often inflated out of existence through self-important and over-zealous praise, or else unnecessarily brought down by the adolescent and gossip-laden gruntings of many of those involved. The result has been that what is known as pop music has become confused and con-fusing. That some pop music may now have ceased to be popular and become music, is a possibility hardly given its proper chance to be heard. Tony Palmer, film director