![]() | Art pop has been listed as one of the
Music good articles under the
good article criteria. If you can improve it further,
please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can
reassess it. Review: September 11, 2017. ( Reviewed version). |
![]() | This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This page was nominated for deletion on 3 May 2012. The result of the discussion was retarget to Art music. |
![]() | Material from Art rock was split to Art pop on October 29, 2015. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted so long as the latter page exists. Please leave this template in place to link the article histories and preserve this attribution. The former page's talk page can be accessed at Talk:Art rock. |
Should this even re-direct? Nothing in the art-rock article even mentions this genre. Andrzejbanas ( talk) 22:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
User:Ilovetopaint how do we move the page then? The "move page" option was problematic due to there already being an "art-pop" redirect page in existence. Considering like 90% of the sources, and all the sources that include a substantive definition, use the hyphen, it seems problematic to leave the unhyphenated version as the page title. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 19:12, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
* Naturalness – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.
Interesting subject, and it has the potential to be a fantastic article. I just wonder, since the message seems to be that art pop originated with English artists – "Art pop developed in the 1960s as pop musicians such as John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Pete Townshend, Brian Eno, and Bryan Ferry began to take inspiration from their previous art school studies" – shouldn't the article's style be BritEng? (It's noticeably AmEng right now, "characterized", use of serial commas, etc.) Also, it's a surprise to not see any mention of some of the artists that Stephen Holden highlights: "music that is loosely defined as art-pop – music as diverse as that of Talking Heads ... Laurie Anderson, Beck, Pavement and Duncan Sheik …" Even more so after seeing that quote that Malik added above, re Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" and "Psycho Killer".
Another thing: perhaps some brief discussion should be given to the emergence of art rock from the art-pop aesthetic? Looking at Holden again (and he's not the only commentator with such a view), it seems to have been the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper that heralded the birth of art rock: "… A bombastic, classically inflected post-Beatles art-rock flourished, especially in England, whence came the Moody Blues; Pink Floyd; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Yes; Genesis; Electric Light Orchestra; Procol Harum, and other bands." Just an idea for consideration … JG66 ( talk) 06:04, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
Hey User:Ilovetopaint, I'm wondering if that Zappa source goes a bit too far—the author says "pop context" but doesn't clarify it's pop music as a genre rather than 'popular music' as a broad swathe, and then seems to confirm the latter by explicitly naming R&B, blues, and rock and roll as the popular forms Zappa incorporated. A few other sources here seem to suggest that (the Fisher source, at least, but perhaps implied by more) that art pop was in large part a move away from rock conventions (rather than an incorporation of them) toward a commercial sensibility. It seems like trying to portray Zappa as making "pop" (as opposed to art rock) music in any way is a bit of a stretch.
More generally, I tried to keep mention of artists to actual use of the phrase "art pop"—the Frith bit added about pop's appropriation of art seemed like a general but helpful part of an introduction from a passage that nonetheless mentioned art pop in name. Surely, we can find writing on a massive number of artists who incorporated art styles or art music into pop contexts that wouldn't be called 'art pop' unless the term was made to be a vague as possible. It seems like the sources are also pretty explicit (with the exception of the Holden piece, which I find pretty flawed personally) that art pop has more to do with incorporating the influence of other art forms rather than 'art music' (IMO just a pretentious name for classical styles) which seems like it's in the domain of art rock.
I've also even avoided including bands who were tagged as art pop because of lack of explanation specific to the term—Talking Heads, Devo, Laurie Anderson—but surely plenty has been generally written about how these artists incorporated pop music forms with experimental art sources, and which would likely be far more relevant to the proceedings here (i.e. Talking Heads weren't combining elitist art music with ironic jazz-rock, they were combining danceable disco with art-school influences like Dada etc.), seem much more in the spirit of Warhol/Hamilton/pop-art influenced 'art pop' described by these sources than Zappa.
On another front, you're doing a lot to cover the usual 1960s rock suspects on various pages—any possibility you could help expand some of the other sections, especially the last two, in which Grace Jones, Bowie, the New Romantics, and Bjork are all given one sentence or less? Surely Grace Jones is far more exemplary of 'art pop' (and IMO, far more interesting) than Zappa and his 20-minute guitar solos. Just worried the emphasis on traditionalist Rolling Stone-verified 1960s conceptions of 'artful' here are turning the page toward art rock-lite, when 'art pop' should be clearly distinct. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 17:24, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
One glaring omission in the article is the Velvet Underground. There's a lot written in Matthew Bannister's White Boys, White Noise about "art-rock" and "rock-and-roll art", some of which I've started adding to Art rock. Nothing explicitly about "art pop" but it essentially deals with the same subject, so at least one sentence or two is warranted for only that source (it's highly likely that others have called them art pop).-- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 23:02, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
Actually, it's right here: "The Velvets emulated Warhol’s art/pop synthesis. The repetitive minimalism of their music echoed Warhol’s emphasis on simplicity – and like him, they ignored the conventional hierarchies of artistic representation (Frith and Horne, 1987, p. 117). They integrated an aesthetic of chance and non-intentionality into their music making, and a presentational ‘blankness’ into their performance personae." -- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 23:09, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to one external link on
Art pop. Please take a moment to review
my edit. You may add {{
cbignore}}
after the link to keep me from modifying it, if I keep adding bad data, but formatting bugs should be reported instead. Alternatively, you can add {{
nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}}
to keep me off the page altogether, but should be used as a last resort. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{
Sourcecheck}}
).
An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.
Cheers.— cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 00:55, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
As I've already complained, the article's current emphasis on the saintly innovations of his highness Brian Wilson, while certainly reflecting User:ilovetopaint's admittedly narrow interest in Wilson/60s rock and the dearth of books by old white male rock critics on the subject, doesn't in any way seem to proportionately reflect the contexts in which "art pop" has been used in music writing, both in past decades and in contemporary writing. The fact, acknowledged above on this talk page, that there's not very much in the way of actual definitions for art pop as a genre or style to bear out my concern in an explicit way only makes this privileging of one particular period/figure who happens to have some more informative writing on it/him related to the term all the more pernicious, especially given the extent to which the term (in my reading) is so often used in contexts that owe nothing to Wilson & co but don't contain enough descriptive substance to flesh out a mitigating definition—if you're not well-read in music outside that given 60s period, this may be beyond one's purview, but I would then expect the editor to recognize that it's more important to balance the page in a way that does justice to the topic rather than zealous googlebooks searches.
For example: the inclusion of quotes like "we all had that in common, that we loved the Beach Boys" does nothing to explain why this was significant to the development of "art pop"—what it does do is implicitly position the Beach Boys as some defining lights of the style while doing nothing to elucidate the actual nature of glam or Bowie's work, so as to render the BB synonymous with "art pop" while leaving the definition vague and making subsequent "art pop" artists into their descendants This seems ridiculous especially given a variety of other contradictions made by other sources on the topic (such as the assertion by several authors of the importance of irony and artifice in art pop, two ideas utterly absent from the earnest innocence of boy child Wilson, save maybe Smile. I can also tell you none of the industrial bands or early post-punk groups wanted anything to do with the lush 60s, and somehow they're considered art pop).
Basically, my concern is that throwing all the sources which mention the term, many of them connected to a particular artist, is in fact creating an incredibly skewed image of the subject. The sources/kinds of scholarship available to us is not magically objective and balanced, and the kind of old 60's obsessed rock books you're quoting from were always gonna be more interested in elucidating terminology than contemporary music writing, which is obviously much less interested in that sort of academic style but nonetheless uses the term in a different way. I'd prefer we acknowledge a broader, less particular view of it that remains cognizant of its wide use.
P.S. Regarding the significance of Brian Eno's "cybernetic studies"—his professor in the subject was the pop artist Ascott, and it was an integral part of his art school studies. As many of the sources here suggest, the term "art pop" has much more to do with the employment of abstraction, irony, and the unsettling of the "natural" human qualities in music—again, ideas antithetical to Wilson's work—than throwing orchestras on things.
P.P.S. "you seem to be forgetting that art pop is first and foremost *a genre of pop music*" that's another issue—says who? Which source calls it a genre? It seems to be described more accurately as a kind of sensibility or methodology that spans any number of pop music genres, rather than some unified style that can be understood through music alone. That's exactly why I'm trying to trouble your attempts to normalize it as any other old musical genre. Music was the last thing many of these artists were thinking about. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 07:21, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
An article should not give undue weight to any aspects of the subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight appropriate to the weight of that aspect in the body of reliable sources on the subject.
Wikipedia's articles are intended as intelligent summaries and reflections of current published debate within the relevant fields, an overview of the relevant literature.. What you're saying is "this particular area, no matter how pertinent and valuable, should be removed because it makes other, potentially more substantial areas appear less significant". That's a solution that has no regard for the long-term. It's highly likely that, in the not-too-distant future, enough material will be made available to expand the post-1960s sections. This is only a temporary issue. It'll resolve itself when the right sources are found. In the meantime, you could tag the article with {{ missing information}}, but I don't think that's really necessary.-- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 23:25, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
User:Ilovetopaint all in good faith, some issues with your last reversions:
I'm a bit confused as to how a section discussing the Warhol/pop art-derived tendencies of glam—the visual stylization, the brandishing of low trash culture, the garish costumes/fashion, its emergence as "the most deliberately visual phenomena to emerge in rock music"—is somehow irrelevant in an essay about a pop music genre defined by its integration of non-musical art sensibilities (especially pop art and its integration of high/low culture). Several sources in the #characteristics section explicitly reference tendencies reflected in the section you confined to a note—the "irreverent plunder[ing]" of old styles directly reflects Frith's "ironic use of historical eras and genres," the fundamental bit about the "manipulation of signs" as well as Fisher's emphasis on fashion seems to be all over the reverted section. Plus, Wilson's engagement with "common or hackneyed material" and the section about Sgt. Pepper being "no mere pop album but a cultural icon, embracing ... pop art, garish fashion, drugs, instant mysticism and freedom from parental control" all reflect the same art-popist tendency to engage with the "low" elements of culture in a considered way. All this seems incredibly pertinent to me...
...especially if we're considering a vague section like this, which doesn't say anything about art pop at all, to be germane:
As the dominant format of pop music transitioned from singles to albums, many rock bands created works that aspired to make grand artistic statements, where art rock would flourish. [...] Before progressive rock (or art rock) became the most commercially successful British sound of the early 1970s, the psychedelic movement (in its attempt to bring the worlds of art and pop together) focused on the question of what it meant to be an "artist" in a mass medium, and some endeavored to use mass media forms without being used by them. For composer Frank Zappa, he targeted the issue of pop commercialism with the cover of the Mothers of Invention's 1968 album We're Only in It for the Money, which parodied the cover of Sgt. Pepper's.
^This section just discusses very vague and rhetorical issues of art culture vs popular culture, rather than elucidating how specifically art pop artists dealt with those issues. Zappa certainly isn't the only smart aleck to "target the issue of pop commercialization" (and no source says anything about "targeting commercialization" being an art pop tendency, on the contrary in fact) and I'm still not sure why he's included besides that—certainly there's no source calling him an art pop artist. Side note, I'm also quite confused by your willingness to lump in art rock (and its irrelevant synonym) in places it doesn't at all seem necessary, especially when several sources explicitly distinguish art pop from rock in this article (you seem to presume the reader will be conflating the two things, which obviously isn't necessarily the case .
Re: the Grimes bit you sidelined: I have no clue how (especially considering the #characteristics section's "central to particular purveyors of the style were notions of the self as a work of construction and artifice") placing her work in "a long tradition of fascination with the pop star as artwork in progress" isn't relevant but somehow the infinitely more vague "focused on the question of what it meant to be an "artist" in a mass medium" and "some endeavored to use mass media forms without being used by them" are. I don't know how to be more direct about this—the part you reverted seems completely relevant to a quality described the #characteristics section. Can you clarify your angle here?
Re: the Róisín Murphy bit—again, there seemed to be overt emphasis on both the avant-fashion element and the usage of varying styles and genres. You'd think a publication calling someone a "queen" of art-pop would warrant paying some attention to the actual characteristics of her work, no?
Again, you seem a bit unfairly stingy on elements that don't reflect what you seem to be interested in (and based on your editing on other articles, you obviously seem to be interested in prog/art rock) but there's plenty you've included that doesn't seem particularly specific or relevant to the page topic. I think the sidelined info has far more relevance to the issue than you're allowing. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 16:20, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
Namedrops
Recentism in one sense—established articles that are bloated with event-specific facts at the expense of longstanding content—is considered a Wikipedia fault.
Art rock / prog rock
Generally speaking, the term art-pop refers to any pop style that consciously aspires to the formal values of classical music and poetry. ... Many people would date the birth of art-pop to the mid-1960's when the Beatles first recorded with a string quartet and producers like Phil Spector and the Beach Boys' leader, Brian Wilson, brought a quasi-symphonic (or Wagnerian, as rock critics were fond of calling Mr. Spector's Wall of Sound productions) textures to pop recording. After the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band established the so-called concept album as pop music's dominant format in 1967, rock bands of every stripe churned out albums (and even operas like the Who's Tommy) that linked songs into suites and aspired to make grand artistic statements. A bombastic, classically inflected post-Beatles art-rock flourished, especially in England, whence came the Moody Blues; Pink Floyd; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Yes; Genesis; Electric Light Orchestra; Procol Harum, and other bands.
Art-pop (inspired more or less directly by pop art) meant not individual expression (like art-rock) but the manipulation of signs.
From the early sixties … there was a counter-tradition in rock and roll that had much more in common with high art—in particular avant-garde art—than the ballyhooed art-rock synthesis [progressive rock]; it involved more or less consciously using the basic formal canons of rock and roll as material (much as pop artists used mass art in general) and refining, elaborating, playing off that material to produce … rock-and-roll art.
Glam
Zappa
"doesn't say anything about art pop at all"
Everything in this article that does not have anything explicitly to do with "art pop" should only exist in the body if there is some important link between the subject and art pop established elsewhere (either in the body or the source itself). Failing that, if the association is only vague and tangential but still slightly relevant, then it would be better under a footnote. I'll visualize examples for you.
Here's how we make this work.
Here is the same logic applied to the "glam" content:
These claims don't really build on each other.
They're just coatrack observations derived from nowhere. You could write this and it would be just as valid to the article:
HOWEVER, this would be OK:
Check out how the article handles "post-punk"
This is how we potentially resolve the glam issue:
Is this easier to understand?-- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 19:25, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
Listen, I know you're trying to spin this to justify putting in the stuff you like, and you know that I know that, so let's stop pretending this is about 'editing logic.' I'm willing to let you add your preferences so long as they're not only obscurely relevant and you don't in turn revert every pertinent addition I make, additions which you KNOW are relevant and interesting pieces of clarification on the style and its sensibilities but which you can also crop out because they don't necessarily use the exact word "art pop" forty times.. Balance this out, or we are gonna need some outside feedback in here (we do anyway, but). GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 22:14, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
Hey, good work on the page of late, think it's been rounded out quite a lot better. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 17:13, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Art pop. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{
Sourcecheck}}
).
An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.
Cheers.— cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 00:09, 4 July 2016 (UTC) Checked Dschslava Δx parlez moi 00:23, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
There are a few pages of Art Into Pop that should be included in the article, but I'm having a difficult time picturing how. Here are the relevant passages (most interesting details are bolded):
The Velvet Underground’s first impact was in the USA itself. They gave shape to a recognizable art school music scene (and to list American art school rockers is to describe a narrower and more distinctive pop sensibility than in Britain’s colleges). ... But the most significant art/pop community came together in the Mercer Arts Center in New York, where experimental artists (like Laurie Anderson) met a new generation of pop-oriented art school graduates (like Chris Stein of Blondie and Alan Vega of Suicide). The importance of the Mercer lay in the way it accounted for rock ’n’ rollers’ and avant-gardists’ mutual interests. The Center was, in David Johansen’s words, ‘ten rooms in a hotel on Broadway and Mercer. There was an experimental video room, a cabaret room, a theatrical room. The experimental place, the Kitchen, started there. We (The New York Dolls) started on Tuesdays in the Oscar Wilde Room.
From the start, in terms of both its combination of activities and its emphasis on a particular sort of artificial ‘outrage’ (the New York Dolls’ semi-drag glam costume was a crucial part of their act), the Mercer encouraged continuation of the kinds of collaboration between high and low art staged in the 1960s in the Factory. As Jerry Harrison (now of the Talking Heads) puts it, ‘it started with the Velvet Underground and all of the things that were identified with Andy Warhol.’ ... Even Iggy Pop, mid-Western, uncultivated trailer-camp boy, became an ‘arty’ rock musician, thanks to his friendship with Anne Wehrer, the dynamo at the heart of the Ann Arbor experimental theatre/music/film/Factory scene. In Andy Warhol’s own words,
- Anne Wehrer introduced me to Iggy Pop at a party at her house. It was after a performance of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1966. He was just a kid in a bands, still in high school. He was Jim Osterberg then. I thought he was cute. That’s when he first met Nico and John Cale. It was the beginning of all that… his affair with Nico, a record produced by John Cale, a movie by François deMenile.
The effect of the Velvet Undergound on a rock ’n’ roll musician like Iggy was to give him a self-consciousness about what he was doing. His own personality became an art object, his every performance an art work (hence his impact on David Bowie, the role of the Stooges as the group linking 1960s hard rock bands to 1970s punk), and the musicians who drifted into the Mercer Arts Center in the early 1970s were all, in one way or another, similarly self-conscious. Even the Ramones were, in this setting, a wonderfully clever signification of stupidity, the most artificial sign yet of rock and roll truth.
Here is every broad claim made in the "History" section. It can be used for the purpose of summarizing.
* ... art pop's origins [is in] the mid 1960s, when producers ... and musicians began incorporating pseudo-symphonic textures to their pop recordings.
- The boundaries between art and pop music ... increasingly blurred throughout the second half of the 20th century.
- In the 1960s, pop musicians ... began to take inspiration from their previous art school studies.
- In North America, art pop was influenced by Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation, and became more literary through folk music's singer-songwriter movement
- Another chief influence on the development of art pop was the Pop art movement.
- ... art pop music would continue to exist subsequent to the Beatles, but without ever achieving their popular success.
- The effect of the Velvet Underground gave rock musicians ... a self-consciousness about their work.
- In the 1970s, a similarly self-conscious art/pop community ... began to coalesce in the Mercer Arts Center in New York. The school encouraged the continuation of the kinds of collaboration between high and low art once exemplified by the Factory
- "the golden age of adroit, intelligent art-pop, to the days when [bands] were mixing and matching from different genres and eras, well before the term 'postmodern' existed in the pop realm."
- subsequent artists ... involved the rejection of conventional rock instrumentation and structure in favor of dance styles and the synthesizer.
- "The last 30 years in art history are in large part a story of collaborative enterprises, of collapsed boundaries between high art and low, and of the end of divisions between media"
- Spin noted a "new art-pop era" in contemporary music ... in which musicians draw on visual art as a signifier of wealth and extravagance as well as creative exploration
-- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 09:49, 28 August 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Art pop. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 05:39, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Reviewer: Retrohead ( talk · contribs) 09:38, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Sorry for the wait, I'm beginning the review in the next couple of days.--
Retrohead (
talk)
09:38, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Done I did not bother removing refs from lead or infobox because the main purpose of those cites is to discourage SYNTH and OR, lest the infobox be constantly inundated with unsourced genres. --
Ilovetopaint (
talk)
11:39, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
I question using samples of " Good Vibrations" and " Strawberry Fields Forever". Are they necessary to exemplify what the music/genre was in the 1960s? Art pop has been subjective at best, especially the 1960s one. -- George Ho ( talk) 05:18, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
I noticed on the progressive rock page that under “other names” is listed the sub genre of art rock.
I believe if this parallel is going to be made then it would only make sense on the art pop / progressive pop wiki pages to also add a section for “other names” and include both hyperlinks.
How do the wiki moderators of these pages feel about this?
Thank you for your time. Jarrett Gardner ( talk) 11:36, 26 September 2023 (UTC)
![]() | Art pop has been listed as one of the
Music good articles under the
good article criteria. If you can improve it further,
please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can
reassess it. Review: September 11, 2017. ( Reviewed version). |
![]() | This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This page was nominated for deletion on 3 May 2012. The result of the discussion was retarget to Art music. |
![]() | Material from Art rock was split to Art pop on October 29, 2015. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted so long as the latter page exists. Please leave this template in place to link the article histories and preserve this attribution. The former page's talk page can be accessed at Talk:Art rock. |
Should this even re-direct? Nothing in the art-rock article even mentions this genre. Andrzejbanas ( talk) 22:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
User:Ilovetopaint how do we move the page then? The "move page" option was problematic due to there already being an "art-pop" redirect page in existence. Considering like 90% of the sources, and all the sources that include a substantive definition, use the hyphen, it seems problematic to leave the unhyphenated version as the page title. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 19:12, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
* Naturalness – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.
Interesting subject, and it has the potential to be a fantastic article. I just wonder, since the message seems to be that art pop originated with English artists – "Art pop developed in the 1960s as pop musicians such as John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Pete Townshend, Brian Eno, and Bryan Ferry began to take inspiration from their previous art school studies" – shouldn't the article's style be BritEng? (It's noticeably AmEng right now, "characterized", use of serial commas, etc.) Also, it's a surprise to not see any mention of some of the artists that Stephen Holden highlights: "music that is loosely defined as art-pop – music as diverse as that of Talking Heads ... Laurie Anderson, Beck, Pavement and Duncan Sheik …" Even more so after seeing that quote that Malik added above, re Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" and "Psycho Killer".
Another thing: perhaps some brief discussion should be given to the emergence of art rock from the art-pop aesthetic? Looking at Holden again (and he's not the only commentator with such a view), it seems to have been the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper that heralded the birth of art rock: "… A bombastic, classically inflected post-Beatles art-rock flourished, especially in England, whence came the Moody Blues; Pink Floyd; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Yes; Genesis; Electric Light Orchestra; Procol Harum, and other bands." Just an idea for consideration … JG66 ( talk) 06:04, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
Hey User:Ilovetopaint, I'm wondering if that Zappa source goes a bit too far—the author says "pop context" but doesn't clarify it's pop music as a genre rather than 'popular music' as a broad swathe, and then seems to confirm the latter by explicitly naming R&B, blues, and rock and roll as the popular forms Zappa incorporated. A few other sources here seem to suggest that (the Fisher source, at least, but perhaps implied by more) that art pop was in large part a move away from rock conventions (rather than an incorporation of them) toward a commercial sensibility. It seems like trying to portray Zappa as making "pop" (as opposed to art rock) music in any way is a bit of a stretch.
More generally, I tried to keep mention of artists to actual use of the phrase "art pop"—the Frith bit added about pop's appropriation of art seemed like a general but helpful part of an introduction from a passage that nonetheless mentioned art pop in name. Surely, we can find writing on a massive number of artists who incorporated art styles or art music into pop contexts that wouldn't be called 'art pop' unless the term was made to be a vague as possible. It seems like the sources are also pretty explicit (with the exception of the Holden piece, which I find pretty flawed personally) that art pop has more to do with incorporating the influence of other art forms rather than 'art music' (IMO just a pretentious name for classical styles) which seems like it's in the domain of art rock.
I've also even avoided including bands who were tagged as art pop because of lack of explanation specific to the term—Talking Heads, Devo, Laurie Anderson—but surely plenty has been generally written about how these artists incorporated pop music forms with experimental art sources, and which would likely be far more relevant to the proceedings here (i.e. Talking Heads weren't combining elitist art music with ironic jazz-rock, they were combining danceable disco with art-school influences like Dada etc.), seem much more in the spirit of Warhol/Hamilton/pop-art influenced 'art pop' described by these sources than Zappa.
On another front, you're doing a lot to cover the usual 1960s rock suspects on various pages—any possibility you could help expand some of the other sections, especially the last two, in which Grace Jones, Bowie, the New Romantics, and Bjork are all given one sentence or less? Surely Grace Jones is far more exemplary of 'art pop' (and IMO, far more interesting) than Zappa and his 20-minute guitar solos. Just worried the emphasis on traditionalist Rolling Stone-verified 1960s conceptions of 'artful' here are turning the page toward art rock-lite, when 'art pop' should be clearly distinct. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 17:24, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
One glaring omission in the article is the Velvet Underground. There's a lot written in Matthew Bannister's White Boys, White Noise about "art-rock" and "rock-and-roll art", some of which I've started adding to Art rock. Nothing explicitly about "art pop" but it essentially deals with the same subject, so at least one sentence or two is warranted for only that source (it's highly likely that others have called them art pop).-- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 23:02, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
Actually, it's right here: "The Velvets emulated Warhol’s art/pop synthesis. The repetitive minimalism of their music echoed Warhol’s emphasis on simplicity – and like him, they ignored the conventional hierarchies of artistic representation (Frith and Horne, 1987, p. 117). They integrated an aesthetic of chance and non-intentionality into their music making, and a presentational ‘blankness’ into their performance personae." -- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 23:09, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to one external link on
Art pop. Please take a moment to review
my edit. You may add {{
cbignore}}
after the link to keep me from modifying it, if I keep adding bad data, but formatting bugs should be reported instead. Alternatively, you can add {{
nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}}
to keep me off the page altogether, but should be used as a last resort. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{
Sourcecheck}}
).
An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.
Cheers.— cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 00:55, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
As I've already complained, the article's current emphasis on the saintly innovations of his highness Brian Wilson, while certainly reflecting User:ilovetopaint's admittedly narrow interest in Wilson/60s rock and the dearth of books by old white male rock critics on the subject, doesn't in any way seem to proportionately reflect the contexts in which "art pop" has been used in music writing, both in past decades and in contemporary writing. The fact, acknowledged above on this talk page, that there's not very much in the way of actual definitions for art pop as a genre or style to bear out my concern in an explicit way only makes this privileging of one particular period/figure who happens to have some more informative writing on it/him related to the term all the more pernicious, especially given the extent to which the term (in my reading) is so often used in contexts that owe nothing to Wilson & co but don't contain enough descriptive substance to flesh out a mitigating definition—if you're not well-read in music outside that given 60s period, this may be beyond one's purview, but I would then expect the editor to recognize that it's more important to balance the page in a way that does justice to the topic rather than zealous googlebooks searches.
For example: the inclusion of quotes like "we all had that in common, that we loved the Beach Boys" does nothing to explain why this was significant to the development of "art pop"—what it does do is implicitly position the Beach Boys as some defining lights of the style while doing nothing to elucidate the actual nature of glam or Bowie's work, so as to render the BB synonymous with "art pop" while leaving the definition vague and making subsequent "art pop" artists into their descendants This seems ridiculous especially given a variety of other contradictions made by other sources on the topic (such as the assertion by several authors of the importance of irony and artifice in art pop, two ideas utterly absent from the earnest innocence of boy child Wilson, save maybe Smile. I can also tell you none of the industrial bands or early post-punk groups wanted anything to do with the lush 60s, and somehow they're considered art pop).
Basically, my concern is that throwing all the sources which mention the term, many of them connected to a particular artist, is in fact creating an incredibly skewed image of the subject. The sources/kinds of scholarship available to us is not magically objective and balanced, and the kind of old 60's obsessed rock books you're quoting from were always gonna be more interested in elucidating terminology than contemporary music writing, which is obviously much less interested in that sort of academic style but nonetheless uses the term in a different way. I'd prefer we acknowledge a broader, less particular view of it that remains cognizant of its wide use.
P.S. Regarding the significance of Brian Eno's "cybernetic studies"—his professor in the subject was the pop artist Ascott, and it was an integral part of his art school studies. As many of the sources here suggest, the term "art pop" has much more to do with the employment of abstraction, irony, and the unsettling of the "natural" human qualities in music—again, ideas antithetical to Wilson's work—than throwing orchestras on things.
P.P.S. "you seem to be forgetting that art pop is first and foremost *a genre of pop music*" that's another issue—says who? Which source calls it a genre? It seems to be described more accurately as a kind of sensibility or methodology that spans any number of pop music genres, rather than some unified style that can be understood through music alone. That's exactly why I'm trying to trouble your attempts to normalize it as any other old musical genre. Music was the last thing many of these artists were thinking about. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 07:21, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
An article should not give undue weight to any aspects of the subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight appropriate to the weight of that aspect in the body of reliable sources on the subject.
Wikipedia's articles are intended as intelligent summaries and reflections of current published debate within the relevant fields, an overview of the relevant literature.. What you're saying is "this particular area, no matter how pertinent and valuable, should be removed because it makes other, potentially more substantial areas appear less significant". That's a solution that has no regard for the long-term. It's highly likely that, in the not-too-distant future, enough material will be made available to expand the post-1960s sections. This is only a temporary issue. It'll resolve itself when the right sources are found. In the meantime, you could tag the article with {{ missing information}}, but I don't think that's really necessary.-- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 23:25, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
User:Ilovetopaint all in good faith, some issues with your last reversions:
I'm a bit confused as to how a section discussing the Warhol/pop art-derived tendencies of glam—the visual stylization, the brandishing of low trash culture, the garish costumes/fashion, its emergence as "the most deliberately visual phenomena to emerge in rock music"—is somehow irrelevant in an essay about a pop music genre defined by its integration of non-musical art sensibilities (especially pop art and its integration of high/low culture). Several sources in the #characteristics section explicitly reference tendencies reflected in the section you confined to a note—the "irreverent plunder[ing]" of old styles directly reflects Frith's "ironic use of historical eras and genres," the fundamental bit about the "manipulation of signs" as well as Fisher's emphasis on fashion seems to be all over the reverted section. Plus, Wilson's engagement with "common or hackneyed material" and the section about Sgt. Pepper being "no mere pop album but a cultural icon, embracing ... pop art, garish fashion, drugs, instant mysticism and freedom from parental control" all reflect the same art-popist tendency to engage with the "low" elements of culture in a considered way. All this seems incredibly pertinent to me...
...especially if we're considering a vague section like this, which doesn't say anything about art pop at all, to be germane:
As the dominant format of pop music transitioned from singles to albums, many rock bands created works that aspired to make grand artistic statements, where art rock would flourish. [...] Before progressive rock (or art rock) became the most commercially successful British sound of the early 1970s, the psychedelic movement (in its attempt to bring the worlds of art and pop together) focused on the question of what it meant to be an "artist" in a mass medium, and some endeavored to use mass media forms without being used by them. For composer Frank Zappa, he targeted the issue of pop commercialism with the cover of the Mothers of Invention's 1968 album We're Only in It for the Money, which parodied the cover of Sgt. Pepper's.
^This section just discusses very vague and rhetorical issues of art culture vs popular culture, rather than elucidating how specifically art pop artists dealt with those issues. Zappa certainly isn't the only smart aleck to "target the issue of pop commercialization" (and no source says anything about "targeting commercialization" being an art pop tendency, on the contrary in fact) and I'm still not sure why he's included besides that—certainly there's no source calling him an art pop artist. Side note, I'm also quite confused by your willingness to lump in art rock (and its irrelevant synonym) in places it doesn't at all seem necessary, especially when several sources explicitly distinguish art pop from rock in this article (you seem to presume the reader will be conflating the two things, which obviously isn't necessarily the case .
Re: the Grimes bit you sidelined: I have no clue how (especially considering the #characteristics section's "central to particular purveyors of the style were notions of the self as a work of construction and artifice") placing her work in "a long tradition of fascination with the pop star as artwork in progress" isn't relevant but somehow the infinitely more vague "focused on the question of what it meant to be an "artist" in a mass medium" and "some endeavored to use mass media forms without being used by them" are. I don't know how to be more direct about this—the part you reverted seems completely relevant to a quality described the #characteristics section. Can you clarify your angle here?
Re: the Róisín Murphy bit—again, there seemed to be overt emphasis on both the avant-fashion element and the usage of varying styles and genres. You'd think a publication calling someone a "queen" of art-pop would warrant paying some attention to the actual characteristics of her work, no?
Again, you seem a bit unfairly stingy on elements that don't reflect what you seem to be interested in (and based on your editing on other articles, you obviously seem to be interested in prog/art rock) but there's plenty you've included that doesn't seem particularly specific or relevant to the page topic. I think the sidelined info has far more relevance to the issue than you're allowing. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 16:20, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
Namedrops
Recentism in one sense—established articles that are bloated with event-specific facts at the expense of longstanding content—is considered a Wikipedia fault.
Art rock / prog rock
Generally speaking, the term art-pop refers to any pop style that consciously aspires to the formal values of classical music and poetry. ... Many people would date the birth of art-pop to the mid-1960's when the Beatles first recorded with a string quartet and producers like Phil Spector and the Beach Boys' leader, Brian Wilson, brought a quasi-symphonic (or Wagnerian, as rock critics were fond of calling Mr. Spector's Wall of Sound productions) textures to pop recording. After the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band established the so-called concept album as pop music's dominant format in 1967, rock bands of every stripe churned out albums (and even operas like the Who's Tommy) that linked songs into suites and aspired to make grand artistic statements. A bombastic, classically inflected post-Beatles art-rock flourished, especially in England, whence came the Moody Blues; Pink Floyd; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Yes; Genesis; Electric Light Orchestra; Procol Harum, and other bands.
Art-pop (inspired more or less directly by pop art) meant not individual expression (like art-rock) but the manipulation of signs.
From the early sixties … there was a counter-tradition in rock and roll that had much more in common with high art—in particular avant-garde art—than the ballyhooed art-rock synthesis [progressive rock]; it involved more or less consciously using the basic formal canons of rock and roll as material (much as pop artists used mass art in general) and refining, elaborating, playing off that material to produce … rock-and-roll art.
Glam
Zappa
"doesn't say anything about art pop at all"
Everything in this article that does not have anything explicitly to do with "art pop" should only exist in the body if there is some important link between the subject and art pop established elsewhere (either in the body or the source itself). Failing that, if the association is only vague and tangential but still slightly relevant, then it would be better under a footnote. I'll visualize examples for you.
Here's how we make this work.
Here is the same logic applied to the "glam" content:
These claims don't really build on each other.
They're just coatrack observations derived from nowhere. You could write this and it would be just as valid to the article:
HOWEVER, this would be OK:
Check out how the article handles "post-punk"
This is how we potentially resolve the glam issue:
Is this easier to understand?-- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 19:25, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
Listen, I know you're trying to spin this to justify putting in the stuff you like, and you know that I know that, so let's stop pretending this is about 'editing logic.' I'm willing to let you add your preferences so long as they're not only obscurely relevant and you don't in turn revert every pertinent addition I make, additions which you KNOW are relevant and interesting pieces of clarification on the style and its sensibilities but which you can also crop out because they don't necessarily use the exact word "art pop" forty times.. Balance this out, or we are gonna need some outside feedback in here (we do anyway, but). GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 22:14, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
Hey, good work on the page of late, think it's been rounded out quite a lot better. GentleCollapse16 ( talk) 17:13, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Art pop. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{
Sourcecheck}}
).
An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.
Cheers.— cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 00:09, 4 July 2016 (UTC) Checked Dschslava Δx parlez moi 00:23, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
There are a few pages of Art Into Pop that should be included in the article, but I'm having a difficult time picturing how. Here are the relevant passages (most interesting details are bolded):
The Velvet Underground’s first impact was in the USA itself. They gave shape to a recognizable art school music scene (and to list American art school rockers is to describe a narrower and more distinctive pop sensibility than in Britain’s colleges). ... But the most significant art/pop community came together in the Mercer Arts Center in New York, where experimental artists (like Laurie Anderson) met a new generation of pop-oriented art school graduates (like Chris Stein of Blondie and Alan Vega of Suicide). The importance of the Mercer lay in the way it accounted for rock ’n’ rollers’ and avant-gardists’ mutual interests. The Center was, in David Johansen’s words, ‘ten rooms in a hotel on Broadway and Mercer. There was an experimental video room, a cabaret room, a theatrical room. The experimental place, the Kitchen, started there. We (The New York Dolls) started on Tuesdays in the Oscar Wilde Room.
From the start, in terms of both its combination of activities and its emphasis on a particular sort of artificial ‘outrage’ (the New York Dolls’ semi-drag glam costume was a crucial part of their act), the Mercer encouraged continuation of the kinds of collaboration between high and low art staged in the 1960s in the Factory. As Jerry Harrison (now of the Talking Heads) puts it, ‘it started with the Velvet Underground and all of the things that were identified with Andy Warhol.’ ... Even Iggy Pop, mid-Western, uncultivated trailer-camp boy, became an ‘arty’ rock musician, thanks to his friendship with Anne Wehrer, the dynamo at the heart of the Ann Arbor experimental theatre/music/film/Factory scene. In Andy Warhol’s own words,
- Anne Wehrer introduced me to Iggy Pop at a party at her house. It was after a performance of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1966. He was just a kid in a bands, still in high school. He was Jim Osterberg then. I thought he was cute. That’s when he first met Nico and John Cale. It was the beginning of all that… his affair with Nico, a record produced by John Cale, a movie by François deMenile.
The effect of the Velvet Undergound on a rock ’n’ roll musician like Iggy was to give him a self-consciousness about what he was doing. His own personality became an art object, his every performance an art work (hence his impact on David Bowie, the role of the Stooges as the group linking 1960s hard rock bands to 1970s punk), and the musicians who drifted into the Mercer Arts Center in the early 1970s were all, in one way or another, similarly self-conscious. Even the Ramones were, in this setting, a wonderfully clever signification of stupidity, the most artificial sign yet of rock and roll truth.
Here is every broad claim made in the "History" section. It can be used for the purpose of summarizing.
* ... art pop's origins [is in] the mid 1960s, when producers ... and musicians began incorporating pseudo-symphonic textures to their pop recordings.
- The boundaries between art and pop music ... increasingly blurred throughout the second half of the 20th century.
- In the 1960s, pop musicians ... began to take inspiration from their previous art school studies.
- In North America, art pop was influenced by Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation, and became more literary through folk music's singer-songwriter movement
- Another chief influence on the development of art pop was the Pop art movement.
- ... art pop music would continue to exist subsequent to the Beatles, but without ever achieving their popular success.
- The effect of the Velvet Underground gave rock musicians ... a self-consciousness about their work.
- In the 1970s, a similarly self-conscious art/pop community ... began to coalesce in the Mercer Arts Center in New York. The school encouraged the continuation of the kinds of collaboration between high and low art once exemplified by the Factory
- "the golden age of adroit, intelligent art-pop, to the days when [bands] were mixing and matching from different genres and eras, well before the term 'postmodern' existed in the pop realm."
- subsequent artists ... involved the rejection of conventional rock instrumentation and structure in favor of dance styles and the synthesizer.
- "The last 30 years in art history are in large part a story of collaborative enterprises, of collapsed boundaries between high art and low, and of the end of divisions between media"
- Spin noted a "new art-pop era" in contemporary music ... in which musicians draw on visual art as a signifier of wealth and extravagance as well as creative exploration
-- Ilovetopaint ( talk) 09:49, 28 August 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Art pop. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 05:39, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Reviewer: Retrohead ( talk · contribs) 09:38, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Sorry for the wait, I'm beginning the review in the next couple of days.--
Retrohead (
talk)
09:38, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Done I did not bother removing refs from lead or infobox because the main purpose of those cites is to discourage SYNTH and OR, lest the infobox be constantly inundated with unsourced genres. --
Ilovetopaint (
talk)
11:39, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
I question using samples of " Good Vibrations" and " Strawberry Fields Forever". Are they necessary to exemplify what the music/genre was in the 1960s? Art pop has been subjective at best, especially the 1960s one. -- George Ho ( talk) 05:18, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
I noticed on the progressive rock page that under “other names” is listed the sub genre of art rock.
I believe if this parallel is going to be made then it would only make sense on the art pop / progressive pop wiki pages to also add a section for “other names” and include both hyperlinks.
How do the wiki moderators of these pages feel about this?
Thank you for your time. Jarrett Gardner ( talk) 11:36, 26 September 2023 (UTC)