Bob Dylan explains why classical artists the ultimate pop heroes: “The people never go to see them”
Ever since I was put on to the image of Dua Lipa wearing the “Hating pop music doesn’t make you deep” T-shirt, I’ve been thinking about my own relationship with the genre.
I’ll be willing to admit, I slip into a subconscious state of musical snobbery from time to time and overlook the genuine merit of the genre. That’s largely because of how pop has been marketed in the 21st century, and as a millennial, it’s all I’ve really known. Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh and the X Factor Christmas number ones were the pillars upon which my understanding of the genre was built, and so I immediately fostered a dislike for it.
But in the eras either side of it, the genre has become far more interesting. Recently, artists like Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish have brought innovation back to the genre by crucially reintegrating songwriting into the pop fold and allowing its stars to be more than just vocal representations of mass-produced ideas.
Then, of course, if we travel back to the decades before reality stardom, pop and authenticity would collide frequently. In the 1970s, the diverse landscape of brilliant music was ultimately what made up the pop landscape, and so the word was more simply used to describe “popular music”. In that vein, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin and Elton John all had grounds to be labelled pop stars, without any offensive subtext hanging around.
Ultimately, the spirit of pop music has always been about connection. Albeit that connection might exist on a mass scale, and so some critics would argue that its widespread enjoyment devalues the impact of its meaning, but that the kernel of a sonic idea doesn’t have genuine merit. Especially, if I put the names that Bob Dylan himself once labelled as pop heroes to you.
Calling Dylan a pop icon would be enough to incite universal rage amongst his most dedicated fans, but if we are going on the basis that pop equates to popularity, then of course the songwriter falls firmly into the category. But he would be happy to do so, for he views pop with the sort of nuance I am trying to understand. Because in understanding the origin of the word, he has gone back to the classical era and brazenly labelled some of the founding fathers of music as pop royalty.
He explained, “I wonder about the time when all those guys, Mozart and Haydn and even Beethoven himself, and Strauss, Chopin, you know, those guys were the pop heroes of their day, but there must also have been ballad singers around – more so than today even – and they’d have been playing in all the drawing rooms of the court, for audiences of maybe six people, so the people never go to see them.”
Ultimately, these classical musicians were, in a sense, the inventors of musical structure, and so the links between their music and contemporary pop can most definitely be identified. Pop music is all about creating something that universally connects, and the fact that these classical icons are still spoken about today just goes to prove exactly that.
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