by Thomas Franz

Created on: January 16, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

In modern music, the terms pop and rock are two genres that often get confused with the influence of radio play. Although they do relate, they are different in style. Before I choose one song that ties them closer together, I will first clear the terms up a bit.
The term Pop, is short for Popular. Back in the days of the 45 and the radio hour, Popular music was the radio friendly music used as pre-television entertainment. It was your father's music before Elvis, Little Richard and American Bandstand. Pop music was a male crooner, like a Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole singing to a big band in a calm "White America" ballad fashion that was accepted on the mainstream. It was radio friendly and made for all to enjoy. Pop music would change in the 1950's to compete with the Rock and Roll boom. Singers like Pat Boone would cover songs from black artists like Hey, Good Lookin' to make it more acceptable to a segregated America, hence the term Popular.

The term Rock is from Rock and Roll coined by disc jokey Alan Fried. Rock and Roll was a description of the dancing teens enjoying the upbeat Rhythm and Blues roots borrowed from juke joints and off the road clubs played mostly by black musicians in the south. The sound was made more mainstream by white entertainers such as Elvis Presley who covered many Rhythm and Blues singles from his home town area of Memphis. Rock and Roll was seen as a rebellious and dangerous music at the time when Pop music was the standard set by the primarily white record buying public.
Both Pop music and Rock and Roll eventually became mainstream American culture, both genres were radio standards, and the best song of all time based on the history of each musical style is Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and his Comets written in 1952 and released in 1954. The song would later appear in the 1955 movie Black Board Jungle which was a social commentary on the Rock and Roll society in America. The film would prove to be a shock to the conservative American culture with Haley's song used as the title track. The influential hit was a Rock'a Billy rhythm played up tempo enough to be "Popular" by America's standards and still modern enough to fit the "Rock and Roll" attitude that the youth craved as an answer to the Pop tunes of the Decca era in the 1940's and early 1950's.
To combine pop and rock to come up with one best song of all time, Haley's historical hit has to rank at the top. Rock Around the Clock was prior to Elvis and The Beatles. The sound of the hit prepared teen audiences for the arrival of Presley and his controversial hip gyrating. By the time The Beatles arrived in the early 1960's, the idea of a Rock and Roll music style was much more accepted as mainstream music. Rock Around the Clock was the first hit song to be recorded at an up tempo pace that was commercially popular enough to sell records.

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