Music is one of the oldest and most beloved traditions around people around the world. Music carries culture, emotion, stories, and so many more things that unite people. However, music is just as diverse as it is uniting.
You can look in a crowd of people, and every person you see could like a different genre. One could like rap, one could like country, one could like rock, and sometimes you’d never even know just by looking at them. But you might wonder, just how many music genres do people listen to?
As of right now, one of the biggest and most beloved genres of music is pop, more so modern pop. However, pop truly made its big entrance through MTV in the 1980s, with stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson. Pop back then didn’t represent a lot, mainly featuring flashy videos and techno, electric sounds. What made these artists so captivating is that they didn’t sound like normal instruments, rather new, inorganic, techno-esque sounds that captured people, giving a sound never heard before.
However, with newer pop, with artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, Lady Gaga, it focuses on love-related themes, such as breakups, unrequited love, and teenage love, abuse in relationships, and many other themes.
Another big music genre out right now is rap, which, similar to pop, has a lot of history. When you think of rappers, you think of Drake, Kendrick Lamar, 21 Savage, NLE Choppa, and probably put them in the same boat. Well, you’d be wrong to say that. There are actually multiple types of rap, starting with “GangstaRap”. Beginning in the 1980s-1990s with rappers like Tupac and Ice Cube, Gangsta Rap was the inspiration for the genres that followed suit. However, most of the time when people hear it, they only hear the cussing and the violence, but in reality, rap represents so much more.
Most of the time, rappers in this area were representing the struggle that African-Americans went through during the 1980s-1990s. It typically covered topics such as gang and street violence, police brutality, and growing up in poverty. And while many just saw these as lyrics in a song, these were real struggles that many of these rappers actually went through during that time.
However, with the new wave of rap that has been coming out, it tends to be more focused on glamorizing the lifestyle, showing off how many people you killed, the chains you have, the money you have, and other things. While rap has lost a lot of its original meaning, some rappers like Kendrick Lamar still hold true to the message rap was made to give.
Rock and Metal are two very popular genres as well. When you think of these, you usually think of skulls and drums and streaming, but there’s really much more to it. Rock and rock culture represent freedom and self-expression, not just words in a song. Rock music addressed social issues and advocated for rebellion and change through its lyrics and fashion. Rock shaped not only modern-day slang, fashion, and music, but also gave way to many new cultural norms and gave teens a real way to express themselves.
Music is so diverse and so vast that it’d be hard to talk about it all on a page. There are country, scene, jazz, and so many others that represent much more than just catchy lyrics. Music is one of the most important parts of the world, and will continue to be for a long time. Different aspects of music and influenced change, fashion, slang, and over