United States

The subsequent evolution of this music into the single musical language of the last quarter of the 20th century hardly needs be told—like jazz, it showed an even more accelerated evolution from folk to pop to art music, though, unlike jazz, this was an evolution that depended on new machines and technologies for the DNA of its growth. Where even the best-selling recording artists of the earlier generations had learned their craft in live performance, Presley was a recording artist before he was a performing one, and the British musicians who would feed on his innovations knew him first and best through records (and, in the case of the Beatles particularly, made their own innovations in the privacy of the recording studio). Yet once again, the lines between the new music and the old—between rock and roll and the pop and jazz that came before it—can be, and often are, much too strongly drawn. Instead, the evolution of American popular music has been an ongoing dialogue between past and present—between the African-derived banjo and bluegrass, Beat poets and bebop—that brought together the most heartfelt interests of poor black and white Americans in ways that Reconstruction could not, its common cause replaced for working-class whites by supremacist diversions. It became, to use Greil Marcus’s phrase, an Invisible Republic, not only where Presley chose to sing Arthur (“Big Boy”) Crudup’s song (“That’s All Right Mama”) but where Chuck Berry, a brown-eyed handsome man (his own segregation-era euphemism), revved up Louis Jordan’s jump blues to turn “Ida Red,” a country-and-western ditty, into “Maybelline,” along the way inventing a telegraphic poetry that finally coupled adolescent love and lust. It was a crossroads where Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, more often channeled as a guitarist and singer, wrote songs that were as much a part of the musical education of Bob Dylan as were those of Woody Guthrie and Weill.

Al Green.© David Redfern—Redferns/Retna Ltd.

West, Kanye; Swift, TaylorKanye West (left) interrupting an acceptance speech by Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards, September 13, 2009.Brad Barket—PictureGroup/AP

Lady GagaLady Gaga, wearing a meat dress, after accepting the award for video of the year for “Bad Romance” at the MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles, September 2010.Jim Ruymen—UPI/LandovCoined in the 1960s to describe a new form of African American rhythm and blues, a strikingly American single descriptive term encompasses this extraordinary flowering of creativity—soul music. All good American popular music, from Armstrong forward, can fairly be called soul music, not only in the sense of emotional directness but with the stronger sense that great emotion can be created within simple forms and limited time, that the crucial contribution of soul is, perhaps, a willingness to surrender to feeling rather than calculating it, to appear effortless even at the risk of seeming simpleminded—to surrender to plain form, direct emotion, unabashed sentiment, and even what in more austere precincts of art would be called sentimentality. What American soul music, in this broad, inclusive sense, has, and what makes it matter so much in the world, is the ability to generate emotion without seeming to engineer emotion—to sing without seeming to sweat too much. The test of the truth of this new soulfulness is, however, its universality. Revered and catalogued in France and imitated in England, this American soul music is adored throughout the world. American music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries drew from all these wells to create new forms, from hip-hop to electronic dance music as new generations of musicians joined the conversation and artists as various as Beyoncé, Brad Paisley, Jack White, Kanye West, the Decemberists, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Jay Z, Justin Timberlake, Sufjan Stevens, and Kendrick Lamar made their marks.

It is, perhaps, necessary for an American to live abroad to grasp how entirely American soul music had become the model and template for a universal language of emotion by the 20th century. And for an American abroad, perhaps what is most surprising is how, for all the national reputation for energy, vim, and future-focused forgetfulness, the best of all this music—from that mournful majesty of Armstrong to the heartaching quiver of Presley—has a small-scale plangency and plaintive emotion that belies the national reputation for the overblown and hyperbolic. In every sense, American culture has given the world the gift of the blues. Adam Gopnik The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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