7 Musical Styles That Shaped Modern Music

The Allure of the Underappreciated in Music

• Some groundbreaking music genres from past eras have shaped modern music. They have been forgotten despite their lasting influence.
• There are musical styles and bands that shaped today’s music but are often overlooked.

Pioneering Bands Ahead of Their Time

• Innovative bands from the 1960s, like the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, are widely recognized to have shaped modern music.
• Other innovative bands of the era, though not achieving mainstream stardom, left a profound and often invisible influence.
• These groups were considered ahead of their time. Their musical DNA is woven into much of later music thus they have shaped modern music.

The Zombies: Odyssey and Oracle

• The British Invasion band, The Zombies, known for a couple of hits, created the album “Odessey and Oracle” in 1968.
• This album was a baroque pop masterpiece, incorporating jazz and classical music, making it unique for its time.
• The use of harpsichords, Mellotrons, and Rod Argent’s jazz-influenced organ work supported lush vocal harmonies.
• “Odessey and Oracle” opened doors for ambitious pop conceptualists and progressive rockers, demonstrating that pop music could be sophisticated.

Love: Forever Changes

• The band Love, fronted by Arthur Lee (an African-American singer), released their 1967 album “Forever Changes.”
• This album fused rock’s gritty feel with orchestral elements and psychedelic experiments, sounding years ahead of its time.
• Love bridged the gap between rock’s harder blues side and its more poetic folk side, combining raw emotion with complex arrangements.
• Their influence can be heard in later visionaries like Neutral Milk Hotel, proving a band could be both visceral. Also, artful while it shaped modern music, it was key in reshaping musical language.

The Pretty Things: S.F. Sorrow

• The Pretty Things’ “S.F. Sorrow” (1968) is recognized as one of the first narrative concept albums in rock, akin to a rock opera, predating The Who’s “Tommy.”
• This ambitious project told a melancholic story about war and lost innocence across 13 tracks, interconnected with musical motifs and lyrical themes.
• Pioneering works like “S.F. Sorrow” paved the way for albums like “Tommy” and Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” establishing the album as a narrative vehicle similar to a novel.

Question Mark & The Mysterians: Proto-Punk Innovators

• Question Mark & The Mysterians, from Michigan, are considered accidental proto-punks.
• Their 1966 hit, “96 Tears,” featured a gritty Vox Continental organ sound and a swaggering rhythm with a loudmouthed punk attitude.
• This band captured teenage frustration years before The Ramones or The Sex Pistols, essentially laying the blueprint for the American underground sound.
• Their raw and unpolished energy revolutionized the music scene, and shaped modern music influencing bands such as The Stooges and MC5.

Big Star: Anglo Power Pop Meets Memphis Soul

• Big Star, featuring Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, blended Anglo power pop with a gritty Memphis soul feel, reminiscent of Beatles melodies meeting Southern soul.
• Despite being tragically overlooked in their time, their albums, including songs like “In the Street” (the theme from “That ’70s Show”), later gained massive underground love.
• Big Star’s story demonstrates how quality and influence can endure, even without immediate commercial success. They shaped modern music and influenced generations of indie and alternative rock.

Ragtime: A Distinctly American Sound

• Ragtime is a distinctly American musical form, particularly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, centered around piano.
• Its key feature, syncopation (“ragged music”), involves an off-beat rhythm played by the right hand over a steady left-hand beat.
• Harmonically simple, ragtime primarily uses basic 1-4-5 chords found in much popular music.
• Unlike early jazz, ragtime was often precisely written and not improvised, requiring machine-like precision with big jumps, octaves, and tricky passages.
• Missouri, especially Sedalia and St. Louis, was a hub for ragtime pianists who could make a living playing in bars and clubs.
• Its diverse influences included African American banjo rhythms, syncopated dance beats like the cakewalk, and European melodies such as fiddle tunes (Irish and British jigs).
• Ragtime spread mainly through sheet music before widespread recording, reaching homes across America as a transient genre.

Scott Joplin: The King of Ragtime

• Scott Joplin, an African-American composer and pianist born in 1867, is widely known as “The King of Ragtime.”
• He began his career working on the railway before becoming a musician and teacher, publishing his music in Missouri.
• “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899), named after a club where he played, became the quintessential and hugely famous ragtime piece.
• Joplin spent the rest of his life attempting to break out of the ragtime genre, composing operas, but never achieving the same success.
• His death in 1917 marked the end of the main ragtime era.
• Ragtime initially faced harsh criticism, labeled as “musical poison” and capable of “arousing suspicions of sanity in young people,” a classic reaction to new, exciting music.
• It fell out of fashion around 1920 with the rise of Jazz, but experienced a revival in the 1970s.
• Joshua Rifkin’s album treated ragtime with classical respect, and the movie “The Sting” (1974) made “The Entertainer” a household name decades after Joplin wrote it.
• This cyclical nature demonstrates how art needs time to be understood.  The music was condemned but later it shaped modern music and became a classic.

Doo-Wop: Raw Power from Street Corners

• Doo-wop emerged from African-American neighborhoods in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the 1940s, exploding in popularity in the 1950s.
• Often performed by young, broke, Black men and women, they gathered on street corners, subway tunnels, and locker rooms due to segregation limiting access to expensive instruments.
• Their voices became their instruments, borrowing from gospel, jazz, barbershop, and spirituals, layering voices in close harmony.
• They invented nonsense syllables like “sh-boom” to fill space and create rhythm; early sounds were slow, sad, and jazzy, originally aimed at older audiences.
• With minimal instrumentation, doo-wop focused on rich vocal harmonies, usually with romantic themes.
• It crossed over into the mainstream in the mid-1950s, gaining a wider audience and becoming more energetic, with bands adopting matching uniforms.
• Groups like The Ravens, The Penguins, The Orioles, The Flamingos, The Crows, and later The O’Jays were prominent.
• Doo-wop was a truly pivotal genre, crystallizing the formula for the modern pop song and shifting focus from solo singers of the jazz age to vocal groups.
• It influenced surf rock, R&B, soul, and rock and roll.
• The Mills Brothers were early giants, mimicking instruments with their voices; Sonny Til and The Orioles achieved national fame, with Sonny Til sometimes considered the world’s first rock star.
• Integrated groups like The Dell-Vikings (“Come Go with Me”) broke barriers, and mixed-gender groups like The Platters gained huge hits.

The Darker Side of Doo-Wop

• Many doo-wop groups comprised teenagers who signed naive contracts that stripped them of ownership of their own music.
• Record labels sometimes erased artists’ names, marketing the sound but not the creators, leading to artists being unable to afford their own records.
• The industry often sanitized the sound, removing raw edges, replacing vocal imperfections with slick backing tracks, and sometimes whitewashing by replacing Black artists with white performers who lip-synced to original tracks.
• This exploitation, combined with the British Invasion in the early 1960s and significant social shifts like JFK’s assassination, pushed doo-wop out of the mainstream.
• Additionally, the general move towards louder rock and roll contributed to its decline.
• Doo-wop’s influence persisted in Motown’s emotion, R&B’s vocal layers, and hip-hop’s sampled hooks decades later.
• It experienced revivals in the 1980s and 1990s through films like “American Graffiti,” “Stand by Me,” and “Dirty Dancing,” which reignited public affection for its harmonies.
• The story of doo-wop reflects not just musical changes but also racial barriers, exploitation, and cultural appropriation within the industry, highlighting how authentic art can be overlooked or exploited.

Psychedelic Rock: A Revolution in Sound and Spirit

• Psychedelic rock surged around 1966, driven by hallucinogens like LSD and marijuana, with San Francisco being its epicenter.
• Key bands included Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, and The Doors, aiming for mind-expanding sounds.
• The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” reset expectations with surreal lyrics, dense harmonies, and crazy studio experiments.
• British psychedelia had its own flavor with bands like Pink Floyd and The Yardbirds, mixing Eastern instruments and odd rhythms during a fertile period.

The Decline of Psychedelic Rock

• The psychedelic “dream” was short-lived, unraveling quickly by the early 1970s due to a “perfect storm” of factors.
• A major blow was the deaths of stars like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, all at 27 between 1970 and 1971, which ripped the heart out of the movement.
• A moral panic surrounding drugs set in, as LSD went from a tool for free thought to being demonized, fueled by media sensationalism of “bad trips” and Syd Barrett’s (Pink Floyd) breakdown.
• The Manson murders, committed by followers high on LSD, solidified fear by linking psychedelic drugs to violence in the public mind, leading to government crackdowns and criminalization.
• The music itself became watered down due to commercialization and oversaturation; by 1967, the “underground” was becoming a mainstream product, diluting its essence.
• Culturally, the hippie movement also started to fall apart, exemplified by the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, which ended in violence and a fan’s death, shattering the utopian dream.
• Musically, things were changing as hard rock and heavy metal, led by bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, began to rise, overshadowing the hazy introspective vibe of psych rock with louder, riff-heavy anthems.
• The remaining elements of psych rock morphed into progressive rock (e.g., Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”) and art rock, featuring more complex and structured arrangements.
• This shift felt like a betrayal to some fans, who found it too intellectualized and pretentious.
• The punk movement of the mid-1970s emerged as an angry rejection of prog rock’s grandiosity and psych rock’s perceived pretension, advocating for back-to-basics, DIY music with no long jams.
• Internal band problems, burnout from constant touring, creative exhaustion, and drug abuse also took a huge toll on artists like Roky Erickson (13th Floor Elevators) and The Doors after Morrison’s death.
• The music industry turned away, with labels, radio, and venues backing off, while drug criminalization stigmatized it, making Syd Barrett a cautionary tale. Labels moved to safer bets like pop, disco, and hard rock.
• The decline of psychedelic rock shows how a genre’s survival depends heavily on its cultural context, not solely on the music itself.

Disco: Community, Freedom, and Social Battles

• Disco exploded in the late 1970s, dominating pop culture with figures like Studio 54, Donna Summer, and the Bee Gees, and reaching its peak with “Saturday Night Fever” in 1977.
• Its roots were deeper, however, in marginalized Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ communities, who embraced it as a symbol of freedom and acceptance.
• The dance floor became a sanctuary; Black artists like Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor became icons, and Latin rhythms were woven into the sound.
• Disco’s sound featured a steady “four on the floor” beat, synthesized basslines, string sections, and long, hypnotic tracks focused purely on rhythm and groove.

Disco’s Dramatic Fall

• Despite its popularity, disco faced an incredibly hostile backlash, particularly from rock fans who felt threatened, viewing disco as manufactured, commercialized, and lacking rock’s authenticity.
• Radio DJs fueled this sentiment, labeling disco as repetitive, soulless, and shallow.
• The anti-disco sentiment tapped into deeper anxieties like systemic racism and homophobia, as disco was labeled “gay music” to discredit it.
• Racial tensions flared, with some seeing disco as a threat to white dominance in music, challenging traditional values during a time of significant social change in America (e.g., the sexual revolution).
• This backlash culminated in “Disco Demolition Night” on July 12, 1979, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park.
• Organized by radio DJ Steve Dahl, 50,000 angry fans stormed the field, burning and hurling disco records, which became a national news story and a symbol of the backlash.
• This event exposed the ugly undercurrents of racism, homophobia, and fear of change.
• However, disco didn’t truly die; it transformed and went underground, morphing into house music, techno, and EDM, with its spirit influencing artists like Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson.
• Disco is currently experiencing a resurgence, with new generations rediscovering its infectious grooves and message of inclusivity and freedom, demonstrating the resilience of a sound.

The Cyclic Nature of Musical Genres

• Musical genres don’t simply vanish but follow cycles driven by key factors, with their core DNA surviving and evolving.

Key Factors in Genre Evolution

• Changing Cultural Trends: Music is closely tied to fashion, politics, and technology, steering audience preferences. Disco ended quickly partly due to backlash, rock steady softened when reggae took over, and societal values shift what people desire from lyrics and artists.
• Oversaturation: When too many artists copy the same formula, the market gets tired, leading to genre burnout. This happened with grunge after Nirvana, when every band in flannel was signed, and radio and TV were flooded. Dubstep also experienced this in the early 2010s. Streaming can exacerbate this by splintering genres into tiny sub-genres, causing floods of lookalikes that can bury originators.
• Technology: Every technological leap rewrites music’s rules.
  • Edison’s phonograph brought music into homes.
  • Tape machines allowed distortion and editing, crucial for psych rock and disco.
  • Late 1980s sampling revolutionized rap with artists like Dr. Dre and Ice Cube turning old records into new hooks.
  • Digital tools and software (Audacity, FL Studio) allow entire genres like vaporwave to bloom, shifting focus from live playing skills to studio craft.

Resurgence and the Post-Genre World

• Forgotten musical styles never truly vanish but constantly influence modern music, teaching producers new tricks and providing artists with ideas to sample and blend.
• This leads to revivals, often within niche subcultures, or via global platforms like YouTube algorithms (e.g., Japanese city pop, disco coming back through European dance music, or artists like The Weeknd).
• TikTok can rapidly make old songs huge again, accelerating revivals and instantly pushing old sounds to new generations.
• This cycle shows that nothing truly dies in music; it transforms and becomes part of its ongoing story, reflecting society’s anxieties, celebrations, and dreams.

The Future of Genres

• If genres are constantly evolving, blending, and influencing each other, the very idea of a genre might be losing its meaning today.
• Historically, a genre was a category defined by similarities in form, style, subject matter, techniques, and instruments (e.g., blues with its 12-bar form or hip-hop with its beats and samples).
• In the 20th century, the music business solidified genres primarily for marketing, to sell specific products and enable radio stations to play specific formats for targeted audiences.
• However, as music and technology evolved (computers in production), lines became blurred (e.g., Michael Jackson blending soul, funk, rock, and new jack swing on one album).
• The internet, with platforms like Napster, iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube, disrupted everything, changing how we find and listen to music.
• Algorithms now dominate, leading to personalized playlists and global distribution, giving equal footing to niche artists and “tiny micro-genres” alongside superstars.
• There isn’t one big dominant genre anymore; no single “must-hear” movement flourishes because listeners follow personalized tastes curated by algorithms rather than mass consensus from old media like radio or MTV.
• This means it’s possible for many people to not have even heard massive global hits, as taste is highly fragmented.
• Pop music’s definition has also changed from a specific sound to whatever music is currently popular; modern stars like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish defy easy labels, blending synth-pop, electro-pop, R&B, trap, and hip-hop.
• We are in a “post-genre world,” where artists blend styles openly, boundaries are blurred, and genre labels feel outdated.
• They are being replaced by “moods” and “vibes,” with streaming sites already sorting music by “sunny day,” “reading soundtrack,” or “lo-fi hip-hop for studying.”
• Listeners have become their own curators, building personal “mini-eras” where individual taste is king.
• In this post-genre world of blending and personal playlists, it’s an open question whether it’s easier or harder for truly revolutionary, era-defining sounds to emerge and gain collective buy-in.