International Pop Music Overview

Music is a very popular form of art that involves sounds and silence in an organized manner. The prominence of Spanish language art in the music industry and beyond is increasing in visibility more than ever before, and especially considering that census population estimates from 2019 peg the percentage of Latinos in America at close to 20%.
In that arena, few stars can vie with the recent popularity of Bad Bunny, aka Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a 25-year-old Puerto Rican singer and rapper who surprise-released his second album YHLQMDLG (or Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana, translation from Spanish: I do what I want) last weekend, announcing the album was coming just days before on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.



That potential can be seen in the studios’ eager promotion of multilingual artists like BoA , who made her public debut at the age of 13 in 2000 International Pop and in the ensuing years has become one of South Korea’s best-known exports thanks to a brand built on raw talent and multicultural positivity.

The ’90s will perhaps always be best remembered for the explosion of boy bands and girl groups that introduced teen icons like Take That and The Spice Girls, plus the bubblegum pop of Kylie Minogue, Steps and Aqua, as well as the return of guitar-based music thanks to bands like Oasis and Blur.
The room reminded me of how pinched and ration-fed much British pop looked in comparison with its US counterparts: a dream of pop elsewhere, an elsewhere made of burgers, chrome, modern appliances and movie stars, not drab, bombed out cities, spam and BBC Radio’s Third Programme.

One thing that struck me about the Walker Art Center’s huge survey of global and historical pop art, ‘International Pop’, and Tate Modern’s identically-themed show, ‘The World Goes Pop’, which opened within months of each other last year, was how this coincidence of curating was itself such an old-fashioned pop moment.
LeAnn Rimes born 1982, is a cross genre artist, and although not considered by everyone to be a true Country singer, her single “how do I live” became very successful and the longest running single in the top 100 billboard, although the single is not necessarily considered pure Country by Country purists, her cross genre songs are very commercial, enjoyed even by those who don’t enjoy Country.