Synthpop

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Template:Genrebox Synthpop is a style of popular music in which the synthesizer is the dominant musical instrument. It is most closely associated with an era between the late 1970s and early 1980s when the synthesizer first became a practical and affordable instrument. The style developed as musicians such as Gary Numan, Ultravox, and Devo embraced the synthesizer as a lead instrument, taking advantage of its unique sound and capabilities.

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History

Although synthesizers had been used in rock music in the 1960s, notably by The Beatles, the instruments were highly complex, temperamental, and expensive. Synthesizers became more widely used by progressive rock groups such as Yes , Emerson Lake and Palmer (driven by Moog master Keith Emerson), by the mid-1970s, and the German band Kraftwerk were among the avant-garde artists who experimented with them. But hugely popular Scandinavian supergroup ABBA embraced them, and producer Giorgio Moroder used them heavily on records by disco artists, notably Donna Summer, giving rise to the subgenre terms "Eurodisco" and "Hi-NRG," further popularized in the by Moroder and fellow German producers Jack White and Harold Faltermeyer, working with predominantly female artists like Irene Cara, Laura Branigan, and Berlin in the early 1980s.

The synthpop genre flourished as part of the new wave music movement. The genre reached its peak in the 1980s, as the dominance of synthesizers flooded every musical style, from smooth jazz to hard rock and heavy metal. British production team Stock/Aitken/Waterman achieved international success creating almost entirely sequence-driven tracks for acts like Dead Or Alive, Rick Astley, and Bananarama. This split between groups of musicians creating their own music and pop acts fronting the work of wunderkind producers or rock acts "sweetening" their sound caused a cynicism in American listeners who had eschewed disco at the end of the 1970s. In the United States, a backlash against the predominant styles of commercial pop in general and synthesized music specifically drove the synthpop genre largely underground there. Few of the genre's 1980s acts and almost none which happened upon a modicum of novelty success there in the 1990s were able to thrive commercially during this period, many dropped from their record contracts as "alternative" music rose to the forefront. A new generation of radio DJs, video jockeys and label reps dismissed synth-driven music as somehow less visceral or artistic than the emerging styles of grunge, hip-hop, and rap. However, in Europe (where the new wave movement began), as well as South America, Australia, and Asia the synthpop genre remained more widely accepted, and artists from these regions (as well as American artists temporarily expatriated there) performing music with 1980s synthpop roots have spurred minor resurgences of the genre in the U.S. (Ace Of Base, Savage Garden, and the Scandinavian-born teen pop phenomenon to name a few.)

While it might be argued that most current popular and commercial music in the industrialized world is realized via electronic instruments, synthpop has its own stylistic tendencies which differentiate it from other music produced by the same means. These include: the exploitation of artificiality (the synthesizers are not used to imitate acoustic instruments), the use of mechanical rhythms and "feel", the use of vocal arrangements as a counterpoint to the artificiality of the instruments, and the use of ostinato patterns as an effect. Synthpop song forms are generally the same as in "regular" pop music.

Synthpop is sometimes referred to as electropop although electropop is generally regarded to be a particular style of synthpop that incorporates the more robotic elements and feel of electro music.

Synthpop has also become increasingly used in gothic and industrial circles to describe various alternative electronic artists, particularly those in the electronic body music and futurepop genres. It is otherwise generally used in its more classic sense, referring to early 1980s synthesizer driven pop acts (e.g., Depeche Mode, Erasure) as well as a variety of New Romantic pop acts from the same era (e.g., Duran Duran, Japan, and Spandau Ballet).