Avant-pop (artistic movement)

Avant-pop is popular music that is experimental, new, and distinct from previous styles while retaining an immediate accessibility for the listener.

Generally, "avant-garde music" refers to music which attempts to challenge or alienate its audiences by being purposely outrageous, whereas "popular music" is designed to have mass appeal. Writer Tejumola Olaniyan describes "avant-pop music" as trangressing "the boundaries of established styles, the meanings those styles reference, and the social norms they support or imply." Paul Grimstad says that it is music that "re-sequences the Legos of song structure, so that (a) none of the charm of the tune is lost, but (b) this very accessibility leads one to bump into weirder elements welded into the design." The Tribeca New Music Festival defines "avant-pop" as "music that draws its energy from both popular music and classical forms", and that it ranges from Charles Ives to Frank Zappa. Inspired by Lester Bowie's 1986 album Avant Pop, literary critic Larry McCaffery employed the term for "innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics, and various unclassifiable texts written by the most radical, subversive literary talents of the postmodern new wave."

In 1959, music producer Joe Meek recorded I Hear a New World (1960), which Tiny Mix Tapes' Jonathan Patrick calls a "seminal moment in both electronic music and avant-pop history [...] [the album] is a collection of dreamy pop vignettes, adorned with dubby echoes and tape-warped sonic tendrils. These pop experiments, originally released in abbreviated form, were all but ignored at the time." According to The Quietus' David McNamee, the electronic music group White Noise's debut studio album An Electric Storm (1968) is an "undisputed masterpiece of early avant-pop". Others who have been credited as avant-pop's pioneers include the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed, performance artist Laurie Anderson,art pop musician Spookey Ruben, and Black Dice's Eric Copeland.

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