As the decades passed, some traditional genres mutated, hybridized and spread like viruses. Many others were left for dead on their home soil. In the United States, where the descendants of African slaves dreamed up jazz and the blues, sounds emerged that would conquer the world. A few returned home transfigured. In the 1960s, for example, a British quartet in love with Chuck Berry and Little Richard reinvented American music. Before the Beatles, “rock and roll” was a phase the world might eventually have outgrown. Afterward, rock was the mainstream.
Yet pop music is no monoculture, even now. Radios and recordings have helped popularize opera and the European classics, art forms that for a while seemed hopelessly unmarketable in the electronic age. People have access to music in unprecedented variety–if we only had time to listen.
