Can Popular Music ever really be unplugged?

Firstly we need to define what unplugged means in terms of music, according to the Cambridge dictionary unplugged describes musicians performing without electric instruments and without amplification. There has been a trend in recent years where artists have performed unplugged using acoustic instruments, the use of performing unplugged enables audiences to hear the vocalists in their real human voice instead of the amplified voice. Unplugged performances seem to be the way to show audiences that the music is genuine and can be performed the same as when heard on radio broadcasts, television programs or on CD’s. But popular music is never really unplugged; the songs have to be created with the use of electrical instruments and with amplification to make it stand out and appeal to the wider audiences and the use of electrical equipment in performances enables the artist to perform better, so it is not a unplugged performance.

What is Popular Music?

Popular music is a wide range of things, it can be music that is popular in its own genre of music, this meaning an artist or a band in a specific genre is popular. Popular music can also be a genre of music, which is popular compared to all other genres of music. The general ideology is that popular music is music that is listened to by the masses of people either nationally or internationally. According to Roy Shuker in Understanding Popular Music, popular music ‘consists of a hybrid of musical traditions, styles, and influences, and is also an economic product which is invested with ideological significance by many of its consumers’ p.7. This suggesting that popular music is a wide mixture of history, culture and politics all put together to make music, which is accessible and approachable to the masses rather than the minorities to be constituted as popular.