Article written by Lauren Johnston.
This week we are going to talk about how pop music took some hardcore drugs and took it to the next level, yes that’s right, Pop Goes Punk. I have been waiting for so long to talk about something like this. To me, I find Pop Goes Punk a very controversial subject, but in saying that it’s also very black and white, you either love it or hate it.
I personally love Pop Goes Punk, I have been listening to it for a very long time, I’m talking scene kid phase, I’m talking 8 to 10 years ago when fashion didn’t matter and it was all about My Chemical Romance Aka My Chem, don’t lie we have all had those phases, BUT even though with the million different times that I have swapped to and from music genres, to now just having a massive playlist with a bunch of different genres, Pop Goes Punk has always been in my day to day music selection.
Pop Goes Punk is where heavy metal or post hardcore bands take a well-known pop song and completely blow it up, but not in a bad way, in the way where you listen to a song for the first time and it’s an absolute banger and you just want to go ape s**t and dance, that’s how they blow it up. The first song I heard that made me dive into the world of Pop Goes Punk was ‘Blank Space’ by I Prevail originally from TayTay. My little ears one day heard this song and whispered silently to myself “What the actual f*ck” I had heard post hardcore and was currently listening to post hardcore every day, but hearing my two favorite genres smashed together and it sounding incredible, blew me right the hell away. I’m trying to think of a way to describe this to you guys but I’m finding it reeealllyyy hard, it’s like taking a pop song you like and intensifying the drums and the beat and tempo and all that good stuff and then on top of that making the vocals completely opposite to usual and there you have it, Pop Goes Punk.
Pop Goes Punk has 8 albums which they call Volumes, the first one was released way back in 2002 and now 16 years later it’s got 8 volumes each one getting better and better. A few of my all-time faves that are currently in my playlist are ‘Little Lion Man’ covered by Tonight Alive, ‘F**k You’ by Sleeping with Sirens, ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ covered by Mayday Parade, ‘Some Nights’ by Like Moths To Flames, ‘Payphone’ covered by Crown The Empire and ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ by We Came As Romans. All of these songs are absolutely done in such a perfect way that I can’t flaw them, I always catch myself turning it up that bit louder every time I hear them come on while I’m driving around!
As I was saying before at the start, Pop Goes Punk is controversial as people think that its the bands trying to rip off a pop song and take the credit for it by messing with the original, and on the other hand you literally just have people talking s**t that have no idea of what they are going on about, and last but not least you have the people like me who see it as, its bands showing us how they can put their spin on a loved or well-known pop song and make it something the same but completely different at the same time. These days in the music industry it’s all about that good ol fat pay check at the end of the day, it’s no longer about making music and having fun with it. Music can be so much more and that’s what I love about Pop Goes Punk, it joins two different genres and smashes them together to make something so interesting that we didn’t know could be done, it’s something different and new, and if no one took that risk or made the effort to try our music industry would be more solid squares all defined from one another instead of a Venn diagram where there’s a central point that is still a grey zone to most but for some they see it as room to grow.
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