The meaning of Pop.

It occurred to me that I've been throwing around the word Pop pretty liberally. Pop to me means something different from "pop culture", which has deservedly negative connotations.

Pop in music means both "hooky" and "accessible", to my mind. It's a positive attribute, but there are good and bad pop aspects of a song, in my opinion. One major aspect of accessibility is in chord progression, but there are some chord progressions that are way overused (namely 1->4->5 and its variants, and relative minor->5->4; i.e. C->F->G would be an example of the former and C-minor->Bflat-major->Aflat major of the latter, although this last one is prominent, and still quite good, in a lot of metal, in Stevie Nicks songs, and in Megachild songs).

In my opinion it takes virtually no talent to write pop with overused motifs. But, especially these days, it takes real talent to write poppy songs with new combinations of chord changes. Nevertheless, not just any chord progression sounds good to my ear. Some work, and some don't.