Genre - Pop Punk

Genre is a style or catergory of art, literature or in our case music. Genre is useful to us as it fulfils audience expectations and can be predicatble. This means that the audience should know what they are getting from each specific genre. However as there is now more genre mixing than ever some of the boundaries between genres are being broken down and this is where things become a lot les predictable.

The genre that we will be focussing on in our promo is Pop Punk. Pop Punk first emerged in the 1980s but didnt become popular until the late 90s and the 21st century. Pop Punk fuses pop melodies with guitar rock tempo and speed. A common theme in the lyrics of pop punk revolves around relationships and young love. Artists of pop punk will often write lyrics that relate to key moments in their life and more often than not moments of  their youth or adolescence. Pop Punk bands are often represented as being quite out there and may like portray themselves as being different. This can relate to lyrics from their songs which can be often be about being different or a social outcast at school.  This then adheres to their target audience who can often consider themselves in that position and therefore can relate to the lyrics.

The target audience for pop punk is predominantly teenagers of 15+ and a fairly even split of both genders as the lyrics often refer to things that are going on in that period of someones life. One of the conventions of promos of pop punk is that there is usually a lot of performance. In this performance another convention will be fast paced editing that may not always cut to the beat. There will also be a lot of camera movement to show the energy of the performance and to reflect the pace and tempo of the song. There can also be strong narratives in pop punk videos and these narratives will often have a large amount of close ups and extreme close ups to show emotions that reflect the lyrics. The performance will often be a band performing in a rehearsal studio or maybe in a garage. A convention of lighting is that it is often fairly darkly lit and this shows the emotions and feeling of a lot of Pop Punk songs.

Pop Punk does not stick to the theory that genre is no longer a fixed set of elements as in this genre very little has changed from Blink 182 up to todays bands such as Paramore. Verismilitude refers to how real a text is and some genres have more verismilitude than others. Pop Punk is a genre that can be said to have a lot of verismilitude as the lyrics refer to real life scenarios and situations and again this will affect the target audience as they will have or will be experiencing these scenarios. This is a big contrast to other genres such as pop and maybe rock too as they can both have lyrics about situations that their target audience have never been in.