Avantpop (artistic movement)

Avant-pop is popular music that is experimental, new, and distinct from previous styles while retaining an immediate accessibility for the listener. It consists of artists who abandon recognizable music and genre conventions in pursuit of novel or idiosyncratic artistic visions, often through combining existing stylistic materials from popular music.

Generally, "avant-garde music" refers to music which attempts to challenge or alienate its audiences by being purposely outrageous, whereas "popular music" is designed to have mass appeal. Writer Tejumola Olaniyan describes "avant-pop music" as trangressing "the boundaries of established styles, the meanings those styles reference, and the social norms they support or imply." Author David Horn describes "avant-pop" as identifying idiosyncratic artists working in "a liminal space between contemporary classical music and the many popular music genres that developed in the second half of the twentieth century." He noted avant-pop's basis in experimentalism, as well its postmodern and non-heirarchal incorporation of varied genres such as pop, electronica, rock, classical, and jazz.

Paul Grimstad of The Brooklyn Rail writes that avant-pop is music that "re-sequences" the elements of song structure "so that (a) none of the charm of the tune is lost, but (b) this very accessibility leads one to bump into weirder elements welded into the design." The Tribeca New Music Festival defines "avant-pop" as "music that draws its energy from both popular music and classical forms", and that it ranges from Charles Ives to Frank Zappa. The term has elsewhere been used by literary critic Larry McCaffery to describe "the most radical, subversive literary talents of the postmodern new wave."

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