Music of The United Kingdom - Modern British Popular Music

Modern British Popular Music

Forms of popular music, including folk music, jazz, pop and rock music, have particularly flourished in Britain since the twentieth century. Britain has had an impact on popular music disproportionate to its size, due to its linguistic and cultural links with many countries, particularly the United States and many of its former colonies like Australia, South Africa, and Canada, and its capacity for invention, innovation and fusion, which has led to the development of, or participation in, many of the major trends in popular music. In the early-20th century, influences from the United States became most dominant in popular music, with young performers producing their own versions of American music, including rock n' roll from the late 1950s and developing a parallel music scene. This is particularly true since the early 1960s when the British Invasion, led by The Beatles, helped to secure British performers a major place in development of pop and rock music. Since then, rock music and popular music contributed to a British-American collaboration, with trans-Atlantic genres being exchanged and exported to one another, where they tended to be adapted and turned into new movements, only to be exported back again. Genres originating in or radically developed by British musicians include blues rock, heavy metal, progressive rock, hard rock, punk rock, electric folk, folk punk, acid jazz, trip hop, shoegaze, drum and bass, grime, Britpop and dubstep.