Learning To Fly: pop song or not?

I'd love to hear why you think it isn't pop, as I feel I have already explained why it is and all you've said is "its floyd how can that be pop????".

 That whole album was made with the intention of re-making Floyd's sound to fit with the more pop-oriented arena rock sound of the 80's that bands like Yes and Asia were doing at the exact same time. Is Owner of a lonely heart not pop because Yes made prog in the past? They did that to be more popular and sell more copies of their new record to new audiences, hence the musical term "pop". I only mentioned Sorrow because I think its the best attempt at what they were going for on that album, combining older songwriting ideas and mixing it with a fresh pop/rock outlook. That's exactly what Sorrow is, the intro sounds like 80's Shine on and it is an 8 minute rocker that mainly consists of soloing, most of which sounds like any arena rock guitarist from that era could have played it. Kinda reminds me of a Camel song, maybe Ice? Not that it's not pop, I called that entire album pop multiple times. I would however consider it the least pop song out of the longer tracks on that record, or in the very least it is the only song on that record that actually achieves something for me. Can we get back to your opinion though? I'd love to hear why you don't consider Learning to Fly to be pop. 

verslibre wrote: And nobody outside PA & PE remembers Emerson, Lake & Powell's "Learning to Fly"!

 

Infinitely better track. I don't really like that album much but that track is a killer. 

Don't really care. It isn't one of my favorites, but I like it. If it is indeed pop... wow. I wish we would have more pop like that.

Please forgive my ignorance. What the hell is PE? In my native Spanish we are not very into using acronyms 

But for that time period, 1987, nah, it is more like a different kind of animal that used to be up there in the 80s but has disappeared.   It was called AOR. Listen to APP's Days Are Numbers and it has similar production values to Learning To Fly.  Except Days Are Numbers came a couple of years before.  For 1987, it would have to be way more synth based for me to consider it pop.

Pop isnt a genre, its a label that can be loosely applied to many musical acts. To say Floyd is pop is to say Floyd made music that sold extremely well worldwide and had a noticeable and long-lasting impact on pop culture. It is not to say Pink Floyd and Celine Dion make the same type of music. OP might not have asked about pop rock specifically but IMO he still did by asking about pop as an idea, because it's not something that stands on its own as a musical concept, it is something that is applied to actual genres of music like rock or jazz or even disco. What is your idea of pop if The Cars and U2, which both play rock music that is popular is pop but Led Zeppelin, who plays rock music that is popular, is not pop? And yes I would consider Dark Side (and practically Floyds whole discography) to be pop, for the same reasons listed above. 

 

Wherever I've seen the term "pop/rock" used, it is referring to all pop and all rock. Thus, it includes all Progressive Rock. It is used as a broad category of music that is distinguished from classical, country, jazz, etc.