Calum Scott honed his huge, honeyed pipes singing other people's songs, but he didn't fully find his voice until he began creating his own intimate pop vignettes. Born in 1988, in the Northern England city of Kingston upon Hull, Scott first took up the drums, while his sister Jade became the singer of the family. Eventually, Jade discovered her brother's natural way with a fierce falsetto and chilling vibrato and signed him up for a local singing competition in 2013. He sang Paolo Nutini's "Last Request" and won. Following that thrill of performing in front of a crowd, Scott joined Maroon 4, a Maroon 5 cover band, before tagging along with...

Broad, earnest, and unreservedly sentimental, Billy Joel remains the quintessential showman of pop music. Born in 1949 in New York City and raised on Long Island during the postwar boom era, Joel spent his early career in Los Angeles, working briefly as the singer in a bar on Wilshire Boulevard - an experience commemorated in his signature song, "Piano Man". He went on to become one of the most successful artists in pop, bridging reflective singer-songwriter material (1982's The Nylon Curtain) with sock-hop nostalgia like "The Longest Time" and "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" for a theatrical, particularly American sound whose resonances can...

The world didn't know how much it needed a Swedish Beatles until ABBA came along. With keyboardist Benny Andersson and guitarist Björn Ulvaeus as the songwriting geniuses and Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog providing the vocal power, ABBA turned pure pop into high art, becoming one of the biggest groups on the planet. Before forming in Stockholm in 1972, Anni-Frid and Agnetha had been successful solo artists in Sweden, while Björn and Benny had been working as a duo; they became two married pairs as well as musical partners.

Before Shania Twain's rise in the mid-1990s, no other singer had combined two roles that, at the time, seemed entirely disparate: rootin', tootin' country star and glamorous pop diva. That she made it look so easy is a testament to the tenacity shown by the performer, who was born in 1965 and raised in the small Canadian town of Timmins, ON. After not gaining much headway during her early stint as a rock performer under her original name of Eilleen Twain, nor in her first years after becoming Shania and signing to Mercury Nashville, she made a fortuitous alliance with Robert John "Mutt" Lange. On Twain's albums The Woman in Me (1995) and Come...

With a towering voice and a singing style that was rooted in revival halls and massive arenas, Whitney Houston helped define pop-R&B in the late 20th century. Born in Newark, NJ, to gospel singer Cissy Houston in 1963, Houston, a model and singer in her younger years, was taken under the wing of legendary music mogul Clive Davis in 1983. Her 1985 self-titled debut was a blockbuster, her voice lending power and poignancy to singles like the slow-burning "Saving All My Love for You", the buoyant "How Will I Know", and the inspirational "The Greatest Love of All". Its 1987 follow-up, Whitney, blended the glittery club hits "I Wanna Dance wit...

The Bee Gees may be associated with the shimmering disco grooves and stratospheric falsetto of Saturday Night Fever, but the band scored hits in four decades with substance and style, reinventing themselves through setbacks and comebacks marked by graceful harmonies and impeccable songcraft. Born to a musical family in northern England, Barry Gibb and his younger fraternal twin brothers, Robin and Maurice, spent their teen years in Australia before returning in 1967 to ride the Beatlemania wave, positioning themselves as adventurous psych-pop explorers on a string of sweet, melancholy hits.

Phil Collins dominated pop radio in the 1980s, bringing a liberating sense of experimentation to unabashedly commercial material. Born in West London in 1951, Collins developed his adventurous tactics while drumming (and eventually singing lead) for English prog-rock visionaries Genesis, spearheading the band's unlikely transformation into a mainstream pop act. But Collins' solo work proved even more successful: His debut solo single, 1981's “In the Air Tonight", contrasted meditative synths with a famously cathartic drum solo that made gated reverb a ubiquitous effect across the decade to come.

Formed in 1962, Status Quo is one of the most popular and commercially successful British rock bands of all time. In 1968, the group scored their first global hit with "Pictures of Matchstick Men", which was later covered by Camper Van Beethoven, as well as by Ozzy Osbourne with Type O Negative. Status Quo holds the Guinness World Record for most hit singles on the UK chart by a band, with 66 - a total that includes one UK No. 1, 1974's "Down Down". They won a 1991 BRIT Award for their contributions to music, and cofounder/vocalist Francis Rossi and rhythm guitarist Rick Parfitt were named Officers of the Order of the British Empire in 2009.

At the height of the fever dream that was Elton John's life in the 1970s, the singer-songwriter had the optician Dennis Roberts design a pair of giant, sculptural glasses studded with 57 battery-powered lights in the shape of the name Elton - to the tune of about $5,000. Adjusted for inflation, you're talking about something more like $25,000. But John had a show to put on, and wouldn't that be something to talk about?

With her inimitable fusion of grace and grit, Aretha Franklin was the definition of soul music. The daughter of renowned Detroit preacher C.L. Franklin, Aretha could testify with all the liberating joy of her gospel roots. She could ache with the sadness of a singer who truly felt the blues, and swing with a playfulness to match her jazz heroes. After nearly a decade honing what would become her singular voice, Franklin - who was born in Memphis in 1942 and died in Detroit in 2018 - brought a blast of Black-and-proud empowerment to the pop charts at the peak of the civil rights era.

Since her debut in the early 1960s, legendary pop and R&B singer Dionne Warwick has landed 56 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, including two No. 1 hits. Among female artists, only Aretha Franklin has more hits to her credit. Born Marie Dionne Warrick in Orange, New Jersey, the singer grew up in a musical family. Her mother managed the gospel group The Drinkard Singers (which included Aunt Cissy Houston), her father was a gospel record promoter for Chess Records, her sister Dee Dee Warwick was a popular soul singer, and her cousin was Whitney Houston.

After the 1980 death of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, surviving members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris asked keyboardist Gillian Gilbert to help them pick up where their former band had left off. But when they added synths to their post-punk songs, they ended up creating one of the most influential electro-dance bands of all time. The Manchester group debuted in March 1981 with "Ceremony", a tune originally written for Joy Division, but the subsequent Movement, with its darkly melodic tracks, revealed a band in transition.

Before embarking on an unusually long career as purveyors of soft-rock ballads, rock's most successful horn-heavy ensemble started out both artistically progressive and politically engaged. Known as the Big Thing when they formed in 1967, the prolific Second City septet released their eponymous debut album as the Chicago Transit Authority two years later. In addition to a sidelong epic devoted to political liberation and Terry Kath's extended guitar freak-out, the record also yielded keyboardist Robert Lamm's hit single "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?".

Some may dismiss pop as inauthentic. But for Lady Gaga - one of popular culture's greatest, most extravagant creations - the inauthenticity is the point. No artist has more defiantly embodied that provocation this century than the one born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (in New York in 1986). Never wedded to the same image - her most memorable looks (among many) have included a gown fashioned from raw meat, a red-carpet-appropriate pair of dish gloves, and "the world's first flying dress" - Gaga personifies pop's surface obsessions while simultaneously upending them. In a sense, her creative identity had crystallized by age 21.

In the 1970s, perhaps no act embodied soft rock's pristine sonics and sentimental bent more than the Carpenters. The combination of Richard Carpenter's meticulous arrangements and instrumentation and the mellifluous voice of his younger sister, Karen, led to a string of hits, starting in 1970 with the orchestra-kissed "(They Long to Be) Close to You" and "We've Only Just Begun". The Connecticut-born siblings showed early aptitude for music: Richard started playing piano at age eight, and Karen was a talented drummer, leading to both of them studying music in college. The duo soon turned professional, debuting in 1969 as Carpenters.

Luther Vandross was more than just a great singer. A suave yet warm-hearted New Yorker who became one of R&B's beloved balladeers from his solo breakthrough in the early 1980s to his untimely death in 2005, Vandross was also a vocalist whose understanding of singing as an art form was so profound, he changed notions of what it could be. That's just what he did on his astonishing 1981 cover of "A House Is Not a Home", transforming the Burt Bacharach/Hal David classic into an acutely personal demonstration of his control, dexterity, and expressiveness.

Slovenian group Laibach's music, performances, and entire aesthetic have been immensely influential across nearly the entire genre of industrial music, especially the martial industrial style. Mocking fascism with their music's Wagnerian thunder and military attire, the collective's live shows portray rock concerts as absurd political rallies.

After releasing the track "The Protagonist" as a one-off compilation entry on the Advanced Electronics Vol. 3, Faderhead received a deal with Accession Records/Indigo to release his debut album FH1 in 2006.

Even in a '90s alt-rock landscape already pounded into submission by the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Ministry and Marilyn Manson, nothing could prepare ears for the sensory-overloading assault and sheer absurdity of Rammstein's "Du hast".

It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say Led Zeppelin invented heavy metal. Formed by latter-day Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page in 1968 (originally as The New Yardbirds), the quartet were among a wave of bands taking the blues-based British Invasion sound in a louder direction.

If it's possible to condense the evolution of hip-hop into a single entity-embodying its street perspectives, pop dominance and global multicultural appeal-it'd be the Black Eyed Peas.