Today sees the start of a new seven-part series written by Guardian and Observer critics called A History of Modern Music, in which we've tried to pinpoint 50 key moments in the stories of seven different music genres. You can journey through time with the interactive features we've created for each day.
It all kicks off with pop – beginning with Frank Sinatra and ending with Lady Gaga – while on Sunday it's the turn of rock, followed by hip-hop and R&B, indie, dance, world and folk, and jazz. We might have included classical music but to do that properly, we'd have to extend the timeline considerably, and the exercise would become unwieldy (later this summer we hope to make amends with a different project).
Even without those genres, it's meant a lot of arguments, a lot of shuffling of lists, and a lot of listening again to an awful lot of music since the first days of recording – some things that just had to be represented because they were personal favourites, some things that few could dispute, and some things you'd wished you'd already forgotten...
In some ways, picking what went into pop was the easiest task: just look back at the charts and see what's been popular. (One irony is that the perfect pop song is meant to be three minutes long and pretty much ephemeral, but the records made by the acts we're celebrating have soundtracked generations.) But we've not always gone for the most obvious moments, and we recognise that as pop history has progressed, some events – the release of a key record, a meeting of two minds, a memorable gig – that you might expect to see in the list we've come up with have ended up in one of our other histories.
Part of the fun – and pop should be fun – is that history is never an objective enterprise. The contributors in this instance have included Simon Napier-Bell, Tom Ewing, Gareth Grundy, Tim Jonze, Alexis Petridis, Jon Savage and Caroline Sullivan. But what do they know? Let us know which moments we might have picked instead, and perhaps a different history will emerge.
