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It's right there in the smallish lower case print on the back cover of highly-touted Ohio trio Times New Viking's latest album Rip It Off. It says, "times new viking play pop songs with guitar keyboards drums."

What they actually play is nearer to lo-fi indie noise terror but their willingness to identify their music with that tell-tale little word "pop" is intriguing.

Somewhere around the end of the '60s "pop" became a dirty word and, despite numerous valiant attempts at rehabilitation, it has pretty much stayed that way.

By expanding the boundaries of popular music, the Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix and others immeasurably enriched our lives. Unwittingly, however, they also consigned pop to the deepest, darkest dungeon imaginable--the Black Hole of Uncool.

From the dawn of sound recording, popular music had absorbed ideas from blues, jazz, folk and elsewhere, and transformed them into songs that almost anybody could enjoy. The best popular music, in the hands of songwriters like Cole Porter, and interpreters like Frank Sinatra, was sophisticated, imaginative and vibrantly alive.

It was popular music, in the shape of Carole King and Gerry Goffin's catalogue of Brill Building hits that Lennon and McCartney aspired to emulate. Like Elvis, the Beatles rocked, but they remained pop artists, determined to please a vast public, until the latter years of the '60s.

Then it was goodbye pop, hello meaningful lyrics, extended guitar solos and concept albums. The humble three-minute pop song, with its simple agenda of an ear-tickling tune and an accessible lyric, started to look insipid and passé. Who could possibly want the Archies' "Sugar Sugar" when the alternative was songs that could stop war, induce higher states of consciousness and expand the universal musical vocabulary?

Pop was cheerfully delegated to the producer-songwriter teams who still dominate it. These largely anonymous movers and shakers function in a world where tempos are analysed for their dance-inducing efficacy and radio stations choose playlists based on the familiarity of new songs to old ones. The Britpop wave of the mid-'90s was one of many regular attempts to reclaim popular music for groups with guitars but it couldn't quite shake off grown-up rock's legacy of earnest elitism. After a brief golden moment of subversive chart action, scene leaders Blur and Oasis went art-rock and dad-rock respectively.

Times New Viking, however, don't seem ashamed of the word "pop."

And it's not just the word that's being reclaimed. It's the spirit of the word.

A clutch of recent debut albums underscores the point. Seattle's Fleet Foxes describe their lusciously melodic music as "baroque harmonic pop jams." Denmark's fast-rising Alphabeat are self-confessed popsters. The Mexican-American trio Alla experiment with Latin grooves in a poppy context almost unknown since the heyday of bossa nova and London's Heart Strings conjure the kind of intelligently infectious pop that ought to be manna for the Eurovision Song Contest (but never has been). Align all of this alongside the emergent power-pop of post-emo bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco and it feels like a sea change is underway.

New York, London, Paris, Munich. Sure seems like everybody's thinking about pop music.

And, for once, it doesn't feel like some localised clique attempting to impose its smug pop agenda on the plebs. It feels like a global groundswell, the product of a generation that wants its own pop, a frontier-free generation only recently connected by MySpace, YouTube, chat rooms and message boards, precisely the same technological advances that seem to be spelling doom for the traditional music business.

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