Back in the eighties I had heard that two companies in Japan made all the VCR’s for dozens of well-known firms like Sony and Toshiba. A similar theme runs through John Seabrook’s new book “The Song Machine: Inside The Hit Factory”. It turns out that most of the “pop” songs we hear on the radio by the likes of Beyonce, Katy Perry and Rihanna, are all written by the same few people.
From one perspective Seabrook is just describing the evolution of the music industry’s long-standing A&R function. The term A&R stands for artists and repertoire. Back in the early days of popular music the A&R man found songs for his artist to sing (e.g., Sinatra). Then there was the Brill Building and Berry Gordy’s Motown Records that churned out songs for their artists. In the late sixties songwriters Boyce and Hart wrote songs for the TV-created band the Monkees. The modern era has seen the likes of superstars like Linda Ronstadt who built her career interpreting the works of her southern California contemporaries.
Artists didn’t write their own songs until the sixties when Dylan and The Beatles came along. Since the demise and uber-fragmentation of radio we have seen a permanent bifurcation in the music industry. On one side we have pop stars that get their hit songs on the radio. Then there are the artists/bands who continue to write and perform their own songs, get little or no radio play (except for satellite) and make most of their money touring. What Seabrook describes in his new book is the impact of technology and things like the songwriting DNA of the Swedish people that has created the modern equivalent of the Brill Building on steroids.
Seabrook’s story begins in Stockholm with Louis Pearlman who, along with the songwriters at Cheiron studios, created the boy bands The Back Street Boys and N’Sync. They also launched the career of Britney Spears. We hear the stories of people like Max Martin, Stargate and Dr. Luke, the new alchemists that all the pop stars turn to for hits (as of this writing Coldplay and Adele have been added to the list).
At the heart of this story are these “songwriters” who with the help of technology have attempted, with great success, to reverse-engineer the pop hits of the past. Where the hook? How soon should it be introduced? This is the alchemy of hit song writing, the 21st century version of “give them what they want”.
Today’s pop songs are more assembled than written. First we have the “track and hook” specialists. Then there are the melody and lyric specialist that travel from studio to studio working on dozens of potential hits per day. Every finished song that is not deemed a potential hit is discarded and they move on to the next song. A good song is not enough. They need hits, preferably mega-hits.
It’s a game of numbers and percentages. It may take assembling dozens of these tinker-toy like songs to find one hit. Hundreds to find that mega-hit. They just keep playing around with beats and hooks until the right combination is found and out pops (sorry) the hit song. What Seabrook describes is truly a songwriting factory.
The old fashioned record executives like Clive Davis that have “ears” for hits are a dying breed that have been replaced by these new alchemists. Davis is still active and responsible for some of the biggest names in pop like Kelly Clarkson. In the chapter of the book about Davis’s impact on Clarkson’s career. There is the story about how she was dead set against recording one of Max Martin’s songs. The song was “Since U Been Gone”.
Seabrook also describes the emerging problem of copycats. Competitors have begun reverse-engineering the song structures and sounds of the innovators like Cheiron Studios and Max Martin. Suddenly you have songs hitting the pop charts that sounded like Cheiron’s stuff but were in fact replications of their approach. Again technology was accelerating the process. The pressure to continue to innovate and stay relevant is intense. Pop stars are only as good as their last hit and the same goes for the professional pop songwriter. We have songs coming out today that are similar if not blatantly the same as songs that were hits for another artist six months ago. Sometime this has resulted in some artists filing law suits.
Now we have mainstream stars crossing over in search of a hit song from the factory (e.g., Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life”). The crossover doesn’t always work. Liz Phair traded in her Indie street cred in an attempt to become a pop star on her fourth album. The fans saw it for what it was. We haven’t heard much from Liz since.
This is not where art and commerce intersect. This is where art and commerce have diverged and may never see each other again. You can say that it’s just an amped up version of what’s been going on since Sinatra recorded songs written by the Gershwins or Carol King wrote “The Locomotion” but something in the world that Seabrook describes is different. The songwriters of old were artists while Max Martin el al seem like technicians and, in the end, imitators. In today’s world it seems pop music can no longer also be art.