Last week, two articles on highlysuccessful musicians provided contrasting glimpses into the technology behind musicproduction in our times. First up was an interesting piece from The New Yorker on what we might call thenew Brill Building or the new Tinpan Alley: the dozen or so teams ofsong producers and writers that are responsible for the vast majority of thehits that dominate the American pop music scene. Fifty years ago, popularmusicians didn’t write their own stuff. Their managers simply had them singsongs that professional songwriters churned out like sausages in places likethe Brill in New York. Look at the first Beatles and Rolling Stones albums: nota single original composition. That is the world that Bob Dylan blew away.Carole King is the sole survivor of that bygone era. She began as a gun forhire with her husband and later successfully made the transition into thesinger-songwriter era of the sixties and seventies who sang her own material.
Now, in the era of the Content Tsunami, "the times they are a-changin' back." A tiny group of twenty or so professional songwriters is once again churning out the Top 40 hits that account for the bulk of music sales. They use very simple formulas:
...today’sTop Forty is almost always machine-made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops,and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, thevoices are Auto-Tuned for pitch, and there are no mistakes. The music soundssort of like this: thump thooka whompa whomp pish pish pish thumpaty wompah pahpah pah.
The songs are written according to atemplate that relies heavily on so-called “hooks,” the repetitive parts thatcaptivate the listener—who apparently has the attention span of a fruit fly. As if older pop music was not repetitive or catchyenough. (Seriously, how much more catchy will pop have to get in the future? I imaginea couple of hands reaching out from a smartphone screen, grabbing you by thelapels and shaking you while a voice shouts: “Dance, bitch!”):
Theproducers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the“synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up withprimary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musicalphrases that lock you into the song.
In this age of alleged media diversification,a handful of individuals are responsible for the listening pleasures ofmillions. In fact, so tiny and influential is this elite that one song writtenfor Beyoncé, “Halo,” ended up being used by Kelly Clarkson (“Already Gone”) beforethe duplication was noticed… and both became hits!
The process of writing cookie-cutter songs,unsurprisingly, relies heavily on high technology:
Eriksenworked “the box”—the computer—using Avid’s Pro Tools editing program, whileHermansen critiqued the playbacks. Small colored rectangles, representing bitsof Dean’s vocal, glowed on the computer screen, and Eriksen chopped andrearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching thespace bar to listen to a playback, then rearranging some more. The studio’ssixty-four-channel professional mixing board, with its vast array of knobs andlights, which was installed when Roc the Mic Studios was constructed, only fiveyears ago, sat idle, a relic of another age.
For a contrast, last week also saw the publication of a New York Times feature on Jack White, formerly of theWhite Stripes, a major figure in the rock’n’roll that was displaced by thisresurgence of the Top 40s hit machine.
White sounds like a post-industrialromantic who is knee-deep into the resurgence of vinyl. His record company’sslogan is that “Your Turntable’s not Dead”:
“It’s a really beautiful process,” White said. At the labelingstation, an employee handed him a pressing of an old Robert Johnson LP that wasbeing rereleased, and he weighed it in his hand. “That’s killer,” he said.“It’s not as heavy as mine, though. I’ve got the real one.” Whitecalls LPs “the pinnacle of musical expression.” “I was talking to Robert Altmanbefore he died,” he said, “and I asked him about an interview where he saidthat he would never switch to videotape, that he would always stay in film. Hesaid: ‘I know what that is. It has a negative. It has a positive. Withvideotape or digital, I have no idea what’s going on.’ That’s how I feel aboutvinyl. The left wall is the left channel, the right wall is the right channel,and you’re just dragging that rock through the groove. Watching it spin, youget a real mechanical sense of music being reproduced. I think there’s aromance to that.”
Later on, the author of the piece describes White’s radically retro style of song production:
Whitethinks of computer programs like Pro Tools as “cheating.” He records only inanalog, never digital, and edits his tape with a razor blade. “It’s sort oflike I can’t be proud of it unless I know we overcame some kind of struggle,”he said. “The funny thing is, even musicians and producers, my peers, don’tcare. Like, ‘Wow, that’s great, Jack.’ Big deal.”It’seasy to overlook amid the stylistic trappings, but White is a virtuoso —possibly the greatest guitarist of his generation. His best songs, like “SevenNation Army,” are firmly rooted in the American folk vernacular, yet catchy anddurable enough to be chanted in sports arenas worldwide. That he does it withsuch self-imposed constraints — for instance, his favorite guitar in the WhiteStripes was made of plastic and came from Montgomery Ward — makes it all themore impressive.
I will not attempt to drive a ten-tontruck through this stylistic difference or to construct some facile analogyabout highbrow hipster retro and mass-market, tech-driven commercialism. I amperhaps a snob, but not at least in musical terms. My tastes are prettyCatholic insofar as pop is concerned. A peek at my iPod reveals a cataloguethat ranges from the artsiness of a Tom Waits to the morose dirges of an Iron & Wine to the sugar-coated superficiality of an Abba. Obviously,someone like White, who says his three spiritual dads are “his biologicalfather, God and Bob Dylan” will be closer to my heart. But I downloaded severalof the songs mentioned in the New Yorkerpiece by Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. While not my cup of tea, I can see theattraction. These artists are obviously the direct descendants of the Motownsound that was organized under very similar lines, with manufactured pop groupswho didn’t write their own music. This artificial and commercial systemnonetheless produced gems such as "You Can't Hurry Love," "Tracks of My Tears," and “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch.”
Both White and the Norwegian producer duoknown as “Stargate” belong to elites that produce popular music for the masses. The only difference is that Stargate’s masses are way more massive. But there is also a second difference. White's musical experiments are much less dependent upon the hit machine. Some of his albums can flop and others will do better, but he still has the independence and freedom to fail. The Stargate duo are much more dependent upon the fickle tastes of the mass public. Their flavor of music can fall out of fashion at the drop of a hat. In fact, it already happened to them once, back in the United Kingdom: "
The New Yorker feature of the Top 40 wizards ends with a poignant moment when Adele's sweep of the Grammys is discussed:
But with the mention of Adele the air pressure in the control room seemed to change. Stargate knew well from their experience in London how quickly fads come and go in the pop business; a massive smash such as Adele’s “Someone Like You,” with its heartfelt lyrics, accompanied by simple piano arpeggios—no arpeggiator required—could be the beginning of the end of urban pop.
The two styles of production inhabit the same moment in time. I would also suggest that White’slast-man-standing posture of cutting physical strands of tape with a knife mightnot be simply the anachronism of an eccentric weirdo. Think more along thelines of Apple versus Google or locavorism versus molecular gastronomy. A Luddite retro hipster living inTennessee like White might just be the flip side of the two Norwegians hunchedover their seventeen-inch screens in midtown Manhattan. In a post-historicistsociety, the line between retro and futurist blurs as the past recurs over andover, and our visions of the future age faster than our furniture. They aresimply two different ways of inserting yourself into the present and thefuture.
But, still, I am beginning to wonder whether, in some fields, technological savvy and sophisticationmight begin to be correlated with replaceability, and perhaps even lower wages and lower profit margins. Instead of a sine qua non for avoiding obsolescence, technological sophisticationmight be the tax you constantly have to pay to maintain your status as a cog ina mass-production machine. A cog that is progressively paid less and whose output becomes increasingly commoditized.
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.
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