Amy's Robot

The Brill Building Lives On. In Europe. +

Slate has an informative piece today about the music industry phenomenon of the hugely successful centralized pop single factory. The Brill Building on Broadway and 50th had songwriters that churned out hit after hit for many performers through the '50's and '60's, and it was common for its biggest writers like Carole King, Neil Diamond, and Burt Bacharach to have multiple songs in the charts simultaneously.

But today, the manufactured pop song has fallen out of favor with "serious" music listeners in America. The pop factories are now centered in Sweden and the UK, where songwriter/producer groups like Xenomania and Maratone (featuring the wildly prolific Max Martin), crank out the hits for Europop acts like Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Robyn, and Rachel Stevens, as well America's own fast-fading disposable pop outfits like the Backstreet Boys, *NSync and Britney Spears, and more recently "Since U Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson.

And in doing so, these songwriters make more money that you can even fathom. Some clever writers who made a stab at performing their own songs early on, like Cathy Dennis, quickly learned that being a songwriter is a much more lucrative and less crazy-making career than going the pop star route, and your popularity won't fade as quickly. Dennis recorded some dance songs in the '90's before she decided to quit performing, and instead got other people to record her songs. She's had hits with the Spice Girls, S Club 7, Kylie (the universally beloved "Can't Get You Out of My Head"), and Britney (the surprisingly lauded "Toxic".) Now she's one of the highest-paid women in the UK.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, who is one of the only critics on the planet with enough guts to admit liking Rachel Stevens and clearly admires the craftspeople who sit in office buildings cranking out hit songs, writes in her article, "for outfits such as Xenomania, pop writing is a genuine art in which cleverness and distinctiveness supplant authenticity and credibility (two terms that should never be written out without cautionary quotation marks). They embrace clichés only to subvert them."

I'm not sure how subversive S Club 7 or Kelly Clarkson songs are, but their wild popularity ensures the manufacture of similarly catchy and formulaic hits on into eternity. And European production groups are raking in the cash. Time for some enterprising songwriters in the American music industry to rent some cubicles and get the hit factories going again.

Update: To go along with these comments on serious music fans in America and their inability to appreciate the value of catchy mindless pop songs is a story that aired on NPR this morning about Fountains of Wayne and their recent album of b-sides and unreleased material. Fountains of Wayne is the kind of US indie-rock band that gets decent reviews on Pitchfork and is generally thought of as cool and authentic, or some crap like that, despite getting airplay on commercial "alternative" stations.

Anyway, on this latest album, they do a cover of "...Baby One More Time", and in their NPR interview they talk about how through their unfathomable open-mindedness they suddenly realized one day that the song actually has a good melody, and even though it's a Britney Spears single, is worth being covered by such a dynamic and musically-astute band as themselves, who can recognize a catchy tune even when it's recorded by some dumb teen idol.

Wow! Well no shit, Sherlock! You could have asked any of the millions of 12 year-old girls all over the world who loved this song in 1999, and they could have told you the same thing. But when older rock-band men decide it's a worthwhile song, that somehow counts more. It drives me up the wall when these disdainful indie types demonstrate how in touch with the unwashed masses they can be by releasing a ponderous and poorly produced treacly acoustic cover of some huge pop hit. Well, at least it means more cash for Max Martin, wunder-Swede.

And the same goes for you, Ted Leo.

categories: Music
posted by amy at 2:49 PM | #