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December 22, 2019 - February 15, 2020
MUSICALLY, THE SONG MACHINE makes two types of hits. One branch is descended from Europop, and the other from R&B.
On the pop side, there’s Ryan Tedder, Jeff Bhasker, and Benny Blanco; on the urban side Pharrell Williams, Dr. Dre, and Timbaland. Bridging both genres are the über hit makers like Stargate, Ester Dean, Dr. Luke, and Max Martin.
The music business, like the TV business depicted by Hunter S. Thompson, is a “cruel and shallow money trench...a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs,” and that’s how the hits have always been accounted for. (Thompson added, “There’s also a negative side.”)
In the United States, melody was kept at arm’s length by the DJs who were the producers of house music, because in the clubs, whenever a strong melody came over the speakers, the dancing stopped.
Ulf Ekberg and Jonas Berggren were school friends who, together with Berggren’s sisters, Jenny and Malin, had a four-person techno group. They made their music in the basement of an auto-repair shop in Gothenburg. It was “a shithole studio,” Ekberg recalls, but they were the masters of their basement space, which is how they settled on their name: Ace of Base.
An air of melancholy pervades the superficially happy-sounding ABBA songs, another uniquely Swedish quality that would cast a long shadow over the future of pop music. Their happy songs sound sad, and their sad songs that sound happy.
Songwriting was just a thing you did on your own when you were watching the cows, a kind of meditation. You didn’t focus as much on your ability as a performer as you did on the structure and craft of the songs. Which is really not the case in the US, where your charm and your voice and your powers as a performer come immediately into play.”
Major chords carry the verses, but with the chorus, the chords turn minor—a Swedish touch.
In addition to working rhythmically, the sound of the words had to fit with the melody, an approach to songwriting that Denniz’s great protégé, Max Martin, would later call “melodic math.”
“All That She Wants” was released on Mega Records in Denmark in the fall of 1992. The record went to number one on the Danish charts. Kjeld
Wennick, who was the head of Mega, wanted the album, Happy Nation, in stores by Christmas, so the band rushed to complete and mix their remaining demos. In early 1993, “All That She Wants” made charts around Europe, and spent three weeks at the top of the UK charts in May. But when Wennick tried to interest US labels in an American distribution deal for Happy Nation, he got a resounding “No!” from everyone. “ ‘No, no, no, no,’ ” he recalled. The reason was always the same: “This band will never work in the States.’ ” Certainly, it was not a propitious time to break a foreign synth-pop band in
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On the urban side, a new generation of R&B stars like Whitney Houston and Boyz II Men were making huge hits, and, although it wasn’t played on the radio very much, hip-hop was going mainstream. Ace of Base, in offering mindless fun and the pleasures of “catching tan,” set to an electronically produced ragga-lite dance track, seemed like the absolute worst possible sound for the times.
a Moog sub-bass and a Korg M1 bass on top. “The bass took some figuring out,” Carr says. “I remember us talking a lot about the space that the reggae bass players always make in their music, and how important that is—that sense of air.”
In the late 1940s, the record industry began to promote these groups under the label “rhythm-and-blues,” a term invented by a white Billboard writer, Jerry Wexler—later a partner in Atlantic Records—to replace the derogatory trade name “race music.”
By the time New Edition achieved fame, in the mid-’80s, R&B harmony groups had been dormant, as an innovative musical form, for more than a decade.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were the first hit makers of rock ’n’ roll, penning R&B hits for black artists such as Big Mama Thornton (“Hound Dog”) and the Coasters (“Yakety-Yak”), among others. When a white kid named Elvis Presley wanted to record “Hound Dog,” the songwriters were at first dismayed—they thought they were writing for cool black people, not white hillbillies—but the first royalty check changed their
perspective, and they went on to write “Jailhouse Rock” and other hits for the King.
Writers such as Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye would bring their demos to Friday production meetings, and Gordy would decide which songs to produce and which artists would sing them.
The following year she auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club again, and this time secured a spot among the seven new mice on the show; her cohort included Timberlake, Ryan Gosling, and Christina Aguilera.
In spite of the triumph of teen pop in the late ’90s, the word still carries with it an element of guilty pleasure in the United States. The reasons for this are complicated (my book NoBrow is an attempt to explain them at length), but suffice it to say that Americans, lacking a class system within which to situate themselves, turn to culture to find their rank in society, and pop doesn’t usually secure the status that more artistically prestigious fare offers.
Outside the Honda Center, he tells me, “They take the love the fans feel for them, and they return it to the fans. . . . When you see them onstage, it’s like they’ve come to see you.”
But because the money is in ticket sales, not record sales, nonstop touring is the norm, and record making has to be fit into breaks in the grueling schedule.
Musically, a Scandinavian snowfall filters down over a sweaty Caribbean drum circle. The stuttering sound that the chords make, created with a software module known as an arpeggiator, would become perhaps the signature Stargate sound.
“OK, say that you have a verse, and it’s done in eighth notes, and everything is starting on the one—DAH-ut da-ut da-ut da-ut DAH-ut . . . Right? OK then when you go to the pre-chorus you probably don’t want to start on the one, and you don’t want to do eighth notes. So you come in on the two, or on the upbeats, or go to long notes, so it stays fresh.” The same principle works in reverse. In a song that’s mostly singing, a sixteen-bar rap provides new texture. The key is to switch up the feel to keep things lively. “That’s why rapping in songs is interesting,” he goes on. “Intrinsically, if
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