The quote is actually from Guy Debord, but it serves a purpose here. We’ll circle back ‘round and deal with it at the appropriate time. But I was struck today when I read that Beyoncé’s last album, Renaissance, credits 104 songwriters. But don’t let’s pick on her first. Like Celine and Whitney before her, her ghastly music gets a pass because she has real vocal chops.
How about Taylor Swift? She’s a mediocre talent with gazoodles of money.
Swift is followed by 92 million people on Spotify. Her faithful minions. Swifties. Her latest album is called Tortured Poets Department. It has over a billion streams. Excuse me while my metabolism returns to normal after the overwhelming surge of cringe.
She shares credit on the songs, but in reality, they’re almost completely written and produced by two Swedish guys, Max Martin and Shellback (Karl Johan Schuster), the geniuses responsible for such masterpieces as Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” Maroon 5’s “In your Pocket,” The Backstreet Boys’ “Bigger,” and Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off,” “Blank Space,” and “Bad Blood.” They also work with Ed Sheeran, The Weekend, Kendrick Lamar, Katy Perry, and Sam Smith, among scads of others.
These are the people who decide what mainstream pop tunes sound like.
Martin and Shellback are just two of a gaggle of countless other hitmakers who establish production factories to churn out anodyne, bland, pop tunes that sell like hotcakes while not offending anyone. In 2015, The New Yorker pointed out that Martin’s success should have drawn comparison to the Beatles. Where are the accolades? He and Shellback continue to churn out hits, and it’s been almost 30 years since they started. Maybe they’re bigger geniuses than John Lennon?
Are they?
It’s hard to define just what’s good and bad when it comes to music, where taste is subjective. Creating some sort of arbitrary checklist with which to judge a work of art is just that: arbitrary. It reflects not only personal and esthetic prejudices, but also the political and religious views of the people establishing the list. That means it’s also a reflection of a certain economic and social class.
This is why you don’t have novelists and painters competing for scores like Olympic divers. Plus, when there are no lyrics, music is the most abstract of art forms.
Still, when John Lennon wrote “I Am the Walrus,” “Sun King,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” he was making experimental music and selling it as part of a pop album. Some of his experiments even ended up being hits. “Strawberry Fields Forever,” charted in the top ten. He was an artist and his instrument was the studio. He would hang out with LaMonte Young and John Cage, and he was very much influenced by others from the musical, literary, and artistic avant-garde. Had they been able to get rid of that pesky Paul McCartney they’d have had a great outfit.
Joking, of course. But not too much.
Who in mainstream music is doing this today? Now, songs are the product of assembly lines and proven formulas.
“That’s always been true!” you counter. “Don’t fall victim to fuddy-duddy-ism.”
Those are defensible and valid comments. Hit-making factories have always existed. It also happens to be a fact that when people get older, their musical aperture tightens. They close themselves off to new and challenging musical forms.
But there is great new music being made and I do listen to it: power electronics, brilliant weirdo Japanese pop outfits, underground metal and noise rock, experimental electronic music, a new wave of bluegrass, and a new generation of jazz guitarists that is truly impressive. I’m not someone’s grandpa sitting around and complaining that “There’s no more Guy Lombardo or Glenn Miller, goddamnit!”
So has anything really changed? Yeah, I think so. I don’t want to sully my dignity by citing Rick Beato. That guy is wrong about so many things musical. He also happens to be one of those Grade A Fuddy-Duddies I just spoke of, and he never talks about the kind of music on the margins that I just alluded to. But he is right about how most pop music today is the result of a factory-line approach to assembling hits, and it is no different from any other mass assembly process. It’s auto-tuned and everything is played to a click track. This means that what made someone like Jimi Hendrix or Patti Smith or Alex Chilton so appealing — their sense of groove and time and their willingness to be just a bit off-pitch to provide greater resolution — is all gone. All of the humanness, the soul, and those imperfections that make music great simply get disappeared.
That’s why contemporary music sounds so sterile, and that is exactly the qualifier it merits.
I’ve always argued that this phenomenon is real, and not just the ranting of some old cranks. As capitalist enterprises grow, they have to address something Marx refers to as relative surplus value. When worker exploitation hits its limits, capitalists need to find more ways of growing, pushing profits up, and constantly expanding.
The music business is not immune to this phenomenon.
With musical acts, it’s very similar to a production line. In a factory, one can push their labor force only so far. When a company extends the work hours to the maximum limit allowed under federal law, the only way to generate more profit is to increase productivity. Capitalists have different ways of doing this, none of which is pleasant for the worker. This is what Marx means when he talks about ways to increase relative surplus value. Capitalists can’t extract any more wealth by increasing the worker’s hours, so they push the workers harder to get more output.
Although it’s impossible to do the same thing with an artist, the capitalist class can squeeze extra value from them by controlling the way in which records are recorded and produced. They have a formula that generates profit:
Keep the harmony simple: three chords and the relative minor.
Make sure there’s a click track and time is super straight, or “on the grid” as they call it.
Use auto-tune instead of letting the artist sing — and swing — with their natural voices.
Finally, use as many as 104 songwriters if you need to in order to make sure the same drek gets pumped out 24/7, all day, every day.
Formulas for profit in the pop music business are based on songwriting cliches and the use of technology to clean up the recordings with computer programs and modeling software. As these formulas grow more sophisticated, the music they generate becomes more insipid and indistinguishable from the same slop they produced previously. Plus, it’s not only old geezers who hear this music and say it’s canned and sterile. A New York Times piece recently shared information gleaned from interviews with college-age students about the prospect of AI-generated pop stars replacing real people. They were not too pleased with the looming possibility, claiming that this kind of music sounds soulless and sterile.
Funny thing is, rubbish like Drake, Taylor Swift, and the rest of the dreck they’re listening to is not much different than what they’ll be consuming in a few years when digital pop stars become a reality. Already, the kind of artists that chart or get mad-crazy streaming numbers on Spotify are no longer writing their own music nor controlling the production. Producers find people like Swift, who are as hollow as the music they play, shallow human beings who are fine with fame and celebrity and money. They provide little or no pushback because the last thing they want is to queer their own hustle and screw up the lucrative Faustian bargain they’ve struck.
This is what drives these kinds of artists, but it’s not what drove John Lennon, Patti Smith, or Alex Chilton. There is no way you’ll see a song like “Strawberry Fields Forever” chart in the top ten again or dominate Spotify. But I can even remember hearing Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain on FM radio in the 1970s. As I said, that music is still being made, but unless you’re a maven, you won’t stumble across it by accident.
This phenomenon affects all of the arts. My father saw Dr. Strangelove, Godard’s Made In America, and Pasolini’s Medea, all in the 1960s. He was neither an intellectual nor a scholar. That was just possible then because you could see films like that in mainstream theatres. Now, all Netflix does is produce war propaganda and laughable id-pol nonsense.
This is how Capitalism works, and there is no other way for it to function. It is not surprising that it extends into the world of the arts. You increase profits and grow every year. Or you collapse. Global military dominance, no minimum wage, no health insurance, a brutal police force, corrupt banking institutions — this all grows out of capitalism and the class system it engenders. They are outgrowths of a process dedicated to the pursuit of profit at all costs.
Debord and Miley Cirus are right. Our lives are fragmented productive specializations, and instead of being able to spend time realizing ourselves creatively, intellectually, or spiritually, we project our repressed and fragmented selves onto celebrities so as to compensate for living a life that is not fully realized.
So is music worse? Is TV news a sham? Are the cops racist and brutal? Does your boss pay you less than what you’re worth?
Because of the way human beings run the world— and because we acquiesce to it —we shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. And most Americans will go to the polls on November 5th and vote for a Genocider or a Racist Celebrity Billionaire, ensuring that nothing changes.
Donald Trump or Kamala Harris? Taylor Swift or Drake?
I wish I had a happier note to end on, so I’ll suggest what I always do: laugh to keep from crying and find solidarity with those around you who have not gone completely mad and are still dedicated be being aware, alive, and engaged.