As dramatised in old Hollywood movies, the songwriting process looks something like this: two men in a room furiously smoking, one of them pounding out piano chords and the other scribbling down lyrics. Swap that piano for a guitar, and the caricature holds true until at least the 1990s.
John Seabrook's The Song Machine, which lifts the lid on the devilish machinations of modern hit-making, details just how much things have changed in the interim. An American journalist – and a late-blooming aficionado of contemporary, chart pop – Seabrook shows how symbiotic teams of tech-savvy producers and writers have learnt to isolate the ear-candy ingredients we can't resist, then turn them into chart-topping singles. Not for nothing does Seabrook call the hit factories these modern-day Midas's work in "labs".
In his captivating, mostly light-hearted opening chapter, the author fesses up. It was when his young son began commandeering the in-car radio, Seabrook says, that he was forced to put Pink Floyd on ice, and lock antlers with Ke$ha, Pink, Rihanna, Katy Perry et al.
But, unlike most middle-aged men, Seabrook isn’t here to diss modern pop – he’s here to extol its heady, evanescent thrill; here to see what powers it.
“Melodies are fragmentary and appear in short sharp bursts, like espresso shots served by a producer-barista,” he writes. “Then, slicing through the thunderous algorithms comes the hook: a short, sung line that grips the rhythm with melodic talons and soars skyward.” As two-word descriptors of pumped and programmed modern pop go, “thunderous algorithms” is perfect.
In the past, there were essentially two epicentres of pop songwriting: the United Kingdom and the United States. But modern pop, the heavily-compressed, bang-and-whistles-infused sort that “bludgeons rock senseless with synths”, owes just as much to Sweden and South Korea.
Seabrook is fascinating on K-pop, a genre that grossed US$3.4 billion (Dh12.4bn) in 2012 and which Time magazine has called "South Korea's greatest export", thanks to groups such as the nine-member Girls' Generation and EXO, a 12-member boy band.
After profiling Soo-man Lee, “the prime architect of the K-pop system”and a man who decided his stars would be made, not born, Seabrook contrasts K-pop’s meticulously prettified surface with its darker underbelly.
At Lee’s S M Entertainment, the deployment of “cultural technology” ensures that future stars who typically sign binding contracts, starting with those as young as 9 or 10, are as much a part of the factory process as K-pop songs.
Tailoring a shade of eyeshadow for maximum effect in a particular Asian region is one thing, but Seabrook alleges some K-pop stars also undergo plastic surgery to realise the sculpted and tapered faces the genre’s puppetmasters deem conducive to sales.
Still, the author points out that for all of K-pop's efforts to be an exact science, only Gangnam Style rapper Psy – a Korean pop star, but not a K-pop star – has conquered the West.
“That a pudgy guy with a goofy horse-riding dance could succeed where the most brilliantly engineered idol groups have not, suggests that cultural technology can only get you so far,” notes Seabrook with some satisfaction.
In an earlier chapter, the author explores the rather more nonchalant world of Stockholm, Sweden’s premier hit-factory Cheiron Studios, as previously helmed by the superstar producers Dag Krister Volle, also known as Denniz Pop, and Martin Sandberg, also known as Max Martin.
Pop, who died of stomach cancer in 1998 at the age of 35, was the DJ-turned-producer behind acts such as Ace of Base and the Backstreet Boys, a man so laid-back he didn’t realise he had accrued $10 million in his current account until his bank called him up to tell him.
It was Pop's protégé Martin, though – a mulleted hard-rock singer with a secret liking for The Bangles – who later made Cheiron the go-to studio for hit hungry record company executives. When Martin wrote and co-produced Britney Spears's …Baby One More Time, it reached No 1 in 20 countries and sold more than 10 million copies.
“I was scared of him!” Seabrook quotes Spears saying of her first meeting with Martin. “I thought he was someone from, like, Mötley Crüe or something.”
The success of Stockholm seems to be down to a mixture of serendipity and the uniqueness of the Cheiron Studios sound, which is attributable to Pop and Martin’s very different skill sets (Pop went on “feel”, Martin was classically trained).
The key thing about Cheiron, Seabrook says, was that nobody was “proprietary” about their efforts. He quotes E-Type, a Swedish dance-music artist who recorded at Cheiron saying: “I got the feeling of a big painter’s studio in Italy back in the 1400s. One assistant does the hands, another the feet, then Michelangelo walks in and says: ‘That’s great, just turn it slightly’.”
Naturally, Seabrook knows that pop stars themselves turn more pages than the winds beneath their wings. Consequently, The Song Machine has potted profiles of Britney, Ke$ha and American Idol-winner turned bona fide pop-star Kelly Clarkson, among others. They act as enjoyable little palette cleansers before Seabrook returns to the nuts-and-bolts of hit-making.
The ongoing evolution of the process, he makes clear, is essentially a fervid but futile attempt to eliminate the role of chance, hence services such as Guy Zapolean’s innovation that came about in early 2000 – Hit Predictor.
Zapolean held that you had to hear a song three times to know if you liked it, and so he served-up a “filet mignon” to online respondents, editing each song until its gist could be consumed three times in two minutes. Then came music entrepreneur Mike McCready’s Hit Song Science, “a computer-based approach that purported to analyse the acoustic properties and underlying mathematical patterns in a new song, and compare them to those of past pop hits”.
Needless to say, neither of these approaches could ensure a 100-per-cent strike rate. Elsewhere in Seabrook's book, it's perhaps Mikkel Eriksen of Stargate – one half of the esteemed Norwegian production duo behind Rihanna's Only Girl (In the World) and Beyoncé's Irreplaceable – who traces the pop song's hit potential to its truest source: its singer.
“What does a superstar lead vocal sound like?” Seabrook asks Eriksen. “It’s a fat sound”, he replies, “and there’s a sparkle around the edges of the words.”
But even superstars become impotent without great material, and one of the most revealing parts of The Song Machine sees Seabrook unpick what's become known as the "track-and-hook" route to hit-writing. Essentially, this sees responsibility for the different components of each song carefully divvied-up, so that the producer and his team of engineers and programmers fashion a zeitgeist-riding "track", and then as many as 50 different "top-liners" might take a crack at writing the melodic hook(s) and lyric.
This hybrid approach, where even one line of melody might derive from two or more brains, explains the lengthy co-writer credits on many modern pop songs, but the track-and-hook approach enables the industry to pool its resources, ant-colony like, around the artist, their queen.
Seabrook notes that after Rihanna's Umbrella topped the US charts for seven weeks in 2007, her record label and manager regularly convened writers' camps; "week-long conclaves where dozens of top producers and writers [were teamed] in the hope of striking gold."
The Song Machine has plenty more to say about modern pop, too. Seabrook explains how, from 2002 onwards, US television show American Idol helped pop regain the chart ground it had lost to rap, and he canvases Spotify founder Daniel Ek's views about the future of streaming. Ek thinks it's going to be about celebrity playlists, and invites us to envisage "a workout playlist that is a collaboration between [Swedish DJ] Avicii and [Jamaican sprinter] Usain Bolt".
Seabrook’s approach is a little scattershot, but he writes beautifully and his enthusiasm for his subject will soon have you scurrying to Spotify or YouTube to reappraise whatever pop nugget he’s just dissected.
If his aim was to show just how much guile and perspiration goes into each modern-pop hit, job done.
James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.