So, to sum up: People who worked together have aesthetics that have rubbed off on one another. I mean, ugh, I know it’s the Internet, and OMG CONTROVERSY is the name of the pageview-goosing game. And it’s not like there are Dr. Luke fangirls clogging up ONTD and big-upping their hero and his protégés and collaborators 24/7. But Jesus, people. If you want to bitch about songs on the radio sounding the same, maybe scratch the surface as far as Wikipedia and figure out why?
If anything, it might be an argument for crediting the producer rather than the singer as the artist. Kinda like the way Lee “Scratch” Perry has come to be viewed in modern discussions of reggae music. Those records were never credited to Perry himself, and were often credited to whatever singer he was recording. But these days we don’t look at them as works of the singer, but of the producer. Same could be said of Phil Spector. It’s a shame that it always takes 20 years or so for anyone to start looking at a particular producer this way, because it probably takes the emphasis away from the people who are doing the actual work.
Of course, a focus on the producers like this easily plays into certain rockist (and not incidentally sexist) paradigms where the (Male) Mad Genius is the one who does the “actual work” while the Sexy (Female) Assistants are only there to provide eye candy and trick people into listening. It’s a way of robbing women like Susan Cadogan and Veronica Bennett of agency, to suggest that their talent for deploying their limited but hugely evocative voices was entirely due to the creative efforts of Lee Perry and Phil Spector.
And that’s not even getting into the problematic morality of the Producer Regnant/Dependent Talent paradigm; the stories of Phil Spector and Ike Turner should be well-known enough to make anyone cautious about drawing parallels. The problem Maura identifies above — that not enough people are interested in the music enough to figure out why it sounds similar — needs to be solved not by framing the players in an old narrative (and the Svengali narrative is very old at this point) but by understanding exactly what is going on so that we can draw up a new one.
Yeah.
This -the question of agency in pop - is always a thorny one (partly because there’s so much we just don’t know about the creative process in modern music). Other than in exceptional cases, the “producer is the real talent” model is way too simplistic. But other than in exceptional cases, the “treat the star as creatively autonomous” model doesn’t work either.
I think reaching outside pop for comparisons re. collective endeavor creating commercial art might help too. When we talk about, say, Batman, we talk about the various individual creators and what they bring to the property, but we also talk about BATMAN as an evolving artistic idea in its own right as well as the work of many hands. I dunno if that’s a good model for pop at all - I can think of stuff wrong with it as well as stuff right with it. But it immediately steps away from the idea of hunting out an auteur figure behind any given pop object.
Or branding - people go “urgh” when you talk about branding but a lot of very smart individuals have thought about HOW brands work and who controls them so at the very least there’s stuff in the purely commercial sector that critics can usefully apply to commercial art.
Also important to realize that co-writing became a pretty complicated issue in pop and teenpop in the 00’s. Katy Perry and Ke$ha (both Dr. Lukees) have songwriting credits on MOST of their songs, and unless we claim they’re operating in bad faith (which to my knowledge has no evidence to support it) that means that they’re as much a “writer” of their songs as Dr. Luke.
And this doesn’t account for the question of why (for instance) Luke sounds different with Ke$ha, Katy, and Miley despite the general structure of their songs being the same. For that you really need to pay attention to things like performance, image, and (yes) co-writing.
Easiest example I can think of right now — listen to Rihanna’s version of “Te Amo” back to back with the original James Fauntleroy version. Rihanna has a co-writing credit, and since there’s only ONE new element in the song, the bridge out in the moonlight, we can (shakily but whatever) deduce that Rihanna herself was at least partially responsible for this. (You don’t just get a co-writing credit for showing up — again, if we’re operating in good faith; feel free to prove me wrong here, but frankly I haven’t seen great evidence saying that these performers are getting a songwriting credit but no actual input whatsoever in the studio.)
The Rihanna “Te Amo” is more affecting than the James Fauntleroy original in part because of a gender-swap that wasn’t possible with the original; in part because of Rihanna’s actual performance; and in part because of the inclusion of that new bridge, which dramatically changes what the song is about in a very important, but small, way.
Similarly, we need to be conscious of co-writing in Dr. Luke productions across the spectrum — and we also need to be cognizant of when artists who do NOT have co-writing credits when they work with (e.g.) Max/Luke DO have co-writing credits elsewhere on the same album — Kelly Clarkson, the Veronicas, etc. Kelly in particular seems to have been a major force behind the sea change in pop sound that emerged from “Since U Been Gone” — and though I can’t point you to the documented evidence (maybe it exists) I can tell you how those structures get used and developed and changed through Kelly’s work which she wrote or co-wrote WITHOUT Max/Luke.
Which is to say, if you want to talk about authorship, start caring more about what’s actually going on in the studio! Maybe not on a literal case by case basis, but surely we need to consider Ke$ha’s seemingly significant and consistent involvement in her own songwriting. Right? …Right?
I’m going to suggest that we really don’t need to rethink the question of agency in pop, and that, if it is a question, it’s not actually asking what we think it’s asking.
See, “they don’t even write their own songs” means the same thing as “the President is a Muslim”: it is an indication of little more than the speaker’s disdain for the subject in question. Sure, the link that began this discussion claimed some artists lacked originality because the writer of the piece didn’t think about the common link between the songs, but what if she had? The conversation wouldn’t change; it’d just go from “these songs sound the same — theft!” to “Dr. Luke is the real genius here — unoriginal artists!”
To a lot of folks, the accusation that Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and Miley Cyrus are all singing the same song is a compelling one because it fits into all kinds of narratives about pop music being indistinguishable, factory-made, not really artistic, etc. And it’s very compelling to apply these arguments to artists like Perry, Cyrus and Ke$ha, because they present as the exact opposite of what smart, creative people are supposed to be: they’re women, not men; they’re playful, not serious; they’re professional, not amateurish; they work collaboratively, not (apparently) solo. But things like this have come along before — see, for instance Red Hot Chili Peppers/Tom Petty, Coldplay/Joe Satriani, or Avril Lavigne/The Rubinoos — and the purpose is always to show that the work of the supposed imitator is not respectable. (Well, in some cases, it’s also a cash grab by the claimed original artist.)
You can’t fight arguments like that, because they’re not about an attempt to see the correct creator credited (if it were, a quick look at this video would shut everyone up). It’s just about saying “Katy Perry is bad,” or “Miley Cyrus is bad” or “Red Hot Chili Peppers are bad.”
Because people have no problem with respectable artists working collaboratively; the extent of Brian Eno’s contribution to mid-’80s U2 is well known, for example. And even egregious instances of imitation are excused if they’re by a sufficiently respected artist; everyone will mention that “My Sweet Lord” bears a strong similarity with “He’s So Fine,” but few will use such a fact to claim that the George Harrison song is poor, or that Harrison is talentless. Likewise, for detractors of the artists Dave mentions — Rihanna, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson — no co-writing credit will convince them the pop star was never anything more than a cipher, just as a Johnny Cash fan will never be dissuaded of the Man in Black’s genius, no matter how many of his songs were credited to other writers.
Artists are meant to be credited with a work; that’s why their names are on the cover of the CD. As Tom was hinting at, this is a brand. Producers and writers are supposed to be in the background; that’s why their names are hidden in the liner notes. The secret isn’t to elevate one or the other, but to recognize that in every song, all are integral.
I guess hip-hop has this best figured out. T.I. can work with Mannie Fresh and Toomp and Just Blaze on different songs, and we can recognize that each is bringing something to the collaboration, and different contributors will affect songs differently, but also, each is playing his own part. And, sure, sometimes you might say that a song’s only good because of the producer, but no one would be silly enough to stick together a procession of Neptunes tracks and point out how similar they are.
The problem is, as it so often is, people using anything but their ears when evaluating a song.
