sparks & spears & sophie & so on (cont.)

a couple more things, still riffing on jordin sparks.

first, to correct an oversight (you might want to read the last post first if you haven't...if you care...if you dare): even though it was mentioned on the teenpop thread, i neglected to note/recognize that "see my side," which i mentioned as by far the sweetest (almost wrote sweedest, ha) of the recent bloodshy/avant crop, was written not just by karlsson/winnberg and åhlund, but also by r. carlsson. which is of course (not me, though i am also r, carl's son!) but robyn, of robyn fame. (of whom discogs has more images than it has credits - well, under that version of her name.) (sorry tapestore - is that someone i know? - but i'm pretty sure the connection probably came via bloodshy and windbag, er, i mean, since apparently they'd already submitted the track to britney. nice thought though - let's keep working on that.)

which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense, because it has an extremely similar sensibility to robyn's heartbreaking closing trilogy, particularly "eclipse" and "anytime you like" - it's not quite as achingly gorgeous as those two, but it's close, and i can imagine robyn doing a pretty stunning rendition of it. (actually, as long as we're getting particular, robyn didn't write "eclipse" - she didn't write "robotboy" or "handle me" either; åhlund did. she does have the third co-credit on "anything you like" with two people i don't know - how significant do we think order of credits is? but the point holds.)

meanwhile, "young and in love" is (in addition to b&a and their frequent crony h. jonback) by cathy dennis, who is a bona fide legend in this game - behind hits from basically everyone in uk chartpop starting with spice girls and s club 7, peaking with kylie, and recently sugababes ("about you now" - with dr. luke!), sophie ellis-bextor ("catch you") and roisin m. (non-album tracks only) and a legit artist in her own right. her previous co-writes with b&a include rach stevens' "sweet dreams (my lax)" and, oh yeah, "toxic."

besides jordin's album, i've been following the links and connecting the dots for sophie la-bex's trip the light fantastic and for kylie's x, both of which i've only started to listen to recently, and about which i feel much greater capacity to care. which is partly because they're almost certainly better albums; partly because i have a much better sense of who sophie and kylie are, as artists and people - tho you can blame that on the no tv if you like i guess. how much those two factors are linked is a crucial question i want to get into a little bit later. anyway, trip has cathy dennis/greg kurstin (who till has no wiki entry, amazingly), pascal gabriel and hannah robinson, xenomania, the guys from sneaker pimps, the feeling, and the b-52s...though, imporantly, sophie has a co-credit on every song except the dennis/kurstin "catch you." x, with minogue credits on just over half the tracks, has dennis, hansen/jeberg, calvin harris, freemasons, karlsson/winnberg with karen poole (of alisha's attic), kurstin/minogue/poole, and, if wikipedia is to be believed, which i doubt, kurstin producing a bloodshy/avant/poole/minogue/quant co-write.

also kat mcphee's album, which in stark contrast to sparks' has no scandinavian names - and the difference is quite audible - but does have six kara dioguardi credits and six nate hills credits (five overlap.) and "open toes" is written/produced by the clutch (along with those two and kat herself), who also did "ice box," "like a boy," dave's two favorite keke palmer songs, and blackout's "radar" and "freakshow" (the latter, interestingly, britney's only writing credit on the album)... both of which are bloodshy/avant tracks, not danja tracks.

which is interesting, because it means the scandinavians electro-pop crew were working together with the american r&b crew (the clutch, which seems to be a slightly loose collective, are timbaland proteges or something; at least they include keri hilson.) though knows how directly they were working together - actually, the liners reveal that all of the bloodshy tracks were recorded partly in the states as well as in stockholm. well whatever.

it's really hard to say what any of this means. how do these songs get written? how much of the way credits are presented is based on legal/contractual considerations that don't necessarily accurately reflect the creative process? in the vast majority of the cases i've been looking at, the producer or producers are credited as among the writers of a given song. which in plenty of cases probably makes sense, especially for sonically inventive/electronic-based music where so much of the song's essence comes from the production rather than the writing per se. but to what extent are songs usually finished before they go into the studio; or to what extent do "'songs" sometimes get fleshed out after the creation of the beats and backing arrangements (which counts as "production.")

i've been fairly focused on songwriting credits lately, in my amg pieces as well as these posts here - calling attention to it, for various reasons, in my reviews of albums by the veronicas, rachel stevens, skye sweetnam, and marit larsen - and while it makes sense as an interpretive key of sorts, it also feels strange to be so fixated on. i do feel in some ways that my interest in pop has been taking a turn for the academic ... that at least a lot of the recent stuff i've been listening to hasn't managed to excite me quite as much on a musical level as some things in the past - or, certainly, to engage me on an emotional level.

indeed, as much as i enjoyed listening to and familiarizing myself with the skye and 'ronnies albums for review - and i stand by my (respectively) generally positive and enthusiastic assessments of them - neither has shown exceptional sticking power. certainly neither has compelled me (so far anyway) to keep listening and re-examining the way rachel and marit's albums have (in both cases i came to fundamentally new shades of understanding in these most recent revisitations.) meanwhile there's been this whole series of teen-pop and dance-pop albums - most of which, admittedly, i only have as itunes playlists - that i've been enjoying, to a greater or lesser extent, but that have so far largely failed to stand out as especially distinctive. that'd include the new ones by sugababes, roisin murphy, keke palmer, ashley tisdale, amy diamond, vanessa hudgens, and the aforementioned sparks, mcphee, kylie and sophie e-b, and aly + aj (though that one is making major strides - probably shouldn't be on this list anymore.)

admittedly many of these will require more listening, though some are simply not going to be worth the effort - my overwhelming impression of a lot of this is that it's, well, overwhelming - just too much, too fast, that's all impressively good but not quite great. and though of course there are some stylistic distinctions among these various albums, i'm struggling to distinguish them more fully. so i guess i may be delving into the minutiae of credit information, in part, as a shortcut to understanding them.

but i'm also on some level trying to link these lackluster impressions to the effect of having too many cooks, as it were. as fascinating as it is to realize how incestuous and intertangled the world of mainstream pop/r&b/dance/etc. can be - especially when the behind-the-scenes players intermingle internationally (well, across scandinavia, the u.k. and the u.s.) even though the public personas often don't - it grows increasingly harder to know what to make of all this prodigious cross-collaborative output, let alone to keep the endless but recurring array of practitioners straight.

many of the albums i listed above have quite a hodge-podge of writers and producers working on various tracks, as i've sort of demonstrated in exhaustive detailed. insomniatic is a clear exception, and is decidedly stronger for it - as are the veronicas and skye album's (though the latter is pretty scattershot even with the same producers/writers on 9/12 tracks) - though it should be noted that all of these are much more pop/rock than anything else on the list, despite their dancy frills. (same goes for ashlee's two albums, primarily the work of the sorely missed simpson/dioguardi/shanks trifecta.)

some other (slightly less recent) albums that are primarily written and produced by the same people: linda sundblad's oh my god [all songs sundblad/karlsson - a different one - with a couple adding others - max martin on one, klas åhlund on "lose you"], sally shapiro's disco romance [the possibly fictional sally herself doesn't write anything, but mr. johan agebjörn wrote all but two songs and produced everything], and the work of bertine zetlitz, especially her last two albums, which were produced entirely by fred ball [aka pleasure] and written entirely by zetlitz/ball. (two people...made the whole album? is that even possible?) the shapiro album and zetlitz's rollerskating are two of my absolute favorite albums at them moment - and the sundblad's pretty great too - i'll hopefully have reviews for all three up on amg shortly.

so those are some scandinavians (there's also annie and robyn, both of whom are starting to get seriously overdue for new albums - but though they do co-write most of their material, neither of them write all of it, and both of their celebrated albums had a fair range of different producers involved, which is interesting to note in light of how auteurist their public personae tend to be.) then there's madonna's confessions on a dancefloor [all madge co-writes; all with stuart price and/or mirwais except for two bloodshy/avant tracks] and hilary duff's dignity [a handful of producers, including, hilariously, richard "humpty" vission, but 12 out of 14 cuts are by dioguardi/duff, often with the producer as a third co-credit] - both solid if not amazing, but certainly stylistically cohesive.

and then there's blackout. it's telling that this album has, by far, fewer producers (or, maybe more relevantly, fewer production teams) than any of spears' albums since her debut - either five or six, depending on how you count the clutch, but basically only two for 3/4 of the album. to recap: four tracks are produced by bloodshy and avant (two with the clutch co-producing) and five are produced by danja. that leaves one by the neptunes, one - "heaven on earth," very possibly my favorite track - with music by onetime (?) ambient electronica duo freescha and vocal production by kara dioguardi, and one - consensus weakest-link "ooh ooh baby" (though i kinda like it; possibly too bad they didn't actually sample the turtles) by dioguardi and "fredwreck" nasser, who also did something on the mcphee album. anyway, as i think i've established, it's quite cohesive sonically and consistent song-wise, and, well, it just keeps growing on me, even though my interest in it has relatively little to do with britney herself.

i'm happy to continue absenting myself from the controversy over the extent of her actual involvement, as fascinating as it is. as far as i'm concerned, as long as the job is done and done well, i'm not going to complain - and whoever it is that's behind blackout has accomplished something pretty remarkable, just by virtue of creating an album that stands out from this season's teeming pack. i will point out, however, that there is only one person listed as executive producer for this album. and that's britney, bitch.

one disclaimer, and one final question. just to be clear, i certainly wouldn't want to contend that a record needs to have a reasonably consolidated writing/production crew to work well as an album. my review of rachel stevens' come and get it - which just might be my personal yardstick for the entire genre - should make that evident enough (even though it's definitely not the album-iest album.) similarly, kylie's fever - an obvious touchstone of an '00s pop album if there ever was one - is cobbled together from a surprising array of talent (truly, surprising - i'd always assumed it wasn't so much, because the sound is so consistent, but nope.) and then, of course, i'll always have paris ... the presence of many sets of writers and producers did little to stop me from erecting a grand glittering interpretive edifice to its conceptual perfection. and i don't think i need to say any more about that.

but as a general rule - and as one would imagine - albums with fewer writers and producers do tend to hold together better as albums. the exceptions generally have some other overarching unifying element - a clear shared stylistic approach, or a front-person with enough individuality, vocal/lyrical distinctness, or sheer force of personality to make everything hold together.

so my question is this: what is the historical context for albums with songs by many different writers and producers? i know it's a longstanding pop tradition in some ways (tin-pan-alley, brill building, motown, what-have-you), but it seems like there's been a resurgence and an intensification, probably just within the last 15-20 years, and possibly increasingly over that span. it seems at least partly related to the rise of hip-hop and r&b (and even in those genres it has gotten far more pronounced - even when the black album came out it was a big deal that each track was by a different producer, which i guess would still be noteworthy today, but i think less so.) if there are discernable trends along these lines, can we link them to other trends in the nature of pop albums?

and, more broadly, what else can be said about the historical development of the pop album? admittedly, it's a somewhat academic, limited question - in pop, albums will always be secondary to singles and songs - but as both a confirmed poptimist and albumist, it speaks to a very present tension in my musical exploration, and as year-end album list time grows ever nearer, it's also timely one - and i'm gonna keep on teasing it out.

it's poppin'

okay, liveblogging as i listen to jordin sparks' self-titled first album for the first time. and browse wikipedia musing on the tangled connections in the pop universe. 'cuz, why not.

first track/first single "tattoo" - written/produced by stargate, the same norwegian team behind "so sick" and "irreplaceable" and "hate that i love you" (and three more songs from good girl gone bad) and it sounds exactly like those songs, which makes me realize how much they sound like each other. (stargate also did mis-teeq's "scandalous" which sounds most different from these of anything i recognize in their discography.) it's not bad - the title metaphor (he's written on her heart like a tattoo) sort of continues the trend somebody pointed out of everyday objects (lip gloss, open-toed shoes, vans i guess) taking prominence lately over namechecking big brand names.

doesn't feel like it should be the first song on the album - it's probably not good enough for one (though, i haven't heard the rest of it yet), but it has that kinda epic vibe that comes on too strong off the bat. irreplaceable (from which the drum groove is lifted verbatim, with added open hat or two) was track 9 on b-day (b'day, get the punxuation right) until the bollixed deluxedition when it was moved to track two (after new track beautiful liar, which is also by stargate. think they're hot right now or something?

scanning the writing credits, every song except for maybe three has at least one writer with a conspicuously scandinavian name.

track two - "one step at a time" - really love the footsteps sound for the beat - surprised that hasn't been done more often. especially before the rest of the beat kicks in, but i like how it's still audible throughout. lovely lilting harp riff very reminiscent of ryan leslie's production for cassie. (i guess i'm thinking of "just 1 night" in particular.)

ok, good, production credits here. (should discogs and wiki merge?) (they're my top two resources for amg bio research.) so the producers/writers are jonas jeberg, who also has credits on vanessa hudgens' V (under the name Jay Jay) and mitch hansen, aka cutfather, who hasn't done much since the new jack era, apparently, when he used to work with soulshock (aka carsten schack), the dane best known as half of the duo behind, well, all kinds of things, including more recently-ish, leave (get out) and some jamelia stuff. [eta: and skye's "kiss a girl"] and also robbie nevil, an american who's apparently been around forever (had a song on the cocktail soundtrack) but doesn't seem to have much connection to current stuff. jeberg and hansen also worked together on a track for kylie's X (working their way from the end of the alphabet i guess?)

"no air," duet with chris brown, about whom i have managed to remember nothing so far, though i guess he's supposed to be important somehow. his name sure sucks. producers/writers are eric "bluetooth" griggs, who has no other credits that i can find, but does have a good name, and the underdogs (whoa, harvey mason's son!) who have been around and worked with lots of r&b names, and pink, britney, and kat mcphee in case they don't count.) ok whatever. not norwegians.

"freeze" is by stargate again. not too impressed.

"shy boy" on the other hand, is neat-o, with snaky synths snaking all over the place (sometimes into midi-ringtone arpeggiator territory, but that's cool) and bleeps and vocals and whatnot. and a minimal (hyphy-ish, i guess) boom-bap and processed vocals. it's by bloodshy and avant.
produced by them; written by them (aka christian karlsson and pontus winberg, whose name sounds like pompous windbag) and the bassist (?) j honback, and klas åhlund of teddybears.

bloodshy and avant are half of the reason i decided to write this in the first place. they are responsible, of course for ("toxic" as well as) four of the key tracks on blackout, the album that's been fascinating me more than most these days. (åhlund also has a co-credit on "piece of me," which means another coup for the robyn/teddybears camp, although i haven't yet been able to notice robyn's b. vox on that song.) according to their very interesting wiki article, B&A wrote more songs intended for blackout that were rejected and subsequently given to sparks (three songs including "shy boy") and to jennifer lopez (the title track of her new album brave)
and to kylie (two of them appear on X - a-ha, another connexion - the very ones tom ewing complained about in pitchfork as sounding like nu-britney. er, also the one he said sounded like ol'-daft punk.)

yeah, bloodshy & avant (what names, right?) have a knack for smashing productions that almost totally obscure the artist "fronting" the track in the process. "toxic" never really sounded like britney to me one whit, i can barely even recall what she sounds like on it. actually of this recent crop j-lo may fare the best - she sounds reasonably like herself on "brave," which makes sense since she possibly has the strongest (in character, not quality) voice of the four. also there's enough harmony in the song that it doesn't feel as frosty as many of the others.

of the jordin tracks - actually of all ten in this crop - "see my side" stands out as the most sweetly touching - music-box harp lines, simple melody, gently pleading "see my side and i'll see yours better." the chorus has funny big boom-bap beats that don't quite fit but don't quite disrupt it either. "young and in love" is more in line with the other tunes - it frankly sounds like a blackout reject. need to hear it more to know if there's anything worthwhile in it; doubtful.

i've jumped ahead and gotten off my album-sequence reportage schedule. which is okay, because i never really cared about the album in the first place. the other half of the reason i'm writing this, in case you were curious, is that two of the tracks were co-written by espen lind, a one-time tourmate of one-time norwegian idol finalist alejandro fuentes (chilean-born, unlike josé gonzález who's only argentinian by parentage), who i don't care about really but i was gonna write a bio on him for amg. but i didn't because i wrote this instead. oh yeah - lind co-wrote "irreplaceable" too (and a ne-yo song, and an elliott yamin song), and stargate produced one of these two songs; the other one was produced by 'espionage' which i'm guessing is lind's producer-hat moniker.

okay, just for the sake of completeness: two of the other tracks, "next to you" and "permanent monday" were produced by one emanuel kirakou (what kind of name is that?) who did two songs i don't remember for kat mcphee and one ("love me for me") for ashleey tisdale, and were co-written with an l. robbins who's connected to people whose names are vaguely familiar (melissa o'neill, anastacia.) and the last song is by a friend of hers, which might be worth paying attention to, but i don't have time now.

i guess the thing to get to, eventually, is the question of what all of this does to the identities of pop artists and pop albums. it's no shocker and no news that albums are (often) cobbled together from the work of multiple songwriters, producers, etc. and hence often don't have a lot of personality - that's where the weakness of a sparks or a mcphee comes through; not having enough force of personality to make a record cohere when there's nothing otherwise coherent about it. i guess having a good executive producer or whatever has to be important, but you never hear anything about that.

but when the individual producers and writings have such strong styles - and especially when those styles are as dramatic iconoclastic as bloodshy & avant's recent work - that you recognize them as they crop up again in lesser and lesser variations across the albums of second- and third-tier artists, we end up with a handful of interchangeable albums that are familiarly, systematically piecemeal.

"toxic" sounded fairly out of place on in the zone; the producers of blackout were savvy enough to run with b+a for much of the album, so that the style ("sliced up" vocals, among other things) is now, already and probably inevitably, shorthanded as "nu britney," since we heard it there first and best and most. and, better, they aligned those tracks with the sympathetic style of danja + co (who do essentially the r&b take on the same basic premise), and a few other producers who seem to be on board with the general concept. i don't know how it came about, exactly, but clearly there was a concerted effort to put together something stylistically cohesive and fresh-sounding. the fact that the style they came up with for it is also has this curious and unsettling effect of distorting the singer (to the extent that she becomes enmeshed within the production rather than riding on top of it) is either convenient or consciously confundatory or both. it's tremendously provocative either way, and blackout is almost certainly the most innovative pop albums of the year, as well as one of the most enjoyable.

jordin sparks on the other hand, frequently sounds fantastic...but leaves me with next to nothing. scandinavians are magic, as is well known. but even magic can only do so much.