ACREDITE SE QUISER: A produção da música pop é como o fabrico de salsichas

These inventions shifted the balance of power from performers to production teams. Today, the process starts with producers laying out beats and chords. They then recruit “topliners”, who are often women, to try out melodies and vocal snippets and see what sticks. Lyrics are an afterthought. The finished product is shopped around to star singers, who do their best to “preserve the illusion” of authorship. “I get this feeling of a big painter’s studio in Italy back in the 1400s,” one Swedish artist says in the book. “One assistant does the hands, another does the feet...and then Michelangelo walks in and says, ‘That’s really great, just turn it slightly...Next!’” The book is full of cautionary tales of singers whose careers went off the rails when they rebelled against their labels and demanded creative control.

The second engine of change in “The Song Machine” is cultural globalisation. The Cole Porters of today hail primarily from Scandinavia: Max Martin, a Swedish über-producer, has written more chart-topping hits than the Beatles. Mr Seabrook thinks it is no accident that American listeners have become hooked on tunes from abroad. Although white artists borrowed from African-American blues in the early days of rock, by the 1990s black music had moved on to spoken, beat-focused hip-hop, while white bands like Nirvana screeched with dissonant grunge rock.

By contrast, Sweden, the country that produced ABBA, never lost its appetite for soaring melodies. Its government offered free music education. Moreover, its artists were not constrained by racial boundaries in American music, and could produce “a genre-bursting hybrid: pop [white] music with a rhythmic R&B [black] feel”. And because English was not their first language, they were free to “treat English very respectless”, as Ulf Ekberg of Ace of Base, a band, says, “and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody”.

«Bopping brilliant», sobre «The Song Machine» de John Seabrook

O processo descrito de produção da pop fez-me lembrar Bismarck de quem se diz (*) ter comparado a feitura das leis nos parlamentos ao fabrico de salsichas: quando menos se souber como são feitas, melhor, disse. Quantos fãs resistiriam e continuariam a consumir as suas salsichas pop se soubessem como são feitas?

(*) Neste comentário coloca-se em dúvida a autoria. Com toda a razão e, por ser duvidoso, escrevi «de quem se diz». Ainda assim, é coisa que o Otto bem poderia ter dito se se tivesse lembrado.