Post by Inside Australian Idol on Sept 13, 2003 21:15:34 GMT 10
Interesting article from SMH--
Who writes the songs?
September 13, 2003
The Dylans and Lennons of our age are out there, but they'll never be household names, writes Bernard Zuel.
It sounded easy enough really: tell us who today are the great songwriters of the age, titles once held by the likes of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. However, working out how to work that out is more than half the battle.
What are the objective measures for greatness? For example, do you consider sales as a criterion? If so, Dianne Warren and Max Martin must rank highly. Although little known or feted outside the industry, Warren is probably the most successful songwriter of the past 20 years, with scores of international top-10 hits across pop, country and R&B charts. As well as being the backbone of Celine Dion's career, she has written No. 1 hits for, among many, Christina Aguilera, Bad English, Michael Bolton, Faith Hill and Cher.
Martin, and the Swedish songwriting/production factory that he has set up, have been the prime force behind pop music since the middle of the '90s. Like Stock, Aitken and Waterman a decade before them, Martin and his crew work on a strict formula that emphasises accessibility, instant sex appeal and a smooth link between hip-hop and pop. It has worked for *NSync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and even Bryan Adams and Dion. It has also worked for millions of music buyers.
Of course, money-spinning writers such as Martin and Warren are universally derided by music critics as creators of formulaic, emotionally empty songs. The argument is that anyone could have written one of their songs, in the sense that the personality of those songs have nothing to do with Warren or Martin.
To my mind, the distance between Warren and Martin and their songs takes them out of the realm of great songs and places them in the category of great pieces of craft and skill. They are the workaday architects of music - they can tailor a song to your needs but they can never give you something that comes from their heart and enters yours. In other words, they are artisans not artists.
Some argue that the process, rather than the pulse, also wins in the work of R&B producer/writer teams such as Timbaland (aka Tim Mosley) and Missy Elliott and the Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo). Both pairs have contributed some of the best songs recorded by modern pop figures such as Spears, Justin Timberlake, Aaliyah, Elliott herself, Michael Jackson and Beyonce Knowles.
Certainly, they appear to be more geared to rhythm and construction of beats than melody, structure and lyrical meaning, but they have put together some of the most innovative sounds and irresistible tunes of the past five years, drawing on soul, funk, pop, rock and hip-hop. Why should they be excluded, particularly when, given that hip-hop and R&B have been the basis of pop music in the past decade, their influence is massive?
Which brings us to another possible criterion: influence. Even if you believe he was not a technically great writer, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was probably the most significant rock songwriter of the past decade. His style - cribbed from pop and punk as much as '70s hard rock - and the fact he got that style onto radio, television and the charts, either inspired or made possible much of the past decade's rock.
Likewise, the combination in Public Enemy of rapper Chuck D and the music production/construction crew the Bomb Squad was probably the most important non-rock/pop writing team of recent years. Chuck D's political and social activism created the template for modern rapping; the Bomb Squad's sonic palette did something similar for production.
Realistically, though, influence is a related but separate issue and it might be too early to say if the relatively short careers of Timbaland, Elliott and the Neptunes are enough to put them at the top.
So then we have to ask: are we talking great individual moments or an impressively deep catalogue? I asked Elvis Costello recently how we should judge great songwriters. He argued that one great moment could be enough. Can this hold? Well, Percy Sledge, who co-wrote When a Man Loves a Woman and is pretty much known only for that moment, might say yes.
But surely we should look for more evidence than one, possibly fluked, moment? The idea that we should look at quality over a long period as the mark of a great songwriter sounds reasonable at first. In sporting terms, it's the career average that matters rather than one glorious season (or album). The argument goes: give him 10 years, see if he can keep it up.
Yet look at the songwriters we call the greats of the '60s and '70s. Dylan, Lennon, McCartney and Wilson did much, if not all, of their greatest work in the intense seven or eight years before they turned 30.
Depending on your fondness for jazz, Mitchell could be said to have had a decade of consistent brilliance, while Burt Bacharach and Hal David, possibly the finest songwriting pairing of the postwar years, lasted only a decade.
And, while, like Dylan, Bacharach had a stunning comeback (in partnership with Costello) in the mid-'90s, it is his work during the '60s that marks him as a genius.
Nonetheless, Costello is a prime example of why the argument for longevity of quality holds greater sway. Any discussion of who are the best modern songwriters throws up some key names, all of whom have been writing and releasing music for more than a decade, or even more than two.
Costello began as a wordy country/rock singer in 1977 and, since then, has consistently produced the highest standard of musical and lyrical output across pop, country, rock, soul and, more recently, classical music.
Along with Costello, you could name Nick Cave, who began as a gothic punk in 1978 but become one of our finest ballad writers in the past decade; Texan country writer Lyle Lovett, who, like Costello, is a master of both melody and lyric; and Bruce Springsteen, who has few peers for his ability to capture the conflicted soul of America.
At least as high would be Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle, who are possibly the finest lyricists today. Williams has a poet's ear and a sensualist's soul, while Earle's leaning towards the storytelling tradition is flavoured by a short-story writer's lean prose and eye for detail. Though sometimes erroneously called alternative country writers, their songs are not genre songs and they cross boundaries effortlessly.
Who might be working their way to that status? Ron Sexsmith, Aimee Mann, Ryan Adams, Julie Miller and Jeff Tweedy all have strong claims and a solid body of work behind them already. (Of interest, for another day maybe, is the fact that none of these is British and only Costello of the older guard is from the sceptred isle. Where have the great British songwriters gone?)
At this point, it might be clear that some, and maybe all, of these names mean little to you and your friends, or are, at best, marginal figures in the public's understanding of the music industry. If they are that good and that significant, why aren't they as central to the charts and people's lives as the great figures of the '60s and '70s?
What we have to acknowledge is that we might never again have circumstances where individual songwriters have as much impact and influence as they did in the 1960s. It has little to do with quality and more to do with the fact that today's record industry is so large, so spread out and so diverse that for any artist to have an impact across the board requires a combination of events that is almost impossible to imagine.
Remember, you had one chart in 1965. Today, you can have a dozen charts. And, while top 40 radio dominated the airwaves then, now you could listen to the radio all day, every day, and not have the faintest idea who is on the charts, or who is selling to someone outside your demographic.
So, it might well be that today there are songwriters of equal standing with the greats of the past. I would argue there are. But, with dissipated music industry influence, wide diversity in options and tastes, and the evacuation of many fine writers to the fringes, the chance of there being anything like a consensus on who they are is small and likely to get smaller.
www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/12/1063341766909.html
Who writes the songs?
September 13, 2003
The Dylans and Lennons of our age are out there, but they'll never be household names, writes Bernard Zuel.
It sounded easy enough really: tell us who today are the great songwriters of the age, titles once held by the likes of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. However, working out how to work that out is more than half the battle.
What are the objective measures for greatness? For example, do you consider sales as a criterion? If so, Dianne Warren and Max Martin must rank highly. Although little known or feted outside the industry, Warren is probably the most successful songwriter of the past 20 years, with scores of international top-10 hits across pop, country and R&B charts. As well as being the backbone of Celine Dion's career, she has written No. 1 hits for, among many, Christina Aguilera, Bad English, Michael Bolton, Faith Hill and Cher.
Martin, and the Swedish songwriting/production factory that he has set up, have been the prime force behind pop music since the middle of the '90s. Like Stock, Aitken and Waterman a decade before them, Martin and his crew work on a strict formula that emphasises accessibility, instant sex appeal and a smooth link between hip-hop and pop. It has worked for *NSync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and even Bryan Adams and Dion. It has also worked for millions of music buyers.
Of course, money-spinning writers such as Martin and Warren are universally derided by music critics as creators of formulaic, emotionally empty songs. The argument is that anyone could have written one of their songs, in the sense that the personality of those songs have nothing to do with Warren or Martin.
To my mind, the distance between Warren and Martin and their songs takes them out of the realm of great songs and places them in the category of great pieces of craft and skill. They are the workaday architects of music - they can tailor a song to your needs but they can never give you something that comes from their heart and enters yours. In other words, they are artisans not artists.
Some argue that the process, rather than the pulse, also wins in the work of R&B producer/writer teams such as Timbaland (aka Tim Mosley) and Missy Elliott and the Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo). Both pairs have contributed some of the best songs recorded by modern pop figures such as Spears, Justin Timberlake, Aaliyah, Elliott herself, Michael Jackson and Beyonce Knowles.
Certainly, they appear to be more geared to rhythm and construction of beats than melody, structure and lyrical meaning, but they have put together some of the most innovative sounds and irresistible tunes of the past five years, drawing on soul, funk, pop, rock and hip-hop. Why should they be excluded, particularly when, given that hip-hop and R&B have been the basis of pop music in the past decade, their influence is massive?
Which brings us to another possible criterion: influence. Even if you believe he was not a technically great writer, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was probably the most significant rock songwriter of the past decade. His style - cribbed from pop and punk as much as '70s hard rock - and the fact he got that style onto radio, television and the charts, either inspired or made possible much of the past decade's rock.
Likewise, the combination in Public Enemy of rapper Chuck D and the music production/construction crew the Bomb Squad was probably the most important non-rock/pop writing team of recent years. Chuck D's political and social activism created the template for modern rapping; the Bomb Squad's sonic palette did something similar for production.
Realistically, though, influence is a related but separate issue and it might be too early to say if the relatively short careers of Timbaland, Elliott and the Neptunes are enough to put them at the top.
So then we have to ask: are we talking great individual moments or an impressively deep catalogue? I asked Elvis Costello recently how we should judge great songwriters. He argued that one great moment could be enough. Can this hold? Well, Percy Sledge, who co-wrote When a Man Loves a Woman and is pretty much known only for that moment, might say yes.
But surely we should look for more evidence than one, possibly fluked, moment? The idea that we should look at quality over a long period as the mark of a great songwriter sounds reasonable at first. In sporting terms, it's the career average that matters rather than one glorious season (or album). The argument goes: give him 10 years, see if he can keep it up.
Yet look at the songwriters we call the greats of the '60s and '70s. Dylan, Lennon, McCartney and Wilson did much, if not all, of their greatest work in the intense seven or eight years before they turned 30.
Depending on your fondness for jazz, Mitchell could be said to have had a decade of consistent brilliance, while Burt Bacharach and Hal David, possibly the finest songwriting pairing of the postwar years, lasted only a decade.
And, while, like Dylan, Bacharach had a stunning comeback (in partnership with Costello) in the mid-'90s, it is his work during the '60s that marks him as a genius.
Nonetheless, Costello is a prime example of why the argument for longevity of quality holds greater sway. Any discussion of who are the best modern songwriters throws up some key names, all of whom have been writing and releasing music for more than a decade, or even more than two.
Costello began as a wordy country/rock singer in 1977 and, since then, has consistently produced the highest standard of musical and lyrical output across pop, country, rock, soul and, more recently, classical music.
Along with Costello, you could name Nick Cave, who began as a gothic punk in 1978 but become one of our finest ballad writers in the past decade; Texan country writer Lyle Lovett, who, like Costello, is a master of both melody and lyric; and Bruce Springsteen, who has few peers for his ability to capture the conflicted soul of America.
At least as high would be Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle, who are possibly the finest lyricists today. Williams has a poet's ear and a sensualist's soul, while Earle's leaning towards the storytelling tradition is flavoured by a short-story writer's lean prose and eye for detail. Though sometimes erroneously called alternative country writers, their songs are not genre songs and they cross boundaries effortlessly.
Who might be working their way to that status? Ron Sexsmith, Aimee Mann, Ryan Adams, Julie Miller and Jeff Tweedy all have strong claims and a solid body of work behind them already. (Of interest, for another day maybe, is the fact that none of these is British and only Costello of the older guard is from the sceptred isle. Where have the great British songwriters gone?)
At this point, it might be clear that some, and maybe all, of these names mean little to you and your friends, or are, at best, marginal figures in the public's understanding of the music industry. If they are that good and that significant, why aren't they as central to the charts and people's lives as the great figures of the '60s and '70s?
What we have to acknowledge is that we might never again have circumstances where individual songwriters have as much impact and influence as they did in the 1960s. It has little to do with quality and more to do with the fact that today's record industry is so large, so spread out and so diverse that for any artist to have an impact across the board requires a combination of events that is almost impossible to imagine.
Remember, you had one chart in 1965. Today, you can have a dozen charts. And, while top 40 radio dominated the airwaves then, now you could listen to the radio all day, every day, and not have the faintest idea who is on the charts, or who is selling to someone outside your demographic.
So, it might well be that today there are songwriters of equal standing with the greats of the past. I would argue there are. But, with dissipated music industry influence, wide diversity in options and tastes, and the evacuation of many fine writers to the fringes, the chance of there being anything like a consensus on who they are is small and likely to get smaller.
www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/12/1063341766909.html