If you want to understand everything that’s gone wrong in pop music over the last 20 years, a good place to start would be the recent New Yorker article The Song Machine.  “Machine” is the operative word, since the article illustrates how the components of today’s pop songs are stripped down, parceled out, and reassembled in the studio.  The “songs” that emerge become templates for high-profile “artists” to stamp their brands on and front for the public, invariably by strutting their stuff in front of elaborate stage sets and lip-synching the sounds created for them in the lab.   It’s an assembly line process that would have made Henry Ford envious, after he got over his shock at the salaciousness of the product.

The article focuses on the aural machine behind Rhianna, described as “the Barbados-born pop singer (who), at twenty-four…is the queen of urban pop, and the consummate artist of the digital age, in which quantity is more important than quality and personality trumps song craft. She releases an album a year, often recording a new one while she is on an eighty-city world tour promoting the last one.”  An album a year may sound impressive, until you remember that when the Beatles were pop (as opposed to “rock”) stars, they recorded eight studio albums between 1963 and 1965, with each new album noticeably different from the last.  Rhianna’s machine is emblematic of that behind all Top Forty hits and is described as follows:

Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate (a duo of tall, skinny, Norwegian ectomorphs with shaved heads) and “top line” writers like Ester Dean (a young black woman from Oklahoma, “discovered” singing in the audience at a concert by The Gap Band). The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.”

And what, you may wonder, qualifies as “top line” songwriting these days?  It’s almost impossible to improve on the article’s description of Ms. Dean’s particular talents, so herewith is an extended quote:

Dean has a genius for infectious hooks. Somehow she is able to absorb the beat and the sound of a track, and to come out with its melodic essence. The words are more like vocalized beats than like lyrics, and they don’t communicate meaning so much as feeling and attitude—they nudge you closer to the ecstasy promised by the beat and the “rise,” or the “lift,” when the track builds to a climax. Among Dean’s best hooks are her three Rihanna smashes—“Rude Boy” (“Come on, rude boy, boy, can you get it up / Come on, rude boy, boy, is you big enough?”), “S&M” (“Na-na-na-na COME ON”), and “What’s My Name” (“Oh, na-na, what’s my name?”), all with backing tracks by Stargate—and her work on two Nicki Minaj smashes, “Super Bass” (“Boom, badoom, boom / boom, badoom, boom / bass / yeah, that’s that super bass”) and David Guetta’s “Turn Me On” (“Make me come alive, come on and turn me on”).

There’s more:  the author was privileged to see Ms. Dean and the ectomorphs in action, and this is how they roll when they make magic in the studio:

Their second attempt (at recording a song) was more promising. Dean carried her iced coffee into the recording booth, which adjoined the control room. She was dimly visible through the soundproofed glass window, bathed in greenish light. She took out her BlackBerry, and as the track began to play she surfed through lists of phrases she had copied from magazines and television programs. She showed me a few: “life in the fast lane,” “crying shame,” “high and mighty,” “mirrors don’t lie,” “don’t let them see you cry.” Some phrases were categorized under headings like “Sex and the City,” “Interjections,” and “British Slang.”

The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—“taking control . . . never die tonight . . . I can’t live a lie”—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been “writing” in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts.

After several minutes of nonsense singing, the song began to coalesce. Almost imperceptibly, the right words rooted themselves in the rhythm while melodies and harmonies emerged in Dean’s voice. Her voice isn’t hip-hop or rock or country or gospel or soul, exactly, but it could be any one of those. “I’ll come alive tonight,” she sang. Dancing now, Dean raised one arm in the air. After a few more minutes, the producers told her she could come back into the control room.

“See, I just go in there and scream and they fix it,” she said, emerging from the booth, looking elated, almost glowing.

Stargate went to work putting Dean’s wailings into traditional song structure. As is usually the case, Eriksen (Stargate Ectomorph #1) worked “the box”—the computer—using Avid’s Pro Tools editing program, while Hermansen (Ectomorph the Second)  critiqued the playbacks. Small colored rectangles, representing bits of Dean’s vocal, glowed on the computer screen, and Eriksen chopped and rearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching the space bar to listen to a playback, then rearranging some more.

In classic understatement, the author notes, “the song is neither clever nor subtle—we are a long way from Cole Porter here—but it is deeply seductive all the same.”  Maybe so, but also extremely depressing, especially when we learn that while Ms. Dean thought this song would be released under her own name, the result was so good it just maybe targeted towards Pink, or even the biggest of the big name stars, Rhianna or Beyonce (surprisingly, Gaga was not mentioned).

Now, I’m not naïve about the music business.  Singing, songwriting and production have been distinct elements in creating songs for decades.  It goes back to the Brill Building and Tin Pan Alley, right up through the music factory at Motown and beyond.  Still, the ability to – literally – mechanize this process, and turn vocals and instrumentation into auditory bits that are “chopped and rearranged” at will strikes me as a very unfortunate turn.  Digitized automation will never capture the mysterious creative alchemy that takes place within the heart, soul and guts of a real artist.  In fact, we may be a small step from eliminating the human element altogether:  how long before the Erik- and Herman-sens of the world conclude that they already have enough auditory information in storage to splice and dice to their hearts content?  It may even become possible to substitute holograms for the whirling divas who are the front-women for the final product: unlike real female singers, projected images will never get cellulite or lose their figures, and they’re likely to be a lot cheaper.

I’m an eternal optimist, though, and I comfort myself with the recognition that this is just one part of the music business.  Technology is also far from being all bad; the digital revolution enables brilliant bands (like Roman Candle, one of my current faves) to reach significant audiences and make a living as working musicians without the marketing and distribution muscle of the major labels.

The worm will also turn again, because it always does.  I think back to the decade between the early 70s and the early 80s, when the ornate structures and musical virtuosity of prog-rock gave rise to the disgusted, do-it-yourself punk rock ethic, and the scuzziness of punk spawned the well-groomed and often suave look and sound of the new Romanticism.  Musicians are always looking for something new, and any dominant trend will ultimately invoke a reaction.

The New Yorker article ends on such a hopeful note, when the name of Adele – a non-gimmicky, real artist with talent to burn – unexpectedly comes up in conversation at the Stargate studio.  Let’s hope the author is right when he says that “…with the mention of Adele the air pressure in the control room seemed to change. Stargate knew well from their experience in London how quickly fads come and go in the pop business; a massive smash such as Adele’s ‘Someone Like You,’ with its heartfelt lyrics, accompanied by simple piano arpeggios—no arpeggiator required—could be the beginning of the end of urban pop.”