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The Swedish DJ Who Invented Industrially-Manufactured Pop Music (bbc.com)
"BBC Culture reports on DJ Denniz Pop (born Dagge Volle), who couldn't sing, play an instrument, or write a song but could mathematically craft a song from stitching together electronically programmed sounds and beats," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. "Pop was the musical brains behind acts ranging from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Ace Of Base to Britney Spears, and trained Max Martin who wrote 22 Billbooard #1 hits for the likes of Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Katy Perry, P!nk, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande and Maroon 5 using a technique called 'Melodic Math.'" From the report: In a basement in Stockholm's suburbs, Pop brought together an elite team of eight songwriters and producers for a new venture -- Cheiron Studios -- in 1992. Over the next eight years they would go on to sell hundreds of millions of records through the likes of Ace of Base, 5ive, Robyn, Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Westlife, *NSYNC and Britney Spears. The secret of their songwriting success was to marry the melody to the beat, not work against it, and to have a big chorus. The team at Cheiron followed Pop's example, experimenting in clubs across the capital with up to a hundred different versions of each new track -- meticulously documenting the combinations of beats and melodies that made the club crowds go wild. Through these experiments, an entirely new genre of music blossomed, one that seemed tailor-made for the age of manufactured boybands and girl groups. Having grown up in socialist Sweden, Pop's approach to writing music was almost utilitarian. Like so many Swedish success stories -- IKEA, H&M, Volvo and Spotify -- the Cheiron team wanted their product to appeal to the maximum amount of people, which in a country with a population of only nine million meant focusing outside the nation's borders. Pop designed his music to reflect the lives of the people who bought more music than anyone else -- American teenagers -- at least as far as he understood them from his basement in faraway Stockholm.
It's funny how Venezuela was the shining socialist success story - right up until the point where they ran out of other people's money. Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Sean Penn, a galaxy of hard left luminaries visited Venezuela and endorsed the socialist system. It was the way forward, you see. 21st century socialism. Now that it turned out like all other times socialism has been tried, suddenly Venezuela isn't socialist and never was. Despite voluminous evidence to the contrary. We have always been allied with Eastasia, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Rap doesn't classify as music.
socialist Sweden
Not confusing at all. It was a mathematically crafted summary to generate two threads for the price of one.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So capitalism is great at fostering individual musical expressions, but socialism helps foster lowest-common-denominator musical pablum. Got it.
(Of course the tiny problem with this theory is that Sweden isn't really socialist. "Sweden is not socialist -- because the government doesn't own the means of production. To see that, you have to go to Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea.")
The other tiny problem is that manufactured music is very popular in capitalist countries.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They still like pop music but they're starting grow out of it as they discover intellectual pursuits and need their music to deliver something with some substance or give them something to think about, not just mindless pap about boy-meets-girl.
You sound like teenaged me. I DIDN'T LIKE pop music when I was a teenager because I was astonishingly pretentious and believed that NOT LIKING it made me superior to all the mindless masses who did like it.
90% of everything is crap and pop music being a strict subset of "everything" is no exception. But sometimes a catchy tune is good and you're not somehow less good because lots of other people like it too.
SJW n. One who posts facts.