Word: poppings
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...pop Svengalis are a noble and often valuable tradition. Berry Gordy was notoriously tyrannical during the heyday of Motown Records, but compare the timeless, distinctive singles the Four Tops or Diana Ross did for the label with the banal, forgettable ones they did after they left. Spector, for his part, brandished a gun in the studio, intimidating everyone around him. But the hits he crafted for the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers are the music equivalent to the Sistine Chapel; the flimsy singles those acts (and many others) released after they broke with him are paint-by-numbers pop...
...Pop music Svengalis have never been beloved figures. In crafting a performer's image, producing or writing their records, or all of the above, they're part bully, part stage mother, and part egomaniac, and inevitably, the singers under their strict control rebel against them. But Svengalis are going through a particularly rough patch these days. Phil Spector, one of the most renowned and controlling, is on trial for murder. Lou Pearlman, who helped concoct the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync by way of his boy-band factory in Florida, has been unceremoniously dragged back to the U.S. from Guam...
...then there's Clive Davis, the SonyBMG chairman and industry old hand who's been steering the careers of pop acts for four decades. In what's become a fascinating spectacle, Davis is in the midst of a snippy public feud with one of his company's biggest acts, American Idol alum Kelly Clarkson, over the direction of her new album, My December, released Tuesday...
Beyond any concerns with Clarkson's lyric-writing abilities, what supposedly made Davis and his company nervous about My December is the album's emphasis on "rock," which is even how iTunes refers to it. (Davis took over SonyBMG during the making of Clarkson's previous, and more pop, album, Breakaway.) In essence, Clarkson wants to rebrand herself, an extremely alarming move -- for record moguls, anyway -- when hit records are more imperative than ever to the life of the slowly expiring music business...
...lyrics, an aggrieved and angry lot, are no more forgettable than what we hear regularly on the radio. But most of the songs, co-written by Clarkson, rely on wide-screen, processed production gimmicks, rather than genuine hooks. And as any pop Svengali knows, making a pop record is as much a matter of craft and precision as it is eccentricities. It's about the thin line between hackwork and magic. As much as one can applaud Clarkson for wanting to be taken seriously, neither pop nor rock should sound as labored as most of My December. A Svengali might...