It comes from here.
Max Martin produces shit. Garbage. Antiseptic mush. Tripe. Poop. Muzak.
[Rick Beato on the same subject.]
Ever wonder why most contemporary pop music has all the distinguishing hallmarks of a wet noodle? This is why: Max Martin, and his ilk. Producers who take whatever creativity and originality remains within a young singer’s aspirational heart and sticks it into a pencil sharpener and grinds it into slivers of febrile strings and then hits it with a flame-thrower and finally shreds it into a box of saturated kitty litter: here, audience, is your dinner.
The Beatles were wrong. Neil Young was wrong. Bob Dylan was wrong. Jimi Hendrix was wrong. Paul Simon was wrong. Tom Waits was wrong. John Prine was way, way wrong.
All of them created distinctive, original music out of their own minds and experiences and intelilgent, thoughtful personalities, and crafted the recordings in collaboration with sympathetic studio producers and sympatigo musicians whose personalities merged into a distinctive entity with personality, mind, and purpose. They jammed. They worked alone in dark rooms to imagine words and notes. They tried out whacky ideas. But always, always the artists were the masterminds, the creative force behind the songs, the originators and inventors of the work.
If you believe in Max Martin, they should never have done that. They should have hired a snare drum consultant, a vocal consultant, an Autotune consultant, an echo consultant, a reverb consultant, a D chord consultant, and consultants for all the other chords, and all the notes, and all the knobs on the recording console, each of them committed to optimizing the one mechanical component of the hit record, based entirely on the previous hit and the next hit and all of the future hits that can be promoted and packaged and Spotified and shoved down the tiktokky throats of 12-year-old girls everywhere. “Picks up the rice in the church where her wedding has been”? No, no, no: “Mmmmph ooommm zommminisa, oompah, bahm bahm bahm, auoooooo!” Yes, yes, yes: those syllables sound moomy. Swirl them, swish them, lick them. It’s the sound, not the content!
His roster of customers is a who’s who of mediocrity: Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Bon Jovi, Celine Dione, ‘N Sync, Pink, Adele, Kesha. Did you have thoughts about admiring Taylor Swift’s phenomenal “talent”? We won’t know if she really has any: she is a Martin collaborator. All she has to do is stand in front of a Neumann microphone in a recording studio and fart and Martin will turn it into a gigantic three-alarm hit, the fucking Grammy people will give her an award, and the sponsors will elbow each other aside to line up at her ass. That means her music is not the product of her imagination or talent or inspiration. It is the product of a faceless mechanism that doesn’t even need her.
Joe Coscerelli, the author of this suck-up, should be journalistically disbarred for the incredible facetiousness of comparing Martin to Lennon and McCartney, because, you know, the only thing important to compare is sales of hit singles.
“It’s staggering when you see it all together,” said Barry Weiss, a friend and veteran record executive who is also a producer of “& Juliet.” “You can legitimately say Max has had a 20- or 25-year fertile period as a writer. The Beatles were what, eight years?”
“Staggering”? Seriously? Seriously?! You seriously want us to believe that this manufacturer of interchangeable non-descript jingles has had a career that should be thought of as “staggering”, and this output rivals the Beatles, except for more than twice the duration?
Barry Weiss isn’t out of his mind. He has precisely the mind-set of a music industry executive who doesn’t give even one tiny little fuck about genuine artistic quality or originality.
Martin’s mentor “was not a musician in the traditional sense but began developing a system in which songs were written more like television shows” and that sounds exactly right. Like “Friends” and “Saved by the Bell” and “Family Matters” in which the entire scripts have been jettisoned in favor of Jaleel White screaming “did I do that?!” (Urkel is obviously Bill Cosby’s real personality exposed.)
Here’s a sample of his genius:
You’re the one that I ever needed/Show me love and what it’s all about.
Yes, now you see where that crap comes from. A Swedish songwriter who believes songs should have feelings but not “content” as if a song that avoids content doesn’t have a meaning. It does. It means you are a cog in the machinery of exploitation and anesthetization. And eccentric, idiosyncratic elements of taste you develop are the enemy of Martin’s product.
More drivel from Pink:
The singer Pink, who has worked with Martin for more than 15 years, called him “a closet punk rocker,” who is “very unique in how he can break you down and pull you apart and then put you back together in exactly the right syncopation, down to the second. He knows how to take your mess and make it feel good in people’s bodies.”
Martin’s music is a psychotropic drug that activates a few cells in your somnambulant brain and massages a few loose spirals of squishy ego until you feel all better until you don’t.
Martin is clueless about his own actual identity, or is he?
“Sometimes I question, like, ‘OK, what do I do?’ I make three minutes of sound. What’s the point?” he said.
No, he does know, on some blank level, that all he does is produce “three minutes of sound” and he has asked the right question. What is the point of this shit? But he’s lying. The point is to make a lot of money. The sales, the popularity of his work, is meaningless– it’s all about selling units to units. Now he has a musical, which is the masturbatory equivalent of Linda Ronstadt doing an album of jazz standards. It’s a joke that the “artist” himself is not aware of.