The Value of School Music Programs
3/14 Welcome to the machine How Sweden's domination of the international pop charts started when a failed glam rock front man met a bootleg DJ who couldn't play a chord (and neither one was in Abba)
Guess the song. It was written by a Swede and produced by three Swedes. It was initially rejected by the
Backstreet Boys and TLC, before a young American singer agreed it would work as her debut single. When she
recorded it in Stockholm in 1998, she was so nervous on the first day that she needed a big night out in the
Swedish capital to calm her nerves. When she did nail the vocals, she had two Swedes as backing singers, a
Swede on guitar and a Swede on bass.
The result was number one in every country in which it charted, sold more than 10 million copies, and its
video (hint: schoolgirls) was voted the third most influential music video of all time by Canadian magazine
Jam! You've possibly guessed by now that we're talking about Britney Spears' …Baby One More
Time, which was produced by Rami Yacoub, Max Martin and Denniz PoP, three of the great Swedish pop
producers of the last 20 years.
You could play a variation of this game with countless recent pop hits. Katy Perry's I Kissed a
Girl,
the Backstreet Boys' I Want It That Way and Maroon 5's Moves Like Jagger are just a tiny
sample of the international mega-hits produced by Swedes, not to mention home-grown acts from Ace of Base to
Robyn, Swedish House Mafia and Avicii. Sweden is the world's third biggest exporter of music (behind the UK
and the US), and in 2011 the Swedish music industry turned over SEK6.3 billion (NOK6bn). Last year, more
than
40 US top 10 hits were produced at least partly by Swedes.
“The music which rules the charts today was first created in Sweden,” says John Seabrook, an American
journalist who has spent a lot of time with Swedish producers and written extensively for The New
Yorker on the Swedish pop phenomenon. The question is how, and why?
One version of the story has Björn Ulvaeus at a Beatles concert in 1963, the same year that Ulvaeus's folk
band, the Hootenanny Singers, had a hit with Jag Väntar Vid Min Mila (I'm Waiting by My
Charcoal
Kiln), which was somewhat put in the shade by Love Me Do. He told one newspaper, “I thought
to
myself, bloody hell, I would love to be in a pop group… Deep in our hearts, what we wanted to do was pop
music
in English.”
The rest is history, but Seabrook says Abba are only part of the reason Swedes came to dominate modern pop.
“Abba made it okay to listen to pop music,” he says. “When they started, progg political music was in the
ascendancy and Abba were initially seen as the ultimate plastic commercial schlock. When they were finally
accepted at home, it became cool to be pop, or at least not uncool.”
But acceptance of catchy schlager music (the German translates roughly as “a hit”) has only a
tangential relationship to how the modern pop sound started, according to Seabrook.
One more appropriate starting point might be 1992, when Denniz PoP (christened Dag Krister Volle), a former
DJ
known for producing bootleg remixes of underground hits, received a demo track called Mr Ace from
an
unknown synth group called Ace of Base - after playing it over and over in his car, he decided to give it a
dub-reggae makeover and call it All That She Wants. The song became one of three number ones in one
of the most successful debut albums of all time, and Ace of Base - who adopted PoP as their producer and
mentor - eventually sold more than 40 million albums, a number bested only by Abba and Roxette among Swedish
acts.
As All That She Wants played across America and the world, PoP co-founded Cheiron Studios with Tom
Talomaa in Kungsholmen, Stockholm, and soon came across Karl Martin Sandberg, nicknamed Martin White, the
leader of a moderately successful glam-style metal band called It's Alive. PoP, with a touch of irony, had
been seeking a heavier, rockier style (this was the era of Nirvana), and produced an album for It's Alive.
The
record tanked, but PoP - who couldn't play a chord - saw something in Martin, a gifted musician who could
transcribe partitures for violin. PoP asked Martin to help him write songs, and on an early track sleeve
changed his name to the catchier Max Martin without consulting with him. (“Who's that?” Martin asked when he
saw his new name).
Somehow, PoP and Martin's backgrounds in everything from underground dubstep to funk, classical and glam
rock
helped form a brand of pure pop that would dominate the charts for years. As PoP and Martin led a group of
producers, including Yacoub and Kristian Lundin, Cheiron's first smash was with a group of Florida teenagers
called the Backstreet Boys, who had been playing at SeaWorld and shopping malls when they flew to Sweden,
intrigued by PoP's work with Ace of Base.
“With the Backstreet Boys, Cheiron somehow came up with a winning formula,” says Seabrook. “If you listen to
their early songs, like Britney's, it's this danceable, keyboard-heavy music, with hard-hitting funky
rhythms.
It became the way that pop music sounded, and they started it.”
By 1998, when Denniz PoP died of stomach cancer, aged 35, he had also helped launch 'N Sync, Robyn and Five.
Martin, meanwhile, was on the way to becoming the most prolific pop producer of all time. In 2001, with
Talomaa, he founded a new pop factory, Maratone, and started churning out hits for, among others, Celine
Dion,
Avril Lavigne, Pink and Christina Aguilera. He's had 17 US number one hits, and been the American Society of
Composers, Authors and Publishers' (ASCAP) songwriter of the year in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2011, 2012, and 2013,
reflecting a stellar last few years in which he's brought Katy Perry and Taylor Swift to the world's
attention.
“The interesting thing about Max Martin,” says Seabrook, “is that he went out of fashion after 9/11, when
his
music was seen as too light and soft. But he reinvented himself in 2004 with Kelly Clarkson and a more
hard-hitting rock sound. He's a master of the melody, and working it into parts of the song. He's also great
at hooks in a chorus, so that it has maximum impact on the dance floor. Everyone's trying to do it, but he's
the one to beat.”
Today, Martin is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Swedish producers. The likes of Klas Åhlund
(Kylie Minogue, Robyn, Madonna), Shellback (Usher, One Direction, Taylor Swift, Icona Pop) and Martin Terefe
(Westlife, James Blunt, KT Tunstall) have regularly produced international chart-topping hits in the last
few
years. Swedes have also recently conquered the world of J-pop and K-pop.
According to Seabrook, Swedish producers still largely follow the collaborative formula used by Cheiron. “If
you look at American producers, there's often a lot of ego,” says Seabrook. “You'll get one guy wanting to
do
the whole song, and to say, ‘That's mine'. The Swedish way, which PoP and Martin mastered, is a lot more
group-oriented. You might have different guys doing various beats and melodies - it's often a collaboration,
and there's an ability to let people stick to their areas of expertise. It helps, too, that Swedish
producers
tend to be very professional - they don't turn up stoned and three hours late.”
And while many have put the success of Swedish pop producers down to cluster theory - the
success-follows-success idea that, for example, saw a glut of Swedish tennis players in the wake of Björn
Borg
- there are other factors at play. Karin Jihde of STIM, a non-profit organisation that provides royalties to
Swedish music creators, says: “A lot of factors have come together in Sweden to create this space for
creating
pop music. For a start, Swedes have always looked abroad, because we don't have a big enough market at home
-
and the fact of singing in a second-language has helped put an emphasis on really strong melodies. Then
you've
got a growing interest in the Melodifestivalen (the feeder competition for Eurovision), high levels of
computer literacy and great musical education - Swedish youngsters can learn an instrument for free, and
there
are high-school courses on music production.”
According to a 2004 study, 30 per cent of Swedish children attended publicly funded music programmes - and
it
was one of these that nurtured Martin's talent. According to Pitchfork, the Swedish Arts Council contributes
more than SEK300 million (NOK288m) a year to musicians, venues and regional music organisations. “That
education keeps going, and there's a tradition of mentoring,” says Jihde, who nonetheless says that music
funding has reduced in recent years. “The top guys pass down what they know.”
What Swedish producers don't tend to do much is talk much to journalists. For this piece, we approached Max
Martin, Klas Åhlund and Sebastian Ingrosso, formerly of the Swedish House Mafia, as well as Norwegian
production duo Stargate, who are responsible for many of Rihanna and Beyonce's biggest hits. None of them
spoke to us.
“Max Martin says no to almost everybody,” says Jihde, “as do most of these guys. They are songwriters, and
if
they wanted to be on stage they'd be on stage. They're happy in a studio, hanging out and jamming. It takes
a
certain personality to sit for hours to find a single note that might make the best take.”
Plus, says John Seabrook, the industry doesn't really want to hear about the producers. “If they put out too
much, they get in trouble - the artists often don't like it and, in terms of image, you want to feel like
that's a Katy Perry song, not something written by a bunch of middle-aged Swedes in a conference
room.”
But, really, that's the truth. As much as you want to think that Britney came up with …Baby One More
Time at the end of a boring day at school, it ain't so. Britney, Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry… their
biggest hits are as Swedish as Ikea.
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Big in Korea
Max Martin and Denniz PoP's form of factory-produced pop has perhaps reached its logical conclusion in
Korea's “K-pop”, where Swedish and Norwegian producers are an increasingly dominant presence in a market
that
grossed US$3.4 billion (NOK21.3bn) in the first half of 2012. Take The Kennel, a Swedish production company
administered by Universal Music, who have had 60 number ones since the company formed in 2009, most of them
in
Korea. They've created hits for the likes of nine-member girl group phenomenon Girls' Generation, who last
year won video of the year at the YouTube Awards; and BoA, the “Queen of K-pop”, who has sold more than 24
million records.
“There's something about the Scandinavian melodies that fits K-pop,” says The Kennel's Pernilla Svanström.
“The songs are always choreographed, so you need a performance concept as well as a catchy melody. It suits
the way we make the songs.”
The Kennel's involvement in K-pop began in earnest when Korean label SME approached Universal Music, who
organised a 2010 songwriting camp in Sweden, inviting the likes of Trondheim's DSign Music. “We had 25
writers
for a week, working together with three in every room and working out how to create hits,” remembers
Svanström. An A&R executive from SME was also there, offering advice like skipping any pre-choruses and
keeping things simple.
K-pop is sometimes criticised as music by numbers - Kennel-produced number ones include (f)x's Rum Pum
Pum
Pum and Wa$$up's Nom Nom Nom - something echoed by the bands themselves. SME has been
criticised for pioneering a trainee system whereby artists begin their training at nine or 10, learning not
just dancing and singing but foreign languages to make them more exportable. Talent agencies reportedly
spend
US$400,000 (NOK2.5m) training and launching a new artist. One thing's for sure: if you spend that much on
your
talent, you want guaranteed hits.