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For a better take on what I perceive to be the issue here, I refer you to the following, from a seminal essay by Sasha Frere-Jones (nominally about Justin Timberlake, but I think the arguments carry across pretty easily):
Ross likes "Cry Me a River," praising its multiple layers and name-checking Duke Ellington, but the whole thing makes him uncomfortable: "In any case," he writes, "the songs on Justified aren't really Timberlake's. A dozen names appear in the credits, and it's anyone's guess how much of a song like 'Cry Me a River,' the album's best track, actually came from Timberlake's pen, if he owns one." There's probably more evidence George Bush doesn't own a pen, but Ross is making a funny. We salute that. But still, the crack is pure ideology....
Ross' attack on Timberlake's legitimacy is simply another appearance of the long-standing critical bias toward a certain kind of musician and a received take on how they make records. Take Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Sleater-Kinney, or Jack White, artists who use tools deemed "basic"—guitar, bass, drums. You can hear what each person is doing, physically, with their hands and voices. So the critic assumes a link straight from the artists to the putative listener, and praises the work using that metric. If a producer is listed, his role is brushed off as merely engineering and arranging, since producers usually don't get songwriting credit.
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There's a real argument to be had about whether or not it matters who made a song, but let's accept for now that the number of people involved in making a pop record matters because this idea about the Individual Artist won't go away. Fine. Thing is, if you read the credits on records, the number of people involved in making big, shiny pop records is about the same as the number of people involved in making the records of high-cred bands like Radiohead or Wilco. |
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