It could be said that we are living through soundless - which is to say zeitgeistless - times. The European pop megaproducers like Stargate, who work in small groups on a case-by-case basis for labels in search of a guaranteed hit, resemble nothing so much as that other entrepreneurial figure, the consultant. In hip-hop, the producer evolved from the figure of the DJ to become an autonomous, entrepreneurial master of all trades, from engineering to songwriting and arranging. Mutt Lange’s immaculate production on Def Leppard’s Hysteria (1987) sounds like money - the massive amounts of it that the consolidating major labels raked in on the strength of MTV hype and global distribution networks in that mythically excessive decade. You can read the economic history of pop back through the succession of epochal producers. This sound, like any other, expresses a whole mode of musical production: the studio as a factory, bringing specialized labor together with technical power to produce interchangeable song widgets at maximum speed. Phil Spector described his early-’60s maximalist production style as a result of a quest for “a sound so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record.” Thrown-together girl groups and scrappy R&B outfits would come into Spector’s studio, and the maestro would turn their musical dribblings into something he once appropriately called “Wagnerian.” Instrumental tracks rerecorded on top of one another until they resembled less music than pure force, voices bathed in an all-consuming reverb - the “Wall of Sound.” In fact, you could say that the producer first arose as a significant figure in the pop world as a response to a need for a ready-made, portable sound. Each of these sounds is curiously detachable from the music itself, and certainly from the artists who make it. A producer serves as a shorthand for the dominant sound of a whole era: George Martin and Eddie Kramer for the “studio as a musical instrument” experiments of the late ’60s Quincy Jones for the clinically precise grooves of ’70s and ’80s R&B Glen Ballard for the drum-machine-and-acoustic-guitar mallscapes of ’90s adult alternative Babyface for the smooth textures of that decade’s R&B Max Martin for the Eurodance sheen of 2000s teen pop. In the history of pop, the producer’s place is clearer. He is a minor god with a Promethean ability to bring new sounds into the world. He is an oracle: the market speaks through him. He is the resourceful fifth Beatle coming to the aid of the heroes, and he is a villain, a representative of stifling, label-mandated homogeneity. He is at once a visionary creator and a bland executor of technical procedures, a name brand with star power and an anonymous functionary. He - as an ideal type, he is nearly always a he - is both a major and a minor character. Hanks and Wilson are now back in the U.S., and still recovering after being diagnosed with coronavirus while in Australia.N early two centuries into the history of recorded sound, there is still no neat place for the producer in the mythology of pop music. Hanks subsequently turned the fictitious Playtone into an actual film and television production company and record label. The film starred Tom Everett Scott, Liv Tyler, Johnathon Schaech, Steve Zahn and Ethan Embry. White, a rep from Playtone Records, who signs an Erie, Pennsylvania band (first called the One-ders, and then changed to the Wonders) after they create a chart-topping hit in the summer of 1964. Hanks, who wrote, directed and starred in That Thing You Do! played Mr. His family appreciates all of the love and support.” He’s on a ventilator and has been sedated to facilitate his recovery.” They added, “He is receiving excellent care, his condition is improving and we are cautiously optimistic. “Adam has been hospitalized with COVID-19. “Thank you for the outpouring of love for Adam and his family,” Schlesinger’s family wrote in a statement announcing the singer’s treatment. Schlesinger was the co-founder of the 2000s pop-rock band Fountains of Wayne and a songwriter on The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
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