John Seabrook

Four stars is probably a bit too high but I do feel like I learned a lot from this book. I'm not a big music person, in that I don't really listen to a ton of music. But what I do listen to is mostly pop and I do have somewhat of an interest in how stuff like film scoring works. This book was an interesting look at that industry.

I thought there were good parts and bad parts to this book. I don't want to just repeat but other reviewers have said but there are gender (and age) imbalances in this industry that Seabrook never really dives into. Sometimes, I didn't have as much of a problem with it. I think that style is really just a holdover from his New Yorker stuff. This sort of presentation journalism is very common in their long-form stories. All sides are laid out and interviewed and quoted from and the reader is left to decide what they think about the story. So rather than describing a scene where there is sexism and then having the narrator point it out, the sexism is described and then the reader has to notice it or not. Your mileage may very on how well you think this works. I thought it failed a little in the Kesha and Dr. Luke but worked fine in other places. I guess what I'm saying is that not diving deeper into the sexism in this industry seemed to me to be less about Seabrook's ignorance and more of a journalistic style choice.

There isn't always clear through-line for all these parts. There are kind of two things going on with this book: an examination of Swedish hit creators and their ilk and the rise of streaming services and the fall of album sales. Obviously, there is some overlap there but I felt like all the stuff about Spotify could have been cut. I thought the K-pop chapter was interesting because I know nothing about that and I don't listen to it but it was not connected to anything else. I think there would maybe be more to write about K-pop now considering that there has been an emerging western market but within this book the chapter is mostly useless. I think I liked the beginning of this book the most where there is an examination of the start of boy bands like the Backstreet Boys. After then first section, it did fall off a bit.

I would recommend this book for people interested in pop. It's not perfect but it's interesting and it does give you a glimpse at what the process of creating a hit can look like. There's no music theory in here, no real examination of the songs and why they work musically but it is an interesting look at the people responsible for those hits.… (mere)