![]() 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. 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. ![]()
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