{"id":3022,"date":"2023-11-26T22:19:36","date_gmt":"2023-11-26T22:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=3022"},"modified":"2023-11-26T22:22:56","modified_gmt":"2023-11-26T22:22:56","slug":"ftom-the-vaults-hitz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=3022","title":{"rendered":"Ftom the Vaults: Hitz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alrighty then.\u00a0 What do Britney Spears, Max Martin, Backstreet Boys, Denniz PoP, Kelly Clarkson, and N\u2019Sync have in common?\u00a0 If you ignored my imaginative spelling in the title (done as an homage to Mr. PoP), then you probably already guessed \u2018hits\u2019 as in \u2018hit records\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

I could have tried to get you off track by adding \u2018Sweden\u2019 to the list, but the Abba fans out there would have still answered \u2018hits\u2019.\u00a0 In his 2015 book, <\/span>The Song Machine – Inside the Hit Factory<\/span><\/i> (Norton Books),<\/span> The New Yorker <\/span><\/i>staff writer John Seabrook set out to connect all of the above threads, and more, into a cohesive story of how modern hit records are made.\u00a0 Not just any old hit records, but those specifically filed under the genre called \u2018Pop\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the olden days, \u2018hits\u2019 were defined by the number of copies a particular song\u2019s sheet music sold.\u00a0 Once records hit the scene, it was all about the number of units (records) that were moved.<\/span><\/p>\n

The market was so competitive that rival labels would record their own versions of other label\u2019s hits songs.\u00a0 There were often several competing records of the same tune by different artists on the charts at the same time.\u00a0 It was also a common practice for many record label owners to add\u00a0 their own names as co-writers so they could collect royalties alongside the song\u2019s original writers.\u00a0 Music was a big money deal for some, but not necessarily for the artists and songsmiths.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 1999, worldwide record sales hit a never to be reached again peak of $27 billion.\u00a0 The whole notion of pushing hit records had the rug pulled out from under it when Shawn Fanning sparked an industry shaking cataclysm.\u00a0 According to Seabrook, the nineteen-year-old Northeastern University freshman, \u201cCreated software for a downloadable \u2018client\u2019 – an app, basically – that allowed people who had it to scan one another\u2019s hard drives and download the music they wanted for free.\u00a0 In its early stages, Fanning told Sean Parker, a friend he knew over IRC (an early text-messaging network) about his idea, and they agreed to start a business together.\u00a0 Fanning was the coder and Parker was the pitch man who raised the money.\u201d\u00a0 They called it \u2018Napster\u2019 while the music industry would soon regard it as \u2018Satan\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Early in the dot-com boom the pair of young entrepreneurs were able to raise $70 million in venture capital.\u00a0 Their user base increased from 30,000 to 20 million in six months, reaching a peak of 60 million users before the roof caved in.\u00a0 According to Seabrook, \u201cThe founders\u2019 fond hope was that the [major record] labels would take Napster over and make it their digital-music distribution service.\u00a0 But the labels weren\u2019t interested in joining forces with the devil.\u00a0 Instead, they put Napster to sleep, filing suit against the company for copyright infringement in December of 1999.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Looking back with hindsight, Parker now says, \u201cThere was this unique opportunity in history.\u00a0 We said, \u2018If you shut down Napster, it\u2019s going to splinter and you\u2019re fighting service after service and you\u2019re never going to get all those users back in one place.\u2019\u00a0 And that\u2019s what happened.\u00a0 [We said] Look, you just have to see this – it will be a Whac-A-Mole problem – and they just couldn\u2019t see it.\u00a0 It was the biggest existential threat to the music business and they wouldn\u2019t listen.\u201d\u00a0 Napster would be driven from the village gates, so to speak, only to be replaced by a horde of imitators like KaZaA, Grokster, Morpheus, Limewire, and any number of other \u2018Moles\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The digital music sharing war raged into the new millennium and the record men at the five major music groups (who accounted for 70 percent of the market) ignored the changing musical landscape.\u00a0 In this case, their \u201cIf it ain\u2019t broke, don\u2019t fix it\u201d attitude was akin to ignoring the holes in the bottom of the boat.\u00a0 The suits in control didn\u2019t sound the alarm until their revenue plummeted as file sharing \u2018free\u2019 music exploded.\u00a0 To make matters worse, as the industry landscape changed, the big three music groups (Warner, Universal, and Sony) were busy gobbling up the competition.\u00a0 The industry was now being run by corporate bosses with little or no music business acumen, something the owners of the smaller labels had plenty of, at least until all the smaller labels began to disappear.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The music-loving entrepreneurs who started their independent labels were displaced by true suits who turned the industry into a web of \u2018corporate enterprise\u2019 with their eye on quarterly earnings and timely results, not making hit records.\u00a0 They only saw the profits and when file sharing knocked out the foundation of the industry (which was selling hit records), it was too late to turn the tide.\u00a0 As Island Records founder Chris Blackwell saw it, \u201cI don\u2019t think the music business lends itself very well to being a Wall Street business.\u201d\u00a0 To understand how Denniz PoP figures into this story, we need to go back to 1992 when a 28 year-old DJ working for a Stockholm-based music company called SweMix laid hands on a demo tape that arrived and was addressed specifically to him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0His real name was Dag Krister Volle (Dagge to his friends) and his place of employment, SweMix, was a collective of ten Swedish DJs led by JackMaster Fax (nee – Rene Hedemyr).\u00a0 In the late 1980s, the SweMix guys would laboriously use razor blades to cut and splice tapes of US and UK hits into dance tracks for European audiences.\u00a0 PoP hated jazz, loved funk and soul, and was partial to spinning \u2018anything with a funk bass line.\u2019\u00a0 When Denniz was in the booth at a club called Ritz the night Public Enemy opened for LLCool J, Swedish music journalist Jan Gradvall remarked, \u201cIt was like seeing the light.\u00a0 Visual proof that exciting music didn\u2019t have to be played on guitars, bass, and drums, but only a Technics 1200 (a high-fidelity turntable favored by DJs).\u201d\u00a0 Denniz grew tired of remixing other artist\u2019s hits (which SweMix would sell – that was how they made their money) and began to dream of making his own hits.\u00a0 He said, \u201cIn the end, you have remade an original song so much that you have now made a new song and just added vocals from the original.\u201d\u00a0 He tried to convince his fellow DJs they could turn Sweden into a global power in pop music, but nobody believed him.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Dagge gained the nickname \u2018Prince of Pickups\u2019 for his skill at removing and placing the stylus of his Technic 1200 in precisely the right groove when he was DJing.\u00a0 He took \u2018Denniz\u2019 from \u2018Dennis the Menace.\u2019\u00a0 He began to follow his own path, creating cool beats he used as the base for his own dance mixes.\u00a0 The other SweMix DJs hated what he was doing, but the dancers at the clubs loved it.\u00a0 Denniz didn\u2019t play any instruments.\u00a0 His preoccupation with music began when he would sit at home and endlessly spin records in his teens.\u00a0 He had some modest success producing a couple of hits (one by a Nigerian dental student who went by \u2018Dr. Alban\u2019).\u00a0 The collective realized they had been wrong and allowed him to rejoin and about this time, he got \u2018the tape\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ulf Ekberg and Jonas Bregman were making demos with their four piece techno band in the basement of an auto repair shop when they heard another Denniz PoP produced hit called <\/span>Another Mother.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 They traveled to SweMix to meet him, but PoP was engaged elsewhere.\u00a0 They went home and sent him a tape with a note that said, \u201cPlease listen to our tape and call us.\u00a0 Ace of Base.\u201d\u00a0 On the way home from the studio one night, Dagge put the tape in the player in his car – something he often did to preview new music.\u00a0 He listened to the first track (<\/span>Mr. Ace<\/span><\/i>) and decided it had some catchy hooks but they were not arranged correctly.\u00a0 He ultimately decided to not produce the band, but when he got home, he found he could not remove the tape from his car\u2019s player.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When he picked up his co-producer (Douglas Carr) the next day, the tape was still playing. For the better part of two weeks, they repeatedly listened to (and made fun of) the demo until Denniz suddenly heard something different in the song.\u00a0 According to Seabrook, \u201c[PoP] saw a way to marry the melody to the beat by breaking everything down into basic elements and then layering it all together.\u201d\u00a0 The next morning, Carr again heard the annoying song playing in PoP\u2019s car, but this time Denniz said, \u201cI think I am going to produce this!\u201d\u00a0 Seabrook notes, \u201cPop music would never be the same.\u201d\u00a0 What ABBA had done for pop music coming out of Sweden in the 1970s was about to be equaled if not eclipsed by PoP’s vision.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Once the Ace of Base guys got back in touch with him to ask what he thought of their demo,<\/span><\/p>\n

Denniz exclaimed, \u201cI\u2019ve been waiting for you guys to call.\u00a0 I really want to work with you guys.\u201d\u00a0 A month later, they were in Stockholm to record <\/span>Mr. Ace<\/span><\/i> with PoP producing.\u00a0 According to Ekberg, \u201cJonas and I are good at melodies, but there were too many things happening on the track.\u00a0 Denniz was very good at erasing things, and making the sound picture cleaner, and simplified.\u00a0 I think he took away maybe fifty percent of our instrumentation.\u201d\u00a0 It was a template Denniz himself had explained in response to the question, \u2018How hard could it possibly be to write such simple songs?\u2019:\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s much more difficult to make it simple, especially achieving a simplicity without having it sound incredibly trivial.\u201d\u00a0 Lundin said (simply):\u00a0 \u201cDenniz was an arrangement genius.\u201d\u00a0 Eckberg further recalled Pop saying, \u201cI don\u2019t care how we do it, as long as it sounds good.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The other key ingredient to a Denniz PoP arrangement was making sure the beat worked even if the lyrics were treated as a secondary plot device.\u00a0 For instance, the first verse of <\/span>All That She Wants <\/span><\/i>includes the lines <\/span>It<\/span><\/i>\u2019s <\/span>not a day for work \/ It\u2019s a day for catching tan<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 The writers from the Brill Building days relied a lot on wit and metaphor.\u00a0 The SweMix guys were not so concerned with grammar and usage.\u00a0 As Ekberg explained, \u201cI think it was to our advantage that English was not our mother language, because we were able to treat English very respectless, and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody.\u00a0 As Seabrook puts it, \u201c[The were] Freed from making sense, which made the lyricists\u2019 horizons boundless.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0So how did <\/span>All That She Wants <\/span><\/i>fair in the states?\u00a0 The musical trends at the time leaned heavily on Grunge and its themes of alienation, suicide, and despair.\u00a0 In comparison to the raw vocal delivery over beds of crashing drums and crunchy guitar riffs delivered by flannel clad bands, it seemed crazy to even float a foreign synth-pop band on these shores.\u00a0 Surely this new sound would be lost in the wake of R&B generated pop by the likes of Whitney Houston and Boyz II Men and the newly emerging hip-hop groups.\u00a0 What it would take to get Ace of Base signed in the states was the ear of an old time industry vet who cut his teeth discovering and signing new bands.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0For Ace of Base, those ears belonged to the head of Arista Records, Clive Davis.\u00a0 As soon as he heard <\/span>All That She Wants<\/span><\/i>, he interrupted his European yacht vacation to hasten to the nearest port so he could make a call:\u00a0 \u201cKjeld, I want this band!\u201d he told his Danish colleague.\u00a0 Before they knew what hit them, the band were on the way to New York to meet Davis at the BMG Building in Manhattan.\u00a0 Davis insisted they needed two more singles to break their album and suggested they cover an Albert Hammond \/ Diane Warren song <\/span>Don\u2019t Turn Around<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 When he asked if they had any more songs in the pipeline, they mentioned <\/span>The Sign<\/span><\/i>, a track they wanted for their second album.\u00a0 Davis was adamant – he added three tracks to the band\u2019s European release <\/span>Happy Nation<\/span><\/i>, renamed it <\/span>The Sign<\/span><\/i> (which would be the band\u2019s third single), and released it in the states on November 23, 1993.\u00a0 An old A&R man like Davis knew what he was doing – the album entered the top three of the <\/span>Billboard Top 200 <\/span><\/i>and remained there for 26 consecutive weeks.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Tired of his fellow DJs in the collective and their dismissive attitude toward his new direction, PoP quit SweMix in 1992.\u00a0 The company was then bought up by BMG so founding member Tom Talomaa and Denniz took their windfall and opened a new studio, Cheiron.\u00a0 Though the new venture was supposed to be a studio \/ record label, the label part was expensive and quickly fizzled.\u00a0 Davis had handed <\/span>The Sign <\/span><\/i>to Denniz hoping he would give it the same magic touch he had on <\/span>All That She Wants.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>Again, Davis knew what he was doing.\u00a0 <\/span>The Sign <\/span><\/i>entered the charts in late 1993, spent six weeks at number one and was the top-selling single of the year.\u00a0 The album of the same name sold over 23 million copies and earned Arista $42 million.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As promising as the Ace of Base story was, they proved to be a band with a short shelf life.\u00a0 \u00a0 When it came out that Ulf Ekberg had belonged to a neo-Nazi party in his younger days (for which he apologized for when it came to light), it put a damper on their future.\u00a0 Of the two Berggren sisters in the band, Malin, hated flying which led to her diminishing enthusiasm for performing in 1995 (no doubt fueled by the 179 flights they took that year).\u00a0 They managed two more albums before they disappeared.\u00a0 Not good news for them, but Denniz PoP had now established himself and there were many other artists out there searching for that elusive hit record,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Tragically, Denniz PoP died on August 30, 1998 after a short battle with cancer.\u00a0 It was\u00a0 something that had weighed on his mind for years before he was even diagnosed.\u00a0 His legacy from his earliest successes creating hits continued to grow after his death. PoP\u2019s influence on pop music today is undeniable.\u00a0 The list of bands and artists who owe more than a tip of the hat to Dagge Volle include \u2018N Sync, Boy to Men, Backstreet Boys, Brittney Spears, Celine Dion, and on into pop leaning rock bands like Bon Jovi.\u00a0 Seabrook sums up PoP\u2019s career as follows:\u00a0 \u201cThe heart of the old Cheiron crew is in L.A. these days.\u00a0 The hit-making methods developed at Cheiron by Denni PoP have spread throughout the UK and United States.\u00a0 Swedish hitmakers, once a crazy dream of Denniz PoP, supplied one quarter of all the hits on the<\/span> Billboard Hot 100 <\/span><\/i>in 2014.\u00a0 The Swedes have become a driving force in K-pop as well.\u201d\u00a0 Not bad for a music loving, non-instrument playing kid who just liked to use infectious beats to mold the songs of others into hits that started on the dance floor and then conquered the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top Piece Video – Ace of Base and the infections Denniz Pop beat on\u00a0The Sign<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alrighty then.\u00a0 What do Britney Spears, Max Martin, Backstreet Boys, Denniz PoP, Kelly Clarkson, and N\u2019Sync have in common?\u00a0 If you ignored my imaginative spelling in the title (done as an homage to Mr. PoP), then you probably already guessed \u2018hits\u2019 as in \u2018hit records\u2019. I could have tried to get you off track by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,8,6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-new-music","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3022"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3025,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3022\/revisions\/3025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}