Well, this is just plain creepy.
Corporate creepy.
Quick, somebody, tell us how to think positively about it. Puh-leez?
One Man Has Written Virtually Every Major Pop Song Of The Last 20 Years. And You’ve Probably Never Heard His Name
by Max Savage Levenson
This past April, the Backstreet Boys celebrated the 20-year anniversary of their career by being inducted into the Hollywood Hall of Fame. On hand to give remarks was an un-remarkable looking man named Max Martin. Martin, with his Seth Rogen-esque neck beard and hair down to his shoulders, wrote many of the BSB’s hit songs. During his speech, Martin reminisced fondly of his first encounter with the Boys. He met the future superstars in a hip Stockholm restaurant back in the mid-nineties. He told them he was excited to hear them sing in the studio later that evening. In response, the band stood up and serenaded him on the spot. “I got the goosebumps. It was amazing”. For millions of people around the world, this would have been the event of a lifetime. But for Martin, it was just another day in the life.
So who is Max Martin aka Martin Karl Sandberg? Was he a huge rock star in Sweden? Not really. A powerful record executive? Nope. A Svengali-like manager who knows all the secrets to success in the music business? Hardly. If he was any one of these things, it would be hard to explain why the most popular song produced by his own band, “It’s Alive”, has fewer than 1000 views on Youtube today.
Max may not have gotten super famous with his hard rock band “It’s Alive”, but he did receive two important gifts from the experience: 1) When the band recorded their first and only album, they hired a producer named Denniz PoP and Denniz is the person who suggested that “Martin Karl Sandberg” should change his name forever to Max Martin. 2) While recording their album, Max astutely learned all the tricks of the producing trade from Denniz. In an interview years later, Max explained: “I didn’t even know what a producer did. I spent two years – day and night – in that studio trying to learn what the hell was going on.”
Writing music. Making hit noises…why didn’t we ever think of that? %@#$!