Culture - Denniz Pop - The Man Who Created The Sound of Modern Pop PDF

4/4/2019 BBC - Culture - Denniz Pop: The man who created the sound of modern pop
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Denniz Pop: The man who created the sound
of modern pop
In Sweden, the undisputed kings and queens of pop are ABBA – but the real success
behind the ‘Swedish Music Miracle’ is owed to a blonde mulleted DJ named Denniz Pop.
By James Ballardie
4 April 2019
Forget rave, grunge and garage – if you were a teenager growing up in the 1990s, the real revolution
in music happened in pop. It was an era when the very definition of ‘pop’ went from being a mere
abbreviation of the word ‘popular’ to a precise musical theory.
Ever since Elvis Presley first shook his hips, pop has been the sound of teenage bedrooms, school
discos and Saturday morning television. But by the turn of the millennium, the pop that dominated our
charts hailed from a cold, dark corner of northern Europe called Sweden. This mysterious sound was a
rigid formula of melodic minimalism, epic hooks and drops, melancholy, euphoria and mathematical
algorithms.
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Why are Abba so popular?
Our modern understanding of pop was the brainchild of one man – a blonde mulleted DJ from
Stockholm called Dagge Volle. Dagge loved pop music so much he even changed his name – to
Denniz Pop. His legacy was to turn Sweden in to a global musical superpower, an unstoppable
melodic machine churning out the most successful songwriters of his – and almost every other –
generation.
“He just put together a bunch of people who really had nothing to do with each other, and he created
this band of brothers,” says songwriter Andreas Carlsson, one of Pop’s disciples. “He was just a music
producer, but he had some sort of effect on people. There was something magical, almost religious.”
Perfect pop song
Denniz Pop didn’t fall into music the traditional way. He couldn’t sing, play an instrument, or write a
song. What he could do, though, was craft a song from stitching together electronically programmed
sounds and beats.
Emerging from the underground club scene in 1986, Pop wasn’t interested in catering for the club
crowd alone. Instead, he looked for ways to connect the divide between music that was popular in
clubs and music that was popular on the radio. His methods were seen as wildly controversial at the
time, according to fellow DJ Stonebridge, who first met Pop at the Ritz nightclub, situated in
Stockholm’s Örebro subway station.
Denniz Pop in 1995 (Credit: YouTube)
“We couldn’t believe he actually picked the name ‘Pop’. I mean we were scandalised,” says
Stonebridge. “For Denniz the challenge was always to create the perfect pop song. He never thought
twice about being cool.”
In Britain and America at this time, the underground was a flurry of creative cool, with turntable
experiments spawning entirely new musical genres like hip hop and acid house. Pop liked funk and
soul, but he also liked to experiment. At the Ritz he noticed that cheesy choruses and simplistic
melodies got the biggest dancefloor reaction.
For Denniz the challenge was always to
create the perfect pop song. He never thought
twice about being cool.
In a basement in Stockholm’s suburbs, Pop brought together an elite team of eight songwriters and
producers for a new venture – Cheiron Studios – in 1992. Over the next eight years they would go on
to sell hundreds of millions of records through the likes of Ace of Base, 5ive, Robyn, Boyzone,
Backstreet Boys, Westlife, *NSYNC and Britney Spears.
Maximum appeal
The secret of their songwriting success was to marry the melody to the beat, not work against it, and to
have a big chorus. The team at Cheiron followed Pop’s example, experimenting in clubs across the
capital with up to a hundred different versions of each new track – meticulously documenting the
combinations of beats and melodies that made the club crowds go wild. Through these experiments,
an entirely new genre of music blossomed, one that seemed tailormade for the age of manufactured
boybands and girl groups.
The way Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time was constructed, for example, has influenced all pop
music since then. “They took the choruses from hair metal – Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, those very big
choruses – and they put them in the context of hip hop and house music production,” says Swedish
music journalist Jan Gradvall. “No one in Great Britain or the States would have thought of that,
because it was considered bad taste. But as a Swede you could do that.”
What separated Pop’s music from almost every other musical genre that came before it was that it
sounded absolutely nothing like the place it came from. In New York, the hip hop pioneers had sought
to capture life on the street in song form. In the UK, the sound of acid house utterly embodied disused
warehouses and muddy fields. In Stockholm, the music was more reminiscent of shopping malls,
stadiums, airports, casinos, gyms and Super Bowl halftime shows.
Denniz Pop named his studios Cheiron, after the centaur in Greek mythology who teaches the god Dionysius how
to sing and dance (Credit: LaserCaution/Wikipedia)
Having grown up in socialist Sweden, Pop’s approach to writing music was almost utilitarian. Like so
many Swedish success stories – IKEA, H&M, Volvo and Spotify – the Cheiron team wanted their
product to appeal to the maximum amount of people, which in a country with a population of only nine
million meant focusing outside the nation’s borders. Pop designed his music to reflect the lives of the
people who bought more music than anyone else – American teenagers – at least as far as he
understood them from his basement in faraway Stockholm.
Singer Robyn suggests this unique way of looking at the world explains why the Swedish Music
Miracle could only ever have happened in Sweden, rather than in more resourcerich neighbours like
Germany or France. “Swedish people are a little bit like the Japanese in how we can get so obsessed
with something, and then try to imitate it or recreate it in some way and then it never becomes what the
original is, it becomes maybe a little bit weirder or stranger version of it.”
What separated [Denniz] Pop’s music from
almost every other musical genre that came
before it was that it sounded absolutely
nothing like the place it came from.
With each new experiment, Denniz drew closer to creating his perfect pop sound, until his life was cut
tragically short. After being diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1997 at the age of 34, Pop was dead
less than a year later.
His disciples at Cheiron Studios were left devastated, says Andreas Carlsson. They continued to churn
out hit after hit, topping the album charts the world over with the Backstreet Boys Millennium and
Britney Spears’ Oops! I Did It Again – just as Pop had taught them.
However, something was missing. “The creativity didn’t come from the same place anymore, what
Denniz had stood for, the joy and playfulness wasn’t really there. We were kind of delivering like a
factory,” says Carlsson. Within a couple of years, the team disbanded.
But this was only the end of the beginning. Back in 1993, Pop had hired a trainee producer, tea boy
and allround dogsbody Martin Sandberg – who like Denniz Pop would later become known for an
altogether poppier epithet ‘Max Martin’.
Melodic Math
As Max rose through the ranks at Cheiron, he ultimately became head of the studio throughout Pop’s
illness, carrying the torch after its closure to his new venture MXM Studios in Hollywood, California. For
the last 19 years Martin and his team have been turbocharging the Cheiron formula into a theory they
call ‘Melodic Math’.
When I made my programme, Flat Pack Pop, the way melodic math was described to me is that it's
more of a philosophy based around moderation and balance. It's a very Swedish thing which has its
roots in ideas like Lagom, defined as “just the right amount”, but more widely translated as the virtue of
moderation or balance.
Max Martin has written or cowritten 22 Billboard Hot 100 numberone hits; only Paul McCartney and John Lennon
have written more (Credit: Getty Images)
For example, if there are a lot of notes in the verse, then you would balance it out by putting very few
notes in the chorus. If you have a very punchy staccato chorus then you would balance it out with a
loose ambient verse.
The ‘math’ element of melodic math relates to the number of notes or syllables in a particular musical
phrase. In order to feel balanced, the notes or syllables have to be equal from line to line. For example,
here's the hook line from the chorus of Baby One More Time:
Give me a sign
Hit me baby one more time
Notice how the first line has five syllables and the second line has seven syllables? What Max Martin
does to make the ‘math’ of the lyrics fit the ‘math’ of the melody is to elongate the word “sign”, and add
extra syllables through vibrato, so it sounds like “Give me a siiiign”. Now both lines have seven
syllables and the ‘math’ is equal.
There are lots of little subrules to melodic math, such as always using the same notes in the intro as
you do in the chorus, so that the chorus feels familiar when it comes in (that's an old ABBA trick).
Perhaps most remarkable of all is that Denniz
Pop, Max Martin and Sweden managed to
conquer the global music market without
anyone ever really noticing.
Today Max has 22 US Billboard number one singles to his name – making him the third most
successful songwriter of all time behind only John Lennon and Paul McCartney – with hits for Taylor
Swift, The Weeknd, Katy Perry, P!nk, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande and Maroon 5. Yet despite
these extraordinary achievements, most pop fans have never even heard of him.
Perhaps most remarkable of all is that Denniz Pop, Max Martin and Sweden managed to conquer the
global music market without anyone ever really noticing. Their relative anonymity is perhaps the most
Swedish part of this whole story – as the socialist communitarian principles on which Swedish society
is founded encourage humbleness in the face of praise.
By tailoring their music to a global audience, Swedish songwriters inspired by Pop and Martin have
achieved far more than they ever could have by instead focusing inwards. When music is specifically
designed to appeal to the maximum amount of people, no other type of pop music could ever be more
‘popular’ than that.
James Ballardie is a journalist, who wrote, produced and presented the BBC4 documentary Flat Pack
Pop: Sweden's Music Miracle.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read
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Eight smash US acts that Britain never
understood
Some artists saw considerable success Stateside, but somehow failed to make a dent
with music fans in Britain.
By Stephen Dowling
3 April 2019
American pop culture, you could argue, defined much of the world’s pop culture over the course of the
20th Century.
Pop and rock music followed in the footsteps of cinema and television. Acts that were big in America,
the logic dictates, would be big around the world. Especially so in the UK – a country no doubt elated
rather than confused that the band Living Colour kept the "U" in their name.
But, as the history books show, this is not always the case. There are many bands able to pack the
most supersized stadia Stateside who somehow struggle to fill venues a fraction of the size on the
other side of the Atlantic.
Phish
Some things – tater tots, cars the size of tanks, snowploughs – just make more sense in America. To
that you can add Phish, the Grateful Deadinspired “jam band” who have been playing since 1983 (and
are possibly still on the same song).
Attending a Phish gig has become a rite of summer passage for American teens in the same way that
attending Glastonbury has for British teenagers. Despite selling a notinconsiderable eight million
albums over the last 35 years, it’s as a live act that Phish have really made their mark, though it’s a
spectacle that’s never fully formed in the land more attuned to The Jam than to jam bands.
Dave Matthews Band
You want the jam band ethos with a ska flavour? Apparently, a great deal of Americans in the 1990s
very much did, according to the success of the Dave Matthews Band. The Charlottesville, Virginia
band have sold more than 90 million albums and sold more than 100 million gig tickets since they
began in 1991.
But over in the UK? In 1995, when the band was touring the hugeselling Under the Table and
Dreaming, they played the Marquee in London, a venue with a capacity of only a few hundred. A few
years later, one British newspaper, in an interview with Matthews, underlined the point by
photographing him – adoring crowd strangely not in shot – in front of the Eros statue in Piccadilly
Circus.
Blues Traveler
The third 90s jam band in this list, you can no doubt start to see a pattern emerging here. New Jersey’s
Blues Traveler, fronted by the largerthanlife John Popper, have racked up a dozenodd studio albums
and a huge and loyal live following, partly thanks to their appearance at Woodstock ’94. But in the UK,
reception was much more muted.
Evidence for the prosecution? Their 1994 US radio hit Run Around, from the sixmillionselling album
Four, climbed to the notparticularlylofty position of 187 in the UK Singles Chart. Welltravelled,
indeed.
Garth Brooks
Apart from a few notable examples, country music has struggled to reach the mainstream across the
pond – though now it is officially the fastest growing music genre in Britain. The struggle was never
more evident than during the 1990s, when commercial country turned the production values up and
took the biggest pop acts on at their own game. One of the biggest acts of that time was Garth Brooks,
a country act so big that only The Beatles have sold more albums in the US than him. His 1998 live
album Double Live sold no less than 21 million copies, but throughout the 1990s Brooks’ allure in the
UK was rather more measured. Double Live has so far only managed to reach silver status (60,000) in
the UK – that’s one copy for every 350 it sold in the US.
Dixie Chicks
Dixies Chicks’ member Natalie Maines caused a Texassized ruckus in the leadup to the 2003
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side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the
United States is from Texas.”
The venue? London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire, normally a mark of success for British indie bands, but
probably less than the queue for the bathrooms at the average DC gig back home. Case in point: The
Dixie Chicks have sold some 25 million records in a 30yearcareer, only 1.5 million of which have
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Live
Pop quiz time: Released on 26 April 1994, it became one of the biggest albums in the US that year.
Another clue? Its cover features a painting by Scottish artist Peter Howson called The Sisters of
Mercy? No? It begins with the track The Dam at Otter Creek. Still no?
Live was one of the last massive American rock albums before the age of the internet. Their Throwing
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but also less than it sold in New Zealand.
Jewel
Alaskan singersongwriter Jewel Kilcher went from coffee shop performer to bonafide chart sensation
in the mid 1990s, releasing the debut album Pieces of You in 1995. It became one of the biggest
selling debuts of all time in the US, shifting over eight million copies. But in the UK? Jewel’s brand of
confessional folk found a less receptive audience; the album couldn’t even break the Top 75.
It’s probable this lack of UK success didn’t lead to too many sleepless nights. In 1998, Kilcher’s debut
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million copies.
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