TY - JOUR
AU - Williams, Justin A
AB - In the earlier period of prosperity, the American people did not wait until the last possible bit of use had been extracted from every commodity. They replaced old articles with new for reasons of fashion and up-to-dateness. They gave up old homes and old automobiles long before they were worn out, merely because they were obsolete … . People everywhere are today disobeying the law of obsolescence. They are using their old cars, their old tires, their old radios and their old clothing much longer than statisticians had expected on the basis of earlier experience.1         —Bernard London, “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence” (1932) What parades as progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it first gained predominance over culture.2         —Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1975) Backstreet’s back Alright         —Backstreet Boys, “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”(1997) Christmas, 2011. Seventeen-year-old Justin Bieber’s latest music video is set in Macy’s Department Store in New York City; the star is shopping, singing, and throwing wrapped gifts to an excited crowd. Somewhat detached from Bieber until the end of the video, pop star Mariah Carey, dressed in Santa hat and red dress, sings the opening, bridge, and final verse for a new rendition of her now-canonical “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (1994). Originally intended to sound “classic” by employing 1960s pop production aesthetics, the single is now revised and renamed in this iteration as “All I Want for Christmas Is You (SuperFestive)” from Bieber’s Christmas album Under the Mistletoe (2011) which debuted at number 1 on the US Billboard 200.3 My initial reaction on seeing this duet became the catalyst for an investigation of what I saw the video to represent—the convergence of a hit Christmas song by Mariah Carey, the star phenomenon of an auto-tuned Justin Bieber in an “updated” duet, and the setting of a US department store as symptomatic of what I am calling “Sloanism” in popular music. Popularized in automotive production by General Motors president Alfred Sloan (1923–56), Sloanism generally describes the production of an “updated” or upgraded consumer good, sold even before the older product’s life cycle has ended.4 What follows seeks to answer the question, What does Sloanism look like (or sound like) in mainstream popular music production? This article investigates the influence of a specific industrial practice in late-capitalist production as adapted as a strategy for creating mainstream pop hits, using distinct cases of 1980s popular dance music (Kylie Minogue’s “Locomotion” and Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation”) and 1990s “rap cover versions” (Puff Daddy’s “Come with Me” and The Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly”) as examples. In addition to investigating Sloanism as it applies to popular music production, my second purpose here is to make a clear distinction between Sloanism and “retroism,” the latter of which has received much greater attention than the former which has never been discussed in popular music studies. What I am labeling “retroism” seeks to re-create or preserve a past artifact or phenomenon; in contrast, Sloanism seeks to upgrade or update it, with associations of either improvement or at least realignment with current fashions. The two concepts are by no means diametrically opposed, but are nonetheless separate intertextual manifestations of the representation of cultural products.5 By using two case studies each of production teams from the 1980s (Stock, Aitken, and Waterman; and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis) and 1990s (The Trackmasters; The Hitmen), I outline ways in which these examples use past musical materials while updating them into a new product. Thus, I differentiate between the constant supply of cultural products that resell the past—retroism—exemplified in music through retro-style production, and the updating/upgrading of earlier musical material. In this context, new hit singles for the mainstream music charts use pop material drawn from the previous generation rather than the annual updates of the car industry (the exception being dance remixes or disco edits that are released in a much faster cycle). These Sloanist covers in popular music recordings are instances that consciously update an earlier song into a newer version, often by way of a new genre, new technology, and/or new star artist. As a model for popular music composition and production, Sloanism applied to music is not without its conceptual challenges. A theory of Sloanist production cannot account for its consumption, even if the two axes of behavior are related and stem from the same late-capitalist contexts. With mainstream pop music marketed to younger age demographics, there is sometimes an assumption that the product is made to last a short time, inevitably to be replaced by something else. This ideology is not always the case in the reality of consumption habits, hence my focus on the relatively short life cycle of the “hit song.” A Sloanist theory applied to music therefore focuses less on any actuality of obsolescence compared to the physical or economic life cycles of cars or laptop computers and more on the recycling of earlier materials into a framework that can be perceived as updated and new, often aimed at the next generation, a younger market assumed to be unaware of the older material.6 Another challenge is one of agency: focusing on collaborative production teams and the assembly line of pop music making risks ignoring (or distorting) the creative decisions of those teams, and the importance of the star artist in such a collaboration. But despite the heterogeneous intentions and aims of the actors within such a network, those involved in the popular music industry share an interest in making hit songs: whether it be the artist, songwriters, producers, or any other record label employees. This is where such aims converge. Songwriting production team Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis elucidate the distinction between the hit song and music more generally: Terry always says there’s really three kinds of music: there’s good music, there’s bad music and there’s hits. You can argue the first two, good and bad, that’s subjective. If it’s a hit it’s a hit. We don’t really make hits, meaning that what we try to do is try to make good music. Then it’s really up to a whole lot of factors: people playing it on the radio, people streaming it, talking about it. There are so many things that go into it to make an actual hit record. So our thing is to try and make it as good we can possibly do it.7 I would add to this list of factors other elements associated with record labels: distribution, marketing, as well as other stylistic trends that are occurring at the time. While Jam and Lewis point out that what makes a hit goes beyond their contribution to the assembly line, this distinction between musical quality and hit record is important when considering popular music production as it functions in the media ecosystem. Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold, for example, make the distinction between the “gods” of the classical canon who are added to but not replaced, and the “kings” of pop, with other stars waiting in the wings to replace them.8 Regardless of how well songs “age” or not in reality, the assumption is that pop is disposable, and in some cases, could be recycled to make new products. In addition to some similarities with automotive and other types of production, the upgrading effect of these compositional techniques also stems from remixing practices in electronic dance music, versioning, and longer-existing African-based aesthetics around “masterful revision” and “signifying.”9 While I want to avoid any theoretical slippage between “the changing same” of music of the Black diaspora and the “Sloanism” I foreground here, updating musical material within an industrial framework will certainly have drawn from some of these earlier aesthetic practices. Sloanist updates, however, center on using chart-success proven material in new ways, as Pop Song 2.0, marketed to new audiences.10 Alfred Sloan and the Rise of Automotive Design It is obvious that Sloanism in automotive and music production are not direct analogues. Here, I wish to highlight the historical contexts for the rise of Sloanism in American consumer culture, and then identify the common elements that are most applicable to popular music production, namely the notion of an upgraded new version redesigned through using previous musical material. Although Sloan’s annual model and style changes were a response to Henry Ford’s philosophies and techniques, Fordism and Sloanism are more complementary than oppositional. At a basic level, Fordism represents standardized industrial production where each worker has a particular task in the manufacturing of a product. Although ideas attributed to GM president Alfred Sloan on style and brand hierarchies would also be a worthy pursuit for future studies, here I will focus on GM’s innovations related to the frequent updating of automotive products and its sphere of influence on popular music production. In this sense, musical Sloanism is a transformation of the concept as it applies to the new context rather than an impermeable analogy between automotive and musical production.11 Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) became an executive at General Motors in the 1920s (becoming vice president in 1920 and president in 1923) and kept a strong leadership role from then until the 1950s. Sloan adopted aspects of Fordist manufacturing, but also saw the importance of variety and style in automobiles. General Motors was the first car company to have a styling division, led by Hollywood-based Harley Earl. Earl was the creator of the Buick LaSalle, oversaw the design of tailfins on the 1948 Cadillac, and led the design of GM’s first sports car, the 1953 Chevrolet Corvette. Sloan’s decentralized management system encouraged what the Los Angeles Times has called an “automotive caste system” of car brands as well as encouraging the construction of annual models,12 as detailed in chapter 13 of his 1964 memoir My Years with General Motors. In it Sloan details what he sees as the three periods of automobile production: To set the scene, let me divide the history of the automobile, from a commercial standpoint, into three periods. There was the period before 1908, which with its expensive cars was entirely that of a class market; then the period from 1908 to the mid-twenties, which was dominantly that of a mass market, ruled by Ford and his concept of basic transportation at a low dollar price; and, after that, the period of the mass market served by better and better cars, or what might be thought of as the mass-class market, with increasing diversity. This last I think I may correctly identify as the General Motors concept.13 Paying in installments was an innovation from Ford’s Model T era, and Sloan capitalized on the idea of the “trade-in” as a central part of his “mass-class market” concept; once the earlier generation of car buyers became tired of their Ford and wanted a newer car, they could “trade up” for a newer model or better brand.14 Therefore, the idea of the annual model worked well in tandem with the brand hierarchy of GM models (Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac), and Sloan’s ideas proved successful when he outsold his rival Ford for the first time in 1927. Sloan continued to have success, and the post–World War II economic prosperity encouraged even more frequent consumption, with American families trading up their automobiles (with the Cadillac seen as the pinnacle of American success). The idea that consumers would be enticed by new cars every year was a task for advertising and marketing departments but was already in concert with the heightened consumption habits of Americans at the time. Stylistic changes occurred every year, but the actual body of the automobile might change only every two or three years. In some cases, the same engine remained in production for decades with only minor changes.15 Sloan’s My Years with General Motors became a bible for business management and had an influence on future business leaders like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.16 One can see most overtly a similar “upgrading urge” for new products in computer software, video games, mobile phones, and computer operating systems.17 The annual model stemmed in part from the need to encourage consumption habits to match increased production in the high-wage economy of the twentieth-century United States. During the First and Second World Wars, production of wartime goods was accelerated not least because its products were so disposable (e.g., armaments, munitions, artillery), thus new strategies had to be developed to keep production at a pace in the domestic sphere. One solution to this, and championed at its earliest during the Great Depression, was the idea to limit the life cycle of a product. Bernard London writes in his 1932 pamphlet “Ending the Great Depression Through Planned Obsolescence”: “I would have the Government assign a lease of life to shoes and homes and machines,” and he goes as far as suggesting taxation to those who “are retarding progress” by holding on to products that the Government would deem “legally dead.”18 Though the government intervention in the consumption of products never came to fruition, the idea that increased production would help the economy and maintain jobs did become popular. The rapid production of industrial goods helped America out of a Depression most directly through the production of goods and equipment in World War II. When wartime production was shifted back to the domestic civilian sphere, manufacturers needed to find a way to make the abundance of new products desirable to disposable incomes benefitting from the postwar economic boom. In the 1950s, the designer Brooks Stevens was an outspoken champion of the practice, defining the term as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”19 He notes: Unlike the European approach of the past where they tried to make the very best products to make it last forever, meaning you bought such a fine suit of clothes that you were married in it and then buried in it, and never a chance to renew it, the approach in America is one of making the American consumer unhappy with the product that he has enjoyed the use of for a period, have him pass it on to the secondhand market, and obtain the newest product with the newest possible look.20 Throughout the twentieth century, this approach to increased production and consumption by either shortening the life cycle of a product (such as the case with lightbulbs) or updating a product model, superficially or un-superficially, has had a profound effect on the industrialized world. Rather than reduce working hours and increase leisure time, companies increased production, giving workers/consumers a seemingly endless array of goods to choose from while constantly updating them and encouraging further consumption. Having too much and at once never having enough became the paradox of consumer society in late capitalism, linked to the desire for social upward mobility.21 While not exactly the same for the music industry—annual “trade ins,” for example, aren’t exactly the case—the demand for music increased significantly after World War II.22 In the United States, this demand grew at the rate of 6 percent per annum in real terms between 1945 and 2001, and at the rate of 10 percent annually between 1945 and 1978. In Britain, it expanded at a rate of 9 percent per year between 1955 and 1978. New distribution channels were added “such as convenience-store racks, record clubs, and superstores,”23 and the music industry was engaged in horizontal mergers that would increase their percentage ownership of the market while maintaining a decentralized and multi-divisional A&R system (A&R is similar to R&D for other industries economically). This decentralization is similar to Sloan and GM’s management techniques.24 Polygram led the way with these mergers, adopting a rights-based organization model after World War II. Like the American pharmaceutical and motion picture industry had already been doing, record companies were able to sell their past copyrights while making new ones. By the end of the twentieth century, six rights-based multinationals dominated the industry: Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), Columbia/Sony Music, Electric & Musical Industries (EMI), MCA Records, Polygram, and Warner Music.25 As economic historian Gerben Bakker notes, hit songs had a short life cycle, so companies would use vertical integration of A&R units with distributors in other countries to enable fast international distribution. A federated structure allowed the majors to buy smaller companies and give them a level of autonomy which may have helped with the diversification of genres and styles; for example, Polygram buys Decca in 1979, Motown in 1993, and Def Jam in 1994; MCA buys Interscope Records in 1996. The goal of these companies and those working within the system was to create hit songs, and reworking previously successful music in different ways was one strategy for rights-based organizations to increase profits.26 Given that the popular music industry grew up alongside mass production more generally, from the 1930s “hit parade” to the contemporary “Hot 100,” the chart-based element of the mainstream pop industry has been interested not only in sales numbers, but an assumption that these singles circulate within a fast life cycle, with weekly reporting of the changes in chart position. This structure no doubt contributes to the critique of mainstream popular music as “all sounding the same” (Adorno’s pseudo-individualization),27 or the Baudrilliardian critique that culture is “not meant to last” (planned obsolescence)28 vis-à-vis ideologies of Western art music that can play the foil to these longevity arguments. Sloanism combines the risk-averse and rights-based nature of the music industry with a desire to produce new material quickly to both meet and create demand; as the economist Joan Robinson tells us, “Modern capitalism has no purpose except to keep the show going.”29 The Elements of Sloanism in Music Production Defined Though it is not my aim here to defend or criticize well-trodden accusations of the standardization of popular music, some assumed popular music life cycles are embedded within the practices and conventions of a genre, such as a relatively short-lived dance club remix in electronic dance music, or in contrast, the perceived longevity of “classic rock” and its canonical institutions/structures (e.g., the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum). Here the case studies will focus on hit songs that found success at the top of the Billboard singles chart, and in that milieu had an impactful but relatively short life cycle before being replaced by new hits on the charts. Echoing Adorno, I aim to show how musical material can reflect social relations, and to analyze Sloanism as an intertextual category that considers the dynamics of capital accumulation. With regard to musical Sloanism on record, it is important to consider what, exactly, is being reused and/or updated. Many of the cases discussed update three main parameters that fetishize the “newness” of the updated version: timbre: re-orchestration, usually involving “new” technology; style or genre: reworking of older melodic, harmonic, and/or lyrical material to fit features of a newer style or genre, e.g. a “jazzed-up” version, or rap cover version; “star text” as brand: inserting a newer, often younger, star to perform the song. Two other parameters are important to mention but are beyond the focus of this article: playback format30 and speed (tempo), both of which could be developed for future studies of Sloanism in record production.31 The Carey/Bieber song discussed above addresses an update of star text (with Bieber as a newer brand name) alongside his auto-tuned vocals as representative of the late 2000s/early 2010s fashion for overtly auto-tuned vocal styles. The first two parameters, timbre and style, are interrelated, perhaps additionally reflecting an emphasis in the design intensity of spaces and products in “post-Fordist” cities.32 Sometimes sonic updating will be done through digital sampling, sometimes through a re-performance, or a mix of both methods.33 The “sound” of a recorded popular song as crucial to its identity cannot be overlooked, as the sound, both the timbre and stylistic features that make up its generic characteristics, will be essential in understanding musical Sloanism.34 Additionally, the updating of “star text” can be seen in a group like the Backstreet Boys, as in the epigraph that opened this article. Their image was constructed based on previous models, most directly the New Kids on the Block, who were refashioned as a white version of the Black group New Edition (notice the “New” in both their names), themselves fashioned on Motown’s original boy band, The Jackson 5, from an earlier generation. Turning to industrial models of music production more specifically, most academic attention regarding musical Fordism has been made in the context of the working methods of Berry Gordy and his employees at Motown Records.35 Similar methods could be said of other in-house studio bands, such as Booker T and the MGs and the Wrecking Crew in the 1960s. The compositional process of these studio bands does not adhere to Ford’s method in the strictest sense, as the musical output varies more than a uniform car part, but the point is that specific musicians are specialized to add a particular ingredient to the product, to its sound. This led to a “Motown Sound” or “Stax Sound” which would become a recognizable brand (consciously or unconsciously) by consumers.36 For the following generation of popular music production, an example of Fordism and Sloanism together in 1990s music production can be illustrated through Los Angeles–based Death Row Records—specifically, Dr. Dre’s (Andre Young) creation of a style he called G-Funk. Dre’s compositional methods in this era involved studio musicians replaying or jamming around riffs from ’70s and ’80s funk records, including the “P-Funk” of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, to create soundscapes for rappers to perform over. Dre’s branded G-Funk style was initially made famous on his debut solo record The Chronic (1992). The sound, more laid back in tempo than New York–based hip-hop, and designed for boomy car speakers, became associated with the gangsta rap subgenre and with the West Coast. For example, consider Warren G’s “Regulate” from the Above the Rim soundtrack (1994): its sonic backbone is sampled from Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin” (1982) in terms of bass, drums, and Rhodes and Clavinet keyboards. Other sounds are added to the Warren G soundscape including Minimoog sweep keyboard sound for the introduction, new guitar riffs, the rapped verses from Warren G, and vocal hooks from Nate Dogg. Lyrically, the ghetto realism common in the gangsta rap subgenre was complemented with proclamations of “It’s the G-Funk era/funked out with a gangsta twist” and “I’m tweaking, into a whole new era/G-Funk step to this, I dare ya.” In other words, Warren G announces the song as part of a wider stylistic collective, and as something explicitly “new.” The success of tracks like this, as well as Death Row albums The Chronic and Doggystyle (the latter as the first rap album to debut at number 1 on the Billboard chart),37 shifted mainstream rap focus from the East to the West Coast, fueling a media-hyped antagonism between the coasts, and helping to draw unprecedented interest in the genre from major record labels. Within this system at Death Row, each actor had a specific role—studio musicians, engineers, rapper D.O.C. crafting the song form from rap freestyles, Nate Dogg providing vocal hooks, and the rappers themselves—all with Dr. Dre overseeing the process. Musicians and producers contributed to the musical assembly line through interpolations of funk materials, updated with additional material, and then targeted to an age demographic that may not have remembered the original source material. This mode of production was influential on the proliferation of the “rap cover version,” and the success of G-Funk, with its utilization of mainstream pop forms, helped convince major record labels to acquire rap music independent labels. Rather than being replaced wholesale by Sloanism, the examples at Death Row Records emphasize that Fordism continued to play an important role in late twentieth-century music production. In order to understand these examples more fully, we need to explore further what a Sloanist logic sounds like as applied to the production of hit songs in the ’80s and ’90s. 1980s and 1990s Music Production Contexts While examples of musical Sloanism could have been chosen from many eras, as the trend to update musical arrangement, and the fascination with the new, is manifest throughout the twentieth century (and earlier),38 I focus on late twentieth-century popular music history for several reasons, in addition to the comparisons with automobile production. In terms of timbre, a record’s sound, new technologies like digital samplers, drum machines, and synthesizers were creating new soundscapes on record.39 These producers and their star recording artists had the capital and corporate backing to utilize the most up-to-date technologies, including the mixing and mastering facilities to produce singles that sounded new. The samplers would be crucial to using older material as the structural underpinning of a track, and the synthesizers and drum machines for the creation of new timbres. Although sampling and synthesizers were made cheaper by the mid- to late 1980s, this polished-sounding form of production and post-production mastering would have still been the bastion of the professionals attached to powerful record companies. The new technologies were also tied to new genres of music that emerged in the 1980s. Electronic dance music genres and rap music gained mainstream popularity that allowed producers to engage in “transtylations” of older works into these new forms.40 Furthermore, sampling and reworking of earlier material were aesthetically fundamental to genres like hip-hop and disco edits for clubs. Practices that existed largely in the underground a decade or two earlier—for example, Hi-NRG club remixes in San Francisco and New York City and talking over records at Bronx parties in the 1970s—became strategies adopted by producers looking to create hit songs in the mainstream in the late 1980s and 1990s.41 By 1998, hip-hop became the best-selling music genre in the United States, at a time of unrivaled economic prosperity for the entertainment industry and many of its fans. Rap cover versions of previous songs therefore became one conscious strategy in the 1990s for updating tried and tested pop hits into a new genre format.42 The star system was arguably at a peak at this time, with artists cross-marketed in film and television in addition to recorded music (e.g., Kylie Minogue, Janet Jackson, and Will Smith). As music videos became key to marketing hit songs in this era, MTV provided an additional audiovisual reinforcement of the novelty of the new product, another platform to promote the star alongside these other media platforms. In terms of the entertainment industry, ’80s and ’90s major record labels were controlled by multimedia conglomerates that followed a rights-based organization structure.43 In other words, they were able to utilize their vast resources, including previously owned copyrights and international distribution, to try to resell or repackage material from an earlier era to a new youth market. In terms of product life cycles, this was largely intergenerational. As Michael Dwyer notes, “In the Reagan Era, courting the generational affiliations of the ‘MTV generation’ became a lucrative business.”44 He points to the cross-marketing of stars in film and pop music (e.g., Prince) as well as the use of “oldies” from the 1950s for nostalgia films like Diner (1982), Stand By Me (1986), and The Buddy Holly Story (1980). Dwyer’s study focuses solely on the 1980s film industry use of 1950s nostalgia, and in most cases the wholesale use of earlier popular music in new films. A Sloanist example of this trend would include the Fat Boys’ version of “The Twist” (1988, featuring original artist Chubby Checker) as an updating for the hip-hop (and MTV) generation. Additionally, the nostalgic tendencies became an opportunity for companies to sell and distribute older material in a variety of ways. The rise of neoliberalism and the financialization of the economy at this time supported a “portfolio management” approach to music and other assets that would have added to these trends. Finally, new playback formats—cassette, CD, DVD—were popularized that allowed record labels to resell their back catalogues through reissues, compilations, or remastered versions. This was another instance of companies repackaging earlier material in new formats for domestic use.45 Remastering “classic” albums for these new formats could also be seen as a facet of the updating of earlier products, fitting within the strategy of rights-based organizations.46 Given that multinational corporations were merging and expanding further at this time, they would be able to exploit a wider catalogue of their existing rights, through new playback formats, remastered versions, as well as sampling or re-recording older songs to create new hits with new stars. 1980s Case Studies: SAW and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis In mid- to late-1980s London, the “hit factory” of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman (known hereafter as SAW) began to produce “Eurobeat” or “Hi-NRG” music, a style of synthesized popular music originating in gay dance cultures with Patrick Cowley and Bobby Orlando’s early to mid-1980s electronic disco productions in San Francisco and New York City respectively. SAW produced hits for Dead or Alive, Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley, Bananarama, and many others. The production team has admitted that their sound was initially based on replicating Trevor Horn’s production work for songs like “Relax” (1983), performed by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Their productive methods helped them achieve more than 100 UK Top 40 hits and sold more than 40 million records between 1985 and 1990. Their prolific output meant that this sound, though it had origins elsewhere, became associated with SAW. The use of Fairlight CMI (series IIx for Dead or Alive, and updated to series III in 1986 by SAW), Linn 9000 drum machine to sequence, and drum samples put into the AMS DMX 15-80S Digital Delay/Harmoniser gave the tracks a distinctive sound, and many of those samples were used repeatedly for multiple artists.47 The tempo and sense of rhythm from Hi-NRG was now being mainstreamed into pop music targeted to young kids. Most relevant to Sloanist production, SAW produced a cover version of “The Locomotion” for Kylie Minogue’s first single in 1988, originally performed by Little Eva in 1962 as “The Loco-Motion.” Through these new techniques of samples and synthesizers, it created a “new” versioning of rhythm and blues from an earlier era. SAW mainstreamed the sounds associated with Hi-NRG, a style that had previously been much more “underground.”48 Minogue’s music video for “Locomotion” shows her flying from an airport to a staged area that features various graffiti-style murals, including one of a New York City subway car, hence making a tentative link to the song’s lyrics, dance moves, and imagery updated for a hip-hop-influenced youth audience. The signature SAW sound was created as a complete backing track without a demo stage in the process. This is important as it cut out a stage in the assembly chain, bolstered by the studio’s top line equipment, adding to the team’s productivity.49 SAW produced music in an organized fashion, like an assembly line. Engineer Phil Harding described how they worked on multiple projects a day in a routine fashion at Bunker Studio: SAW worked 11 a.m.–10 p.m. in the upstairs studio, recording and working on two or three projects in the same day. Pete Hammond and Dave Ford would arrive around 10 p.m. and work on the mixes through the night to have them ready for SAW to listen to the following morning. Harding writes: “A true ‘production line’ in every sense of the phrase and hence the nickname ‘The Hit Factory,’ which we became known as from 1986.”50 We could see this as capitalist alienation and a hyper-specialized division of labor, and arguably a shift from the musician toward the labor of the producer/programmer/technician as song composer.51 By comparing SAW’s processes to that of Motown in the 1960s, Pete Waterman often defended criticism of his assembly-line production “for churning out similar-sounding, manufactured, cold, sterilised pop music, that was easy to make, uninspiring and didn’t deserve to be successful or to last any length of time.”52 Harding commented that SAW are “now revered as the only UK-based music group, so far, to emulate the success of Tamla Motown in America.”53 The assembly line production model was not lost on the satirical British television program Spitting Image, which in 1989 satirized Stock, Aitken, and Waterman by suggesting that Kylie Minogue was manufactured in a lab, and that she is essentially the same as Rick Astley, changeable by turning a dial in the studio. Producing Minogue’s version of “The Locomotion” for her successful debut album is a paradigmatic example of Sloanist updating of an earlier song to a newer style, defined in part by state-of-the-art electronic timbres. Across the pond in Minneapolis, the production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were producers of a style that became known as “new jack swing,” a heavily synthesized mix of drum machine, synthesizers, and samples as comprising its sonic palette. To use one example of their production style, they used a one-measure looped sample from Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” (1969) as a structural basis for the song “Rhythm Nation,” as recorded and performed by Janet Jackson on her fourth studio album Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989). The sample, which has the audibly distinctive “slap” of Larry Graham’s bass line with layers of synthesized drum hits and other sounds that sounded more “up-to-date.” In addition to the sample, the chorus is a collectively sung pentatonic melody: “We are a part of a rhythm nation,” stylistically drawing from Sly Stone’s collectively sung “Thank You” chorus (ex. 1). Although the Sly example suggests a G pentatonic over an E7 chord (creating a #9) and the Jackson example (ex. 2) suggests E pentatonic over the same E7 bass line, the collectively sung chorus creates a similar effect. Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Chorus of “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” 1969. Transcription by the author. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Chorus of “Rhythm Nation,” 1989. Transcription by the author. The song arguably updates the tried-and-tested funk sound of “Thank You” into a new jack swing framework by way of sampling the old version, including new synthesizer sounds associated with the new style—“new jack swing” as brand—and updating with a new star text (the first three parameters of Sloanist updating as outlined above). While arguably more rearrangement and new compositional work is being done to call it a cover version of “Thank You,” the original loop provides the structural backbone of the new song in such a way that the tempo, bass, and rhythm of the track provide the same basic groove. Jimmy Jam explains in a 2015 interview the inspiration for the title track from the album: “I was sitting at dinner one night and ‘Thank You’ from Sly and the Family Stone came on. When it got to the bridge, I just was like ‘Oh shit, that’s it!’ I put the guitar part in a sampler, put a beat around it. It took Sly to conjure that up. That album took six months. The title track is the centerpiece of the whole thing.”54 The music video for “Rhythm Nation” takes place in an abandoned industrial factory, and itself updates the aesthetics of the Broadway/Hollywood musical with the collective dancing and rhythmic breaks for dancers to show individual moves, something Janet Jackson’s brother Michael utilized so successfully in his 1980s music videos as well. The lyrical content of the song emphasizes moving beyond the racist barriers in society: “With music by our side / To break the color lines / Let's work together / To improve our way of life; Join voices in protest / To social injustice / A generation full of courage / Come forth with me”—a call to moving together collectively in the interest of social progress and uplift.55 The collectivity demonstrated in the video, through dancing, collective singing, updated military-style outfits, and the funk sample, reinforces the notion of African American empowerment in a similar way to Sly and the Family Stone, but with updated sonorities signifying new jack swing. The military outfits are potentially reminiscent of the Black Panthers, but also echo Public Enemy’s militant approach to rap music at the time. Given the dance-heavy nature of the music and video, however, it suggests a less combative approach than Public Enemy or the Black Panthers. As with hip-hop, new jack swing was updating earlier forms and ideas with an emphasis on synthesized electronic timbre as an element in its design. The Sly sample represents the deployment of musical capital that becomes structurally integral to the new single. David Arditi has argued that digital music production has devalued the skilled labor of the musician,56 and as Marx argued in Capital: Volume 1, mass industrialization brings about such a devaluing.57 The foregrounding of these new synthesized sounds explicitly add to its Sloanist production, SAW embracing the cover version more traditionally than the sample-based version from Jam and Lewis while emphasizing the new of new jack swing. Producers in the following era have also had successful careers crossing over into artist territory, as we will see most notably with Puff Daddy in the 1990s. 1990s Case Studies: Puff Daddy, Will Smith, and the “Rap Cover Version” Inspired in part by Dr. Dre’s G-Funk methods, the mid- to late 1990s work of production teams “The Hitmen,” based at Bad Boy Entertainment, and The Trackmasters (Poke and Tone) provide some of the more overt examples of Sloanist upgrading of musical products. Puff Daddy worked with the Trackmasters in the early 1990s, then applied these Fordist and Sloanist methods with his own production team, The Hitmen. In short, this was a strategy of re-recording hit songs of the past, and adapting them to be a vehicle for star rappers. The hook of the hit song is often maintained for the (sung) chorus, where verse material can be replaced by a rap instead of the vocal. Examples include The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” (1994), produced by the Trackmasters, using the beat and chorus from Mtume’s “Juicy Fruit,” and Puff Daddy’s lament to The Notorious B.I.G., “I’ll be Missing You” (1997). The latter was co-produced with Stevie J (head producer of the Hitmen), reperforming The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and debuted at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It is both within the “crate digging” aesthetics of hip-hop producers looking for earlier material as the backbone of their new track, and a strategy of a risk-averse music industry that would rather bank on a previously tested hit song than something designed from scratch. To quote Dave Laing, “The only guide available to what may be very popular in the future is felt to be what has been very popular in the past.” He continues, “The producers of today are frequently the consumers of yesterday.”58 The use of a previous pop track for a rap single became a transtylization that we could call a “rap cover version,” a practice that became popularized (and criticized) in this period (1994–99) as rap music was rising to become the best-selling music genre in the United States by 1998. This method was arguably less complex intertextually than production techniques of hip-hop’s “golden era” (1987–93) where digital sample collages and more fragmentary looped beats were the norm.59 With rap music of the 1990s and 2000s, Adam Krims notes that the star producer has become a brand, representing particular “soundscape strategies,” in which “the ‘beats’ on the CD will fill the playback space in trademarked ways,”60 but also in the case of the producers mentioned, that the star producer will employ trademarked sampling or borrowing formulas that rework older hits into new design-intensive spatialized sound worlds. Stepping into the artist-producer role, Puff Daddy’s song “Come with Me” (1998) featured in the blockbuster film Godzilla (dir. Roland Emmerich). The track was an interpolation of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” (1975), and while Jon Bonham’s drumming was a regular feature on hip-hop breakbeats for decades, this cover takes such hip-hop aesthetics in a different direction. The music video is a mini-movie in itself, using the larger-than-life disaster aesthetics of a Godzilla movie, but with Puff Daddy as protagonist. He and the musicians are performing in Times Square in all-white suits, juxtaposed with cuts from footage from the film. The music video could also be said to be flaunting Clinton-era economic prosperity of the “bling” phase of mainstream rap, conspicuous consumption in its “overproduction,” inclusion of more symphonic musicians than the original, and in the cultural capital of bringing in Jimmy Page for the video and the recording session.61 One cannot help but think the presence of Page gives the new track a tacit stamp of approval from the originators, and might even prompt younger listeners to seek out the original. The figure perhaps most associated with the “rap cover version” of this era is Will Smith. Most of the singles from the Will Smith albums Big Willie Style (1997) and Willennium (1999) fit the definition of Sloanist updates with the large-scale harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and timbral use of earlier song material: “Men in Black” (1997, using Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots”), “Wild Wild West” (1999, using Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish”), “Miami” (1998, using The Whispers’ “And the Beat Goes On”), “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” (1998, using Sister Sledge’s “He’s the Greatest Dancer”), “Just the Two of Us” (1998, using Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr.’s song of the same name) to name a few. All the aforementioned singles had accompanying music videos, were highly successful, and in the case of “Men in Black,” “Wild Wild West,” and Puff Daddy’s “Come With Me,” were cross-marketed with films. These music videos interact with the film’s story world in some way, while updating the older songs to include rap verses. This trend for rap cover versions became formulaic to say the least. Perhaps in a similar vein to the Spitting Image parody of Stock, Aiken, and Waterman in the 1980s, music journalists began to rail against the unoriginality of these versions. Many mainstream rap examples from Will Smith, Puffy Daddy, and others encouraged Neil Strauss in 1997 to write the New York Times article “Is Sampling a) Creative or b) Theft”—writing about singles by Puff Daddy, Wyclef Jean, and Will Smith in particular as uncreative because of the extent of borrowed, untransformed musical material used.62 Strauss’s critique may originate from a “rockist” perspective, an assumption of musical originality that sometimes erases (or even whitewashes) the deeply intertextual relationships between current music and its past influences—not dissimilar to how many speak of composer-geniuses of the Romantic era. Those aware of early hip-hop (and wider Afro-diasporic) music-making practices will see that the practice of a rap cover version of a song also fits in the earlier traditions of hip-hop DJs playing preexisting material for parties where MCs would rap over the records, or of dubplates and toasting in Jamaican music. By this estimation, the first rap cover version was also the first rap hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” which used Chic’s “Good Times” as its (reperformed) instrumental, and also utilized the 12-inch format for the extended edit, including a 15-minute version.63 Utilizing such strategies within a capitalistic framework of the music industry shows that the two impulses/practices do not need to be completely separate. Dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality in these dynamics will need investigation at a level that this introductory survey of the concept cannot address fully here, but they are very much at work and have been since the origins of the recorded music industry.64 One final example from the rap cover era that helped spur a further updating of the original was The Fugees’ version of “Killing Me Softly.” The 1996 version covers the 1972 version made famous by Roberta Flack, and reached number 1 on US Top 40 charts. Salaam Remi, who produced a number of tracks on their second album The Score, recounts an anecdote where band member Pras called him up to ask about the original song: One day Pras calls me and says, ‘Hey, if you were gonna do over [Roberta Flack’s] “Killing Me Softly,” how would you do it?’ I thought about it [hums out the beats]. I was like, ‘Hey, you know what? I’d probably do it like [A Tribe Called Quest’s] “Bonita Applebum,” kinda like in that type of vibe. [Pras says], ‘That’s the same thing I thought! I’ll call you right back.’ Click.” Mimicking the quick exchange, Remi pointed out the direction. “If you listen to The Fugees’ ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’ it’s pretty much ‘Bonita Applebum’ with the bass played the same way that the bass on ‘Nappy Heads’ [which had been produced by Remi].65 So my influence was pretty much in them, without me actually always doing it. That’s part of what this ‘paying it forward’ is. I helped them find their space where they could now explore something themselves. They took what happened on that album, and continued on into their [solo] careers.66 The idea to cover the song came from Pras, but Remi provided the formula as production strategy for the cover version to include the well-known hip-hop beat underneath Lauryn Hill’s vocals. The success of the song spurred Flack, whose 1972 version also went to number 1, to rerecord a dance remix version, “Reborn Club Vox.” At 7 minutes 44 seconds in length, it was recorded for Atlantic and reached the top of Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play singles in September 1996. Though in one sense, Flack reclaims the song she is famous for singing, in another she crosses over into another genre where such remixing is common and arguably a part of Sloanist upgrading of musical products to a new purpose, from soul ballad to uptempo club dance floor remix. Whereas the 1980s examples from SAW and new jack swing consider timbre as a prominent feature in updating, the following examples from the 1990s, I would argue, foreground genre even more so. Rap music covers are timbrally different from the earlier tracks they utilize, but there is also a lot of sonic overlap from the sample (often 1970s funk) as a defining sonic feature of hip-hop music. Transtylations into rap music are arguably one of many genres that are well suited to such practices. The solidification of genre cultures give rise to the opportunity for the Sloanist upgrading of previous “models”: ragtime, jazz, heavy metal, synth pop, bossa nova, dub B-side versions, disco edits, electronic dance music remixes, and rap music are but few of the genres that can transtylize through using generic signifiers to transform materials from other song genres (e.g., a jazz version of song x). An interesting special case involves the “Bond Song” canon, as in hit songs from the six-decade James Bond film franchise, as investigated by Daub and Kronengold. For the Bond song, the form is locked into using particular melodic and harmonic motives, and often similar orchestral soundworlds, but is consistently updated (sometimes by genre and always with new star singer) to be marketed alongside the new films.67 Also engaging in a dialectical relationship between new and familiar, the examples from SAW, new jack swing and the rap cover version all update timbre, genre, and star to varying degrees. Retroism vis-à-vis Sloanism One could argue that with the relatively large-scale borrowing from songs in the previous examples, that the sampling, covering, or borrowing of material is reflective of what Simon Reynolds described at length in his 2011 book Retromania. He argues that recent years, especially the decade of the 2000s, have been dominated by an obsession with our recent past. He provides a long list of such manifestations, including band reunions (e.g., The Police, Led Zeppelin, The Pixies), museums like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, biographies, rockumentaries, shows like VH1’s I Love the 80s, reissues, remastered albums, YouTube as new “field of cultural practice,”68 Hollywood film remakes (True Grit, Get Smart, Dukes of Hazzard), sampling, and bands like the White Stripes who espouse much older rock ideologies from the 1960s.69 Reynolds considers retro as an “intersection between mass culture and personal memory,”70 and defines retro as always about the immediate past. He continues that not only is this obsession unprecedented, but that “there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.”71 New internet technologies such as YouTube and digital storage devices such as the iPod have been able to facilitate access to the past more quickly and on a larger scale.72 My use of 1980s and 1990s examples here means that my focus differs slightly from Reynolds’s overall area of the 2000s as the “re-decade,” but his observations were the impetus to consider how Sloanist upgrading both differs from retroism and sometimes contains it. I agree with Christopher Doll’s observations that Reynolds’s conception of the “retro” could be viewed as a specific intertextual category,73 and would add that Sloanist production is another distinctive intertextual category that seeks to update the old by transtylizing it, updated to new trends, new technologies, and new genres. Both retroism and Sloanism can arguably stem from an obsession with the recent past (and perhaps intergenerational linkage), and perhaps from the same rights-based corporate strategies. What Reynolds overlooks, however, is the difference between the preservation, re-creating, reenacting of the past, and the repackaging and remaking of a product that updates previous material through musical covers, mashups, remixes, and other reappropriations. Sloanist music production therefore could be analyzed as distinct from a retroist music production style such as Mark Ronson’s 1960s Phil Spector–style production for Amy Winehouse’s single “Rehab” (2006), or the Stray Cats’s “Rock This Town” (1981) or “Stray Cat Strut” (1981) that seek to re-create 1950s rock and roll or rockabilly production styles.74 “Nu-crooners” such as Michael Bublé would also fall under the retromania Reynolds discusses as invoking an earlier form of jazz,75 as would The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” (2019) which utilize 1980s synth pop aesthetics, like A Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran” from 1982, via more recent vaporwave and retrowave trends. Such approaches could also be compared with the Sloanism of the previous examples, or with other transtylations like heavy metal covers of pop and R&B songs (e.g., Northern Kings’ “Kiss from a Rose”), progressive rock tendencies to cover classical music (e.g., Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s version of “Pictures at an Exhibition”), or new films that update songs via their intermediality (e.g., the 1992 updated music video of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to include Wayne’s World movie footage).76 The phenomenon of updating band members may also represent Sloanism linked to an obsolescence in function of some of their members. The 1950s doo-wop group The Drifters, Latino boy band Menudo, and the late-1990s girl group The Sugababes are such examples of this.77 Sloanism and retroism can converge and hybridize in many cases; for example, in an iPod dock in the shape of a Jukebox: the Sloanism of the iPod technology becomes hybrid with the skeuomorph of a large jukebox as both furniture and loudspeaker with a heavy emphasis on retro design—the “convergence culture” of new and old media, and theorized extensively by Henry Jenkins.78 Products play on the music/image dichotomy by creating an ironic mismatch of retro and new—one such example would be the Spike Jones music video for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” (1994) which sets their new song to a parody of 1970s crime drama television imagery.79 Baz Luhrmann’s films also use such a postmodern juxtaposition: Moulin Rouge (2001), for example, uses hyper-stylized imagery of fin-de-siècle Paris alongside stylistically updated versions of pop songs (e.g., “Lady Marmalade,” “Nature Boy”).80 Long deceased stars associated with an earlier era are often used for advertising. For example, Volkswagen “updated” Gene Kelly to advertise the Golf GTI. The now-iconic scene in which Kelly performs the title song from the film Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is updated in the 2005 commercial with computer technology to have Kelly breakdancing to a remix version of the song. Perhaps this is the most overt instance of Sloanism—updating music and dance moves to signify and market the updating of a car brand.81 Reynolds’s version of retroism might hinge on recent memory, but Sloanism also takes history as raw material for new transformative products often targeted to a new audience. From an economic standpoint, it is a way to sell old labor in a new guise, and to sample the earlier version makes money for the old and new brands. This is where the two concepts often converge: invoking and using the music of the past, in part, to resell it to the consumer in upgraded formats. In other words, the retroism of content (the reissue) converges with the Sloanism of form (a new, updated playback format). The proliferation of retromania, as argued by Reynolds, may be a reaction against the Sloanist impulse, against the “new.” However, his perspective comes from particular ideologies in popular music that purport to “rip it up and start again,” to quote the title of his book on postpunk. I would argue that such perspectives mask the indebtedness that his beloved postpunk artists have to the past, and to the Black music (and its practices) that he critiques so strongly in Retromania, namely, sampling. His perspectives erase a recognition of African-based approaches to “masterful revision.” Furthermore, these genres work within a much larger framework of industrial production which none of us are completely separate from. To ignore such facets risks being susceptible to the very illusions and ideologies that have made such divisions between owners of capital and artists so stark in the music industry. Conclusion The idea of the upgrade in popular culture is still with us in the twenty-first century, with mobile phones, video games, and playback equipment.82 By the mid-2000s, Beyoncé released the song “Upgrade U” on her second album B-Day (2006), which discussed how she would upgrade her partner’s wardrobe: “Partner, let me upgrade you, Audemars-Piguet you / Switch your neckties to purple labels.” This song espouses the desire for upward mobility through conspicuous consumption as well as the celebration of excess also found in the previous decade’s “bling” era of hip-hop. Intersecting with wider fashion trends, the idea of upgrading your man could be considered a reversal of the marketing trope of upgrading your woman that has been so uncomfortably linked with car discourse and material culture more generally. “Upgrade U” demonstrates a new manifestation of trends and attitudes that were mainstreamed through GM’s concept of the annual model, and continue to pervade capitalist frameworks in powerful ways.83 We may wish to further investigate what happens when the nineteenth-century concept of conspicuous consumption meets the twenty-first-century condition where we are the product being sold in the digital economy, and how such shifts are tracked and monitored. As I have shown, Sloanism can be found in music production techniques as adapted from realms of automotive and other forms of industrial production. With a brief survey of examples from the 1980s and 1990s, I am not necessarily trying to make the case that such methods are the norm in popular music production and marketing, nor am I trying to pass an aesthetic value judgment on them. Using terms like “formulaic” or “overproduction” are ways to demonstrate strategy, technique, and pervasiveness rather than act as a pejorative. In choosing to focus on production and which musical elements have changed, I am also not trying to make the point that the star artist is somehow tangential or not crucial to the process. Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey are important examples here—their constant evolution, artistry, and star power have proven to be formidable hit makers for decades. These star artists are a fundamental reason that these new versions feel new, that they work as hit songs, and that the fan loyalty accumulated could be likened to brand loyalty. I would argue, however, that by looking at the specific instances of Sloanism in popular music, stemming from a shared desire to create hit records by artists, producers, and their labels, it may help to provide a greater understanding of these instances within the appropriate industrial and economic contexts. As the first study of its kind, examples of Sloanism could be expanded to cover multiple musical genres and media formats in ways that I have and haven’t touched upon here. The desire for the new, as a feature of the modern era, has existed longer than the automobile, but the post–World War II desire to keep up with domestic production and shorten product life cycles has fueled realms of cultural production in unprecedented ways. At a time when income inequality is increasing alongside the growth of corporate personhood, it is urgent to understand the contemporary dynamics of capital accumulation in all realms of production. Reynolds and others who discuss retro culture leave uncategorized the distinction between a retroism to revive and reissue the past as it existed, and an “upgrading urge” that somehow “updates” the previous material—as a business or marketing strategy to resell their copyrighted material, as the result of a risk-averse popular music industry, a product of the devaluing of non-digital labor as described by Arditi and the rise of remix cultures, alignment with the “crate digging” practices of hip-hop culture, as sources of inspiration for creative working methods, or for wider aesthetic reasons. Both retroism and Sloanism utilize the capital of earlier music as the basis for new songs, but the latter is more concerned with using the past as an engine with which to reorganize and change its product in different ways. As stated earlier, a theory of Sloanist production cannot account for a theory of Sloanist consumption, and Sloanism in music production will inevitably differ in some ways from strategies utilized by the automotive industry. This article deals primarily with the mainstream “hit song” for that reason, to engage with a product that has a relatively short life cycle as it exists on the Billboard charts, regardless of its physical or economic decay.84 For example, the release of “Rhythm Nation” did not encourage listeners to forget or trade in their Sly and the Family Stone albums for Janet Jackson ones. In fact, sampling may encourage others to discover these earlier versions, which will likely be updated in terms of format, not content.85 From an economic standpoint, Sly Stone, Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis, and their record labels and publishing companies (and anyone else invested in those brands) can seek to profit from such a relationship despite any obsolescence of playback format. A Sloanist theory of popular music production only accounts for a small range of production strategies in the music industry, but nevertheless shows instances where techniques in the production of other products have mirrored music production, most overtly in using past musical material for a perceivably newer genre, technology, or star performer. Musical Sloanism as a special kind of cover version or interpellation is nevertheless a formidable intertextual practice that demonstrates the potential for combining the study of musical material, record production, and other late capitalist modes of production. Justin A. Williams is an Associate Professor in Music at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop (2013), editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (2015), and coeditor (with Katherine Williams) of The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (2016) and The Singer-Songwriter Handbook (2017). He has also written on crowdfunding, progressive metal, and Hamilton: An American Musical. Email: Justin.Williams@bristol.ac.uk Portions of this research were presented at the Popular Music and Automobile Culture Symposium (University of Chester, June 2012), Popular Culture Association (Washington, D.C., April 2013), and Experience Music Project Pop Conference (April 2014) as well as research seminars at St. John’s College, Oxford (January 2015), and City University of London (February 2015). I would like to thank Katherine Williams, Carlo Cenciarelli, Tim Summers, Tom Perchard, Jason Stanyek, Laura Tunbridge, Jonathan Godsall, Steven Gamble, James McNally, Shaena Weitz, Emma Hornby, Paul Rouse, Dianne Scullin, Maeve O’Donnell, Marko Higgins, Ivan Mouraviev, Alex Gibson, and Zach Diaz for comments on earlier drafts of this article, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. The research and revisions for this article were supported in part by AHRC grant ref. AH/V002988/1. All underlying data are provided in full within this paper. Notes 1 Bernard London, “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence,” 1932, 1–2. Available at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/London_(1932)_Ending_the_depression_through_planned_obsolescence.pdf (accessed 1 June 2013). 2 Quoted in David Gartman, Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design (London: Routledge, 1994), 8. 3 The song “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” written by Carey and Walter Afansieff, arguably aims for a “retro” production reminiscent of the 1960s, making it sound more “timeless” than it was, complemented by a music video that emulated grainy “home video” footage seemingly from decades previous. Carey herself updated the song with added orchestration and a different introduction on her 2010 album Merry Christmas II You, reflective of the sequel impulse in popular culture, as well as the updating of products that I discuss in this article. The new version has Carey singing verse one, Bieber singing verse two, both singing the bridge, and Bieber providing response phrases to Carey’s singing of the final verse. 4 The term “Sloanism” was used in Karal Ann Marling, “America’s Love Affair with the Automobile in the Television Age,” in Autopia: Cars and Culture, ed. Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 355. The term is used by Marling in passing as descriptive of Sloan’s methods and has received little critical attention in academic literature. 5 In the context of critical theory the term “intertextuality” was coined by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s (influenced by Bakhtin and Saussure) to refer most broadly to the relationship between two texts, and most often refers to the presence of a text, through quotation, allusion, or otherwise, within another text. For a broad overview, see Graham Allen, Intertextuality (New York: Routledge, 2000). For a taxonomy of intertextuality in popular music, see Serge Lacasse, “Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music,” in The Musical Work: Reality or Invention, ed. Michael Talbot (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2000), 35–58. See also Lori Burns, Alyssa Woods, and Marc Lafrance, “The Genealogy of a Song: Lady Gaga's Musical Intertexts on The Fame Monster (2009),” Twentieth-Century Music 12, no. 1 (2015): 3–35. Related to musical intertextuality is the musicological subfield of “musical borrowing” which looks at the relationship between quotation, collage, and other intertextual techniques in a range of repertoire from early music to Charles Ives to hip-hop. See J. Peter Burkholder’s “The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field,” Notes 50, no. 3 (1994): 851–70; Musical Borrowing: An Annotated Bibliography, available at http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/borrowing/ (accessed 10 February 2015); and “Borrowing,” in Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy, available at http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/52918?q=Borrowing&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit (accessed 10 February 2015). 6 Colin Campbell has written on the processes through which novelty is created in consumer culture, and divides conceptions of the “new” in three ways: (1) new as fresh or newly created, e.g. a new baby or new car but not necessarily a new invention or innovation, (2) new as improved or innovative, and (3) the new as the unfamiliar or novel. Colin Campbell, “The Desire for the New: Its Nature and Social Location as Presented in Theories of Fashion and Modern Consumerism,” in Consuming Technologies, ed. Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch (London: Routledge, 1992), 52. The musical examples in the article exploit the third sense of the new, as hybridity of new sounds with material that will sound new to a younger demographic, though arguably musical Sloanism does have aspects of all three senses of the new. 7 Raina Douris, “Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis: The Songwriting Production Duo You Know, But Don’t,” NPR interview, World Café Words (at 6:14-6:40), available at https://www.npr.org/2021/10/07/1043998539/jimmy-jam-and-terry-lewis-the-songwriting-and-production-duo-you-know-but-dont (accessed 21 October 2021). 8 Daub and Kronengold write that “to see how inimical this untimeliness is to the way pop music usually works, consider the following. Classical music has gods: you ascend to heaven and you are one more of the elect. You do not displace someone else—the ascension of Brahms and Wagner didn’t displace Mozart and Beethoven. But pop stars, and to a lesser extent the songs that make them temporarily famous, always exist under the threat of being disposable and local; that’s why we have kings of pop. They ascend the throne; they throw some orgies and command some minions; and lackeys put their faces on any piece of merchandise big enough to carry it. But all the while there are pretenders and would-be assassins waiting in the wings. Then you get forced off the throne, or you expire on a Las Vegas toilet, and suddenly someone else is walking around in your vestments and hogging your throne. You die, you lose your cachet, you get charge with some sex crimes, and suddenly Neverland belongs to the bank and your crown passes on to someone else.” Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold, The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4–5. 9 See Samuel A. Floyd, The Power of Black Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Related to this is Amiri Baraka’s concept of “the changing same”; see LeRoi Jones, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in Black Music (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1969), 180–211. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Sweat, ed. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 55–71. 10 Musical-cultural analysis of this kind is also indebted in some ways to Adorno, who famously lived in car-centric Los Angeles from 1941 to 1949, and not coincidentally was one of the first theorists to link mass production techniques with popular music distribution in terms of standardization and pseudo-individualization. 11 In the most basic sense, automobiles and recorded popular music are both highly pervasive and influential products of the twentieth century, and have been intertwined in a number of pop-cultural realms, including films (American Graffiti), books (JG Ballard’s Crash), music videos (OK Go’s “Needing/Getting”), and songs (“In My Merry Oldsmobile”). John Urry has written on the twentieth century as the “century of the car,” citing Henri Lefebvre, writing in 1968 that it is the “leading-object” in terms of its centrality within American culture, and that the automobile is the quintessential manufactured object of Fordism. John Urry, “The ‘System’ of Automobility,” in Automobilities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry (London: Sage, 2005), 32, 26. Lefebvre quoted in Tim Dant, “The Driver-Car,” in Automobilities, 61. 12 Dan Neil, “When Cars Were America’s Idols,” Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2009, available at https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jun-01-fi-gm-history1-story.html (accessed 21 October 2021). 13 Alfred P. Sloan, My Years with General Motors (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 150. 14 This is not to say that Sloan and his team invented upgrading products and planned obsolescence, but he popularized it on a large scale with an object that became crucial to American everyday life. 15 For example, the “Stovebolt Six” that Chevrolet introduced in 1929 stayed in models for almost a quarter century, to 1954. Gartman, Auto Opium, 97. Head designer Earl once said, “Our big job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934 the average car ownership span was 5 years; now [1955] it is 2 years. When it is 1 year, we will have a perfect score” (97). 16 In the promotional material for the newest edition of My Years with General Motors, Bill Gates has said that Sloan’s 1964 book “is probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business.” 17 Chapter 21 in Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers (London: Longmans, 1960), 307–19, deals with what he calls the “upgrading urge” of American consumers to trade in for more luxurious goods to represent a higher social class. Packard, a journalist and critic of consumerism, also wrote The Hidden Persuaders (1957), which focused on advertiser use of consumer motivational research to create desire for products. The impulse to create more versions of a copyrighted product can be found in film sequels (e.g., Star Wars, Batman, or James Bond franchises) or reboots (e.g., Ghostbusters, X Files, Roseanne). In the case of video games, we see franchises such as Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Madden updated for faster and higher-quality games. Strictly speaking, a music sequel would not always fall under Sloanism in music—“sequels” such as Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again,” Brubeck’s Time Further Out (1961), or the Now That’s What I Call Music compilation series would derive in part from the increased production and consumption of familiar products, brands, and star texts. Phones labeled 4G (for fourth generation) are advertised as more advanced than the previous 3G, and Internet practices defined as part of “Web 2.0” (and now Web 3.0) have now seeped into other marketing for updated products or concepts (“Classroom 2.0,” “Enterprise 2.0,” “Communities 2.0”) as a signifier of their newness over some previous, now outdated version. The term Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of the World Wide Web with an increased focus on user participation and collective creation. It is represented by software that supports sites used for accessing knowledge, social networking, blogging, tagging, and other communicative features. The term was popularized by Tim O’Reilly at the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. See Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0,” O’Reilly Network, available at http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (accessed 10 February 2015). My thanks to Tim Summers for suggesting the linkage of these practices with video game cultures. 18 London, “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence,” 1932, 3–4. 19 Quoted in Glenn Adamson, Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World (London: MIT Press, 2003), 129. 20 Brooks Stevens, quoted in the documentary film Pyramids of Waste (2010), 19:00 minutes. 21 Packard, The Status Seekers, 307–19. 22 Gerben Bakker, “The Making of a Music Multinational: Polygram’s International Business, 1945–1998,” Business History Review 80 (2006): 84. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 93. Bakker usefully summarizes: “The music multinationals that emerged after 1945 were rights based. They linked dispersed, idiosyncratic A&R units, creating portfolios of innovations (protected by temporary legal monopolies) within a global distribution system. This organization guaranteed market access and cornered the revenues of the major markets. It sold products whose marginal costs were minimal and whose marginal revenues roughly equaled marginal profits. Thus, since most of their costs were fixed, each additional sale added little to these costs; as a result, a large part of the added sales revenue equaled additional gross profits. The principle that marginal revenues translate into marginal (gross) profits is an essential feature of industries with both high fixed and sunk costs. These multinationals specialized in exploiting their existing rights—whose supply by definition was fixed—and in creating new rights whose rents they would be able to capture.” 25 Ibid., 82. 26 Even if the label did not own the rights to the original, they had the capital to purchase the license in ways that smaller options might not. 27 “Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.” Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in Essays onMusic, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 300. 28 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (London: Sage, 2016). 29 Quoted in Daub and Kronengold, The James Bond Songs, 22. 30 In terms of studies of musical format, one could start with Jonathan Sterne, “Format Theory,” in his book mp3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). See also Will Straw for discussions of the circulation of cultural commodities such as vinyl records and the compact disc. Straw, “Music as Commodity and Material Culture,” Repercussions 7–8 (1999–2000): 147–72; and “Spectacles of Waste,” in Circulation and the City, ed. Alexandra Boutrous and Will Straw (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 184–213. 31 Currently, the ever-increasing speed and density of a microprocessor is testament to this obsession with speed and its use in marketing consumer electronics, as well as the marketing of high-caffeine energy drinks which allow the consumer to do things faster and more productively. Semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that chip density would double every eighteen months or so (Moore’s law). See James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (London: Vintage Books, 1999), 77. One example of resistance to this acceleration was an internet “meme” in 2010 in which a Florida-based electronic musician slowed down the Bieber song “U Smile” by 800 percent and posted it on the Soundcloud website. The track was created by “Shamantis” on Soundcloud, and while it has been taken down presumably for copyright infringement, the track is easily available on YouTube and other Soundcloud repostings. The algorithm used to slow down such tracks was created by Romanian programmer Paul Octavian Nasca. Nasca had been inspired by a Norwegian sound art piece based on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony stretched across twenty-four hours called “9 Beet Stretch” (2002). Jace Clayton, “Curiosity Slowdown,” in Best Music Writing 2011, ed. Alex Ross (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2011), 70–74. See also Alexander Rehding, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). The equating of speed and power was forcefully theorized by Paul Virilio, and this attention to speed in the appropriation of popular music styles manifests itself in Kanye West’s early production, as in “Through the Wire,” a speeding up of Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire,” bebop jazz’s distancing from swing-era music, the aforementioned Soundcloud tempo manipulations, the Houston-based “Chopped and Screwed” hip-hop subgenre, dub music, rock and roll, EDM, and trip-hop to name a few. As the reworking of previous material reemploys past labor of musical material, the manipulation of speed of that labor both transforms it, updates it, and reconfigures the social relations within the music. See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Kay Dickinson, “Pop, Speed, Teenagers, and the ‘MTV Aesthetic’ in Recent Teen Films,” in Movie Music: The Film Reader, ed. Kay Dickinson (London: Routledge, 2003), 147. Speed politics has been rooted in discourse with the railroad, the automobile, and other mobile technologies, but speed as a value and source of power could also be found and analyzed in musical reappropriations as well. 32 Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (London: Routledge, 2000), xxix–xxxiv. 33 The legal/industry term for reperforming older material is called interpolation or replays, and is cheaper to license than a digital sample. 34 Mark Butler points to Albin Zak and Theodore Gracyk’s work, respectively, citing Zak: “Every single detail of its sound [is] a fixed element of its identity.” Quoted in Mark Butler, Playing with Something that Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 46. 35 In particular, see Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 36 Similar discussions have occurred in the context of the “assembly line” production of classical Hollywood film scores, involving a team of arrangers and orchestrators as there was a need to produce a film score in a relatively short amount of time. Classical Hollywood film music, like popular music, was also a target of Adorno’s mass culture criticisms. See Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Continuum, 2005). One link between industry and jazz composition is using the name of department stores to label specific bridge chord progressions: the Sears and Robuck (III7–VI7–II7–V7, e.g. “I Got Rhythm”) and Montgomery Ward (V7–I7–IV–IV–vi7–II7–ii7–V, e.g. “On the Sunny Side of the Street”). See Morris B. Holbrook, “Playing the Changes on the Jazz Metaphor,” Foundations and Trends in Marketing 2, nos. 3–4 (2008): 104. 37 One example I have analyzed elsewhere is “Who Am I (What’s my Name)” on the Snoop Doggy Dogg debut album Doggystyle (1993) which reperformed Tom Browne’s “Funkin for Jamaica” bassline alongside the chorus to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog,” changed to “Snoop Doggy Dogg.” The choruses on the static harmonic frameworks of George Clinton songs “Atomic Dog” and “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucka)” were translated into the descending chord progression (bm, bm/A, G, F♯7). A longer analysis of “Who Am I (What’s my Name)?” with transcriptions and sample sources can be found in Justin A. Williams, “‘Cars With the Boom’: Music, Automobility, and Hip-Hop ‘Sub’ Cultures,” in The Oxford Handbook to Mobile Music, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 109–41. 38 One musical example from the nineteenth century will suffice for now: Wagner aimed to re-create Beethoven’s artistic vision for the Ninth Symphony by updating the scoring, “taking into account the technical advances of musical instruments since Beethoven’s days, such as keyed trumpets capable of playing an extended pitch range, and simplified the parts in fairly inconspicuous ways.” Rehding, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, 64–65. Rehding’s study of the Ninth focuses on digital culture, but is also careful to note that the themes he investigates are not new: “Despite the emphasis on newness that is an almost inescapable part of any discussion of digital culture, the musical questions surrounding slowness and its concomitant features—scale and format, time and form, history and monumentality, incomprehensibility and the sublime—did not, of course, suddenly emerge out of thin air; they have a long history that stretches back into Beethoven’s nineteenth century and far beyond” (29). 39 Daub and Kronengold emphasize in their James Bond Songs that they are not talking about songs so much as “records,” in an era (1962 and later) in which music production becomes more crucial to the product: “Once records start to outsell sheet music, we find an increasing emphasis on grooves and on what is called feel, we hear musical arrangements becoming more and more assertive across a range of styles, and we see the emergence of record production as a creative realm alongside songwriting, performance, and arrangement. The rhythm section and percussion instruments play a greatly enhanced role—and not merely a rhythmic role, but textural melodic/harmonic, formal, and generic. The Bond films emerged at a moment when record production was becoming more assertive and tensions between the song and the record were coming to the fore. Changing production practices from the fifties into the seventies worked toward clearer differentiation of elements in a mix, and thus supported a more heterogeneous collection of materials. Beginning in the sixties this added up to a new kind of musical discourse, in which smaller musical objects—a dissonant brass chord, a electric-guitar twang, a simple piano-accompaniment figure—started to resemble objets trouves. A sense of particles constituting the musical discourse, and of objects in the stereo field, could make a recorded song feel like an assemblage. As such these records embodied multiple sets of values: different genres, different modes of continuity, different sorts of comportment. These changes had effects even on pop records, like Barry’s Bond songs, that sought to emphasize pop music’s traditional aesthetic values” (21). 40 The term transtylation comes from Lacasse, “Intertextuality and Hypertextuality,” 54. 41 The origins and features of the “disco edit” can be found in Margie Borschke, “Disco Edits and Their Discontents: The Persistence of the Analog in a Digital Era,” New Media & Society 13 (2010): 929–44. See also Butler, Playing with Something that Runs, 52–54, on versions in electronic dance music. See also Richard Osborne, Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012). 42 The flaunting of capital in pop hits was visual as well as musical. The celebration of excess is seen in many of the mainstream rap songs of the time, from Nas’s “Street Dreams” (1996), Puff Daddy’s “Come with Me” (1998) to the opulent resource-heavy productions of director Hype Williams (e.g. Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin” from 2000). We could also see this moment as somewhat of an apex for mainstream popular music, right before Napster’s rise and a wider national economic downturn. 43 After World War II, multinational enterprise and “rights-based” organizational structures were becoming important for pharmaceutical and motion pictures industries in America. Polygram pioneered a rights-based model for music, with copyrights generating revenue working like rents on a piece of land. These rights-based multinationals “linked dispersed, idiosyncratic A&R units, creating portfolios of innovations (protected by temporary legal monopolies) within a global distribution system. Costs were minimal, and that marginal revenues translate into marginal (gross) profits as an essential feature of industries with both high fixed and sunk costs.” The multinationals specialized in exploiting their existing rights, and in creating new rights whose rents they would be able to capture. Bakker, “The Making of a Music Multi-National,” 93. 44 Michael Dwyer, Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 85. 45 Steven Pond, “Old Wine, New Bottles: Record Collecting, Jazz Reissues, and the Jazz Tradition,” Jazz Perspectives 13, no. 1 (2021): 3–37. For a discussion of the Verve label and its acquisition by Polygram and discussion of CD reissues on the label, see Dale Chapman, The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 132. 46 For more on digitally remastered albums, see Matthew O’Malley, “The Definitive Edition (Digitally Remastered),” Journal on the Art of Record Production 10 (2015), available at https://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/the-definitive-edition-digitally-remastered/ (accessed 22 September 2022). 47 Joe Bennett, “Constraint, Creativity, Copyright and Collaboration in Popular Songwriting Teams” (PhD diss., University of Surrey, 2014), 164–65. 48 SAW had engaged with similar techniques for a cover of “Venus,” originally recorded by the Dutch band Shocking Blue in 1969, and reproduced for Bananarama in 1986. Harding tells an anecdote around the construction of “Venus,” as Siobhan of Banarama had wanted “Venus” to sound like the SAW production on “Dead or Alive”: “MA [Matt Aitken] and I looked at each other and said ‘Why didn’t you say so before, Siobhan? Leave it to us and come back tomorrow.’ As she left, all eyes were raised to the heavens. We knew exactly what we had to do. MA asked the assistant to power up the Linn, dig out the cowbell and Dead Or Alive samples, and get programming and recording. PW [Pete Waterman] and MS [Mike Stock] came back from the pub and were delighted with the news. We all rolled our sleeves up and got on with it. Within 12 hours, we had turned Bananarama into a female Dead Or Alive and the record was huge everywhere, proving to us that even though we had moved on to soul with acts like Princess, and our UK/Chicago hybrid House, there was still life in the Hi-NRG sound if you gave it a different twist. It seemed ironic that Dead or Alive originally came in asking SAW to make them sound like Divine and Hazell Dean, then two years later Bananarama come in asking us to make them sound like Dead Or Alive! What a circle we create in life.” Phil Harding, PWL from the Factory Floor (London: Cherry Red Books, 2010), 92. 49 Bennett, “Constraint, Creativity, Copyright,” 164–65. 50 Harding, PWL from the Factory Floor, 90. 51 David Arditi, “Digital Downsizing: The Effects of Digital Music Production on Labor,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 26, no. 4 (2014): 503–20. 52 See Harding, PWL from the Factory Floor, 19–20. 53 Ibid., 20, 137. 54 Steve Appleford, “Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis: Our Life in 15 Songs,” Rolling Stone, 9 October 2015, available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/jimmy-jam-and-terry-lewis-our-life-in-15-songs-163941/ (accessed 22 September 2022). 55 This focus on dance music, collectivity, and racial equality was a feature through the whole album, influenced by Jam and Lewis watching TV and switching between MTV and CNN, which merged in their mind: “Watching music videos on one side and watching atrocities on the other. Somehow they all merged together. The idea for ‘rhythm nation’ was you can dance, but we can also do something more intelligent.” Quoted in Appleford, “Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.” 56 Arditi, “Digital Downsizing.” Another consideration in the replacement of human labor in the digital era is the use of dead labor in sampling technologies. The relationship between live and dead labor has been discussed as “technologies of the intermundane” in Natalie Cole’s Grammy-winning remake of her father’s “Unforgettable” (1991)—a paradigmatic case of Sloanism in music production, playing with the nostalgia for the original while updating the production and adding his daughter to create a duet that creates family reunion effect across worlds. Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane,” The Drama Review 54 (2010): 14–38. See also Fred Goodman, “Duets With the Dead: Homage or Exploitation?” New York Times, 16 January 2000, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/16/arts/music-duets-with-the-dead-homage-or-exploitation.html (accessed 22 September 2022). 57 Arditi, “Digital Downsizing,” 503–20. 58 Dave Laing, “Making Popular Music: The Consumer as Producer,” in Consumption, Identity, and Style, ed. Alan Tomlinson (London: Routledge, 1990), 186, 190. 59 After 1992–93, high-profile sampling lawsuits concluded that all samples had to be cleared, and since then sample clearances and ownership credits are often easily found in mainstream rap album booklets. For more on copyright’s effect on mainstream hip-hop, see Amanda Sewell, “How Copyright Affected the Musical Style and Critical Reception of Sample-Based Hip-Hop,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 26, nos. 2–3 (2014): 295–320. See also Justin Williams, “Intertextuality, Sampling, and Copyright,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, ed. Justin Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 206–20. The well-publicized “Blurred Lines” case between the Marvin Gaye estate and Robin Thicke/Pharrell Williams concluded in the 2018 ruling that one could copyright a groove, thus bypassing many of the flexible methods of hit song creation. Perhaps in light of the weakening income streams of record companies, they have had to find more aggressive ways to protect their copyrights. See Ingrid Monson, “On Serving as an Expert Witness in the ‘Blurred Lines’ Case,” in The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture, ed. Nicholas Cook, Monique M. Ingalls, and David Trippett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 58–62. 60 Krims, Music and Urban Geography, 158–60. 61 Serge Lacasse mentions “Come with Me” and the reperformance of “Kashmir” in his “Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music,” 39–40. 62 Neil Strauss, “Sampling Is (a) Creative or (b) Theft?,” New York Times, 14 September 1997, anthologized in The Pop, Rock and Soul Reader, ed. David Brackett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 422–23. Strauss encourages readers to try to make such a hit themselves: “In future months, expect to see newcomers breaking into the pop charts riding a stolen song. It’s a clever way for pop singers to remake a classic and keep some of the writer’s royalties for themselves. If you get tired of the formula, you can always try it yourself. Just program a drum machine with any 4/4 rhythm with a strong back beat. Now grab a pop song that is no longer current but still recognizable, like Survivor's uplifting ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ Let your beat run for a few bars to create a groove, then drop in the chorus of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ completely unchanged from the original. Follow it with a vapid rap along the lines of: ‘It’s the eye of the tiger/The tiger of the eye/I’m working hard just to get by/Got more moves than Rocky/I’ll sip a glass of sake/Pay some royalty checks/Cause Survivor's on the decks.’ Then go back to your ‘Eye of the Tiger’ chorus (sing along or scratch a record over it if you like) and you’ve got your hit” (423). Wyclef Jean produced an updated version of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” (1977) titled “We Trying to Stay Alive” (1997). 63 The 15-minute version, described as “a milestone in the format,” features in the article, “The Most Collectable 12” Singles,” Record Collector, issue 503, 17 February 2020, available at https://recordcollectormag.com/articles/the-most-collectable-12-singles (accessed 21 October 2021). 64 The racial segregation in the origins of the recording music industry have been most explicitly outlined in Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and David Brackett, Categorizing Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). 65 The “Bonita Applebum” track by A Tribe Called Quest samples its main sitar riff from “Memory Band” (1968) by Rotary Connection, also used in “Killing Me Softly,” and the drums are sampled from 1973’s “Fool Yourself” by Little Feat. 66 Jake Paine, “Fugees Producer Salaam Remi Explains How They Went From Underground MCs to Global Superstars,” Ambrosia for Heads, available at https://ambrosiaforheads.com/2016/02/the-fugees-fu-gee-la-set-the-score-for-the-group-salaam-remi-explains/ (accessed 21 October 2021). 67 Daub and Kronengold, The James Bond Songs, 2015. 68 Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addition to its Own Past (London: Faber, 2010), 59. 69 “Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the ‘Re’ Decade. The 2000s were dominated by the ‘re-’ prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments. Endless retrospection: every year brought a fresh spate of anniversaries with their attendant glut of biographies, memoirs, rockumentaries, biopics and commemorative issues of magazines. Then there were the band reformations, whether it was groups reuniting for nostalgia tours in order to replenish (or to bloat still further) the members’ bank balances (Police, Led Zeppelin, Pixies … the list is endless) or as a prequel to returning to studio to relaunch their careers as recording artists (Stooges, Throbbing Gristle, Devo, Fleetwood Mac, My Bloody Valentine et al).” Ibid., xi. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., xxi. 72 Reynolds’s book has received criticism as well as praise—one critique points out that his opinions favor ideologies of “authenticity” found in his much-loved “post-punk” (1978–84) era, almost parading as a universal paradigm for all popular music authenticity. See Timothy Gabriele, “Retromania, you’d throw it against the wall if you weren’t so immersed in it,” popmatters.com, 7 August 2011, available at: http://www.popmatters.com/review/145770-retromania-by-simon-reynolds/ (accessed 10 February 2015); James Parker, “Retromania and the Atemporality of Contemporary Pop,” Discipline 2 (2012): 156–64; and Christopher Doll, “Review: Retromania” Notes 68, no. 4 (2012): 763–65. Furthermore, Reynolds is extremely critical of mash-ups, sampling, and YouTube, for example, and is generally skeptical of technology in different ways; he sees sampling technologies as able to mine and raid past material faster than ever before in order to create derivative material that will soon be forgotten. As Doll states, he is an “unapologetic Luddite (though never self-identifies as one),” and James Parker writes that Reynolds places blame on the current condition in mediological terms. Technologies and artists are blamed, rather than any other factors. Gabriele additionally makes the point that Reynolds ignores the economic dimensions of the music landscape, and that “the collapse of the music industry on all fronts likely lead to a monetary retreat into the safety of the familiar, the pop hierarchy unwilling to finance any risky business venture that might threaten an already unstable infrastructure,” a reading which would explain one possible motive for a rise in musical Sloanism as well as in retro products. 73 Doll, “Review: Retromania,” 765. 74 Dwyer, Back to the Fifties. 75 The term “nu-crooner,” and a longer discussion of it, can be found in Stuart Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead? (or has it moved to a new address) (London: Routledge, 2005), 77–98. 76 The 1992 Wayne’s World version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” music video includes the same music from the 1975 release, but the music video has updated footage from the film mixed with the original Queen promotional video for the song. In this case, the single itself is not a Sloanist updating, but the music video as an intermedial product is. A longer analysis of these music videos, and a longer reception history of “Bohemian Rhapsody” can be found in Nicholas Cook, “Video Cultures: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ Wayne’s World, and Beyond,” Representation in Western Music, ed. Joshua Walden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 77–99. 77 My thanks to Jonathan Godsall for pointing this out to me. To explore briefly the possibilities of outlining the Sloanist “updating” of classical music, early twentieth-century examples might include Romantic-style symphonic arrangements of Baroque music, such as by arranger/conductors Leopold Stokowski (1922 version of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor) and Sir Henry Wood (1935 version Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor) which are arguably updated to twentieth-century performance and recording technologies. The trend of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) would be the retroist companion to such practices. Synthesized examples of classical music from the 1960s to 1970s include the work in 1968 of Wendy Carlos (Switched on Bach) and Isao Tomita (The Planets), and the two artists are often sampled by hip-hop producers. In many cases, the updating of music in the Western classical canon does the exact opposite of making the older version obsolete; rather, it reinforces its place in the canon by demonstrating its longevity and adaptability. 78 Mark Katz’s chapter “The Persistence of Analogue” opens with a description of a wooden box speaker that supports an Apple iPhone 4 (ca. 2011) as a way in to discuss the relationship between digital and analogue. His main two case studies feature recent DJ-ing practices and the vinyl resurgence of the past fifteen years or so. See Katz, “The Persistence of Analogue,” in Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Production, ed. Gianmario Borio (London: Routledge, 2015), 275–87. 79 Another hybrid music video would include Christina Aguilera’s “Candyman” (2007) which has retro World War II visuals and stylistic allusions using material from “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” as made famous by the Andrews Sisters. Technology has allowed Aguilera to be all three sisters, and lyrics are much more sexualized than would have existed in the era, but the video and music certainly play heavily on retro aesthetics. The technological convergence of both old and new media, such as playing video games on a television, or listening to music on a mobile phone, is the subject of Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture, and a convergence of older brands or older media with newer updates certainly represents such examples of hybridity. See Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). In the case of music, such a convergence culture can be represented by the remastered album on a new media format. 80 Katherine R. Lawson, “Silly Love Songs: The Impact of Puccini’s La Bohème on the Intertextual Strategies of Moulin Rouge,” Journal of Popular Culture 42, no. 6 (2009): 1040–52; Elizabeth Hudson, “Moulin Rouge! and the Boundaries of Opera,” Opera Quarterly 27, nos. 2–3 (2011): 256–82; Mina Yang, “Moulin Rouge and the Undoing of Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 20, no. 3 (2008): 269–82; Ann van der Merwe, “Music, the Musical and Postmodernism in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge,” Music and the Moving Image 3, no. 3 (2010): 31–36; Philip Hayward, “Integrated and Intersected: Kylie Minogue, Baz Luhrmann and the Use of Popular Song Material in Moulin Rouge,” Screen Sound 4 (2013): 31–43; Rebecca Coyle, “Baz Luhrmann’s Eclectic Musical Signature in the Red Curtain Trilogy,” Screen Sound 4 (2013): 9–30; Kirsten Strayer, “Between Violetta and Vasantasena is Toulouse-Lautrec: Cinematic Avatars and Bollywood in Moulin Rouge,” in Figurations in Indian Film, ed. Meheli Sen and Anustup Basu (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Luhrmann’s film version of The Great Gatsby (2013) seeks to visually present 1920s Long Island upper classes, set anachronistically to a rap soundtrack produced by Jay-Z. But the use of music in the film has variation, in some cases current rap songs are used unchanged, and the first party in the film depicts a jazz band playing a jazz version of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.” 81 To return to Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation album, the music video for “Alright” engage with a similar trope as the Golf GTI commercial but without the use of CGI, the updating of the new jack swing sound set against the backdrop of an earlier era (1930s and 1940s Harlem), with suits, cinematography, and dance moves of the past. To add to the nostalgia, the video features Cab Calloway, Cyd Charisse, and the Nicholas Brothers. 82 The SAW case study and my 1990s examples could be said to converge in the 2009 hit “Right Round” by Flo Rida featuring Ke$ha, and provides the opening example to John Seabook’s The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (London: Random House, 2015), which covers Cheiron Studios in the 1990s and its protégés up to 2013. “Right Round” is a hip-hop cover of Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead or Alive, from the SAW hit factory in the 1980s, but now repurposed by Dr. Luke and Kool Kojak, protégés of the Max Martin/Deniz Pop hit factory of Cheiron Studios in Stockholm, Sweden. Seabrook, The Song Machine, 4, 270–74. The sound is updated for late-2000s style, new timbres, and a soundscape “made for malls, stadiums, airports, casinos, gyms and the Super Bowl half-time show” (5). Newer artists in late 2010s and early 2020s like Rina Sawyama who combine 1990s Nu-Metal with late-’90s bubble gum pop aesthetics, PRETTYMUCH’s updating of new jack swing for “Would You Mind” (2017), or a genre like vaporwave exist on a retro-Sloanist spectrum, updated to both align with and to help create new listening contexts and stylistic trends. 83 A more recent example, Jesy Nelson’s “Boyz” (2021) featuring Nikki Minaj, samples Puff Daddy’s “Boyz 4 Life” which shows that the rap cover version has moved onto a new generation. Puff Daddy (now P. Diddy) features as a guest in the video, and in addition to switching to female gender artists and dancers, the artist has come under a lot of criticizing for “Blackfishing.” As an example that demonstrates Sloanism, “Boyz” also shows how complex such translated appropriations are from a race and gender perspective vis-à-vis the pop music industry. Media coverage includes: Mikki Kendall, “Jesy Nelson will Dispose of her Black Costume When it no Longer Serves Her,” The Guardian, 13 October 2021, available at https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/oct/12/jesy-nelson-boyz-video-blackfishing-race-black-culture (accessed 22 September 2022); Raven Smith, “The Problem with Blackfishing,” Vogue, 14 October 2021, available at https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/blackfishing (accessed 22 September 2022); Olivia Petter and Laura Hampson, “WHAT IS BLACKFISHING AND WHY HAS JESY NELSON BEEN ACCUSED OF IT?,” available at https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/what-is-blackfishing-jesy-nelson-b1937462.html (accessed 22 September 2022); Ryan Smith, “Jesy Nelson Accused of Blackfishing in New ‘Boyz’ Music Video,” Newsweek, 9 November 2021, available at https://www.newsweek.com/jesy-nelson-accused-blackfishing-new-boyz-music-video-1636980 (accessed 22 September 2022). 84 Michael Thompson’s groundbreaking Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (London: Pluto Press, 1979/2017) demonstrates the social creation of value in objects that move from transient to rubbish to durable, for example, some forms of housing, antiques, and ancestors. 85 And even in the case of “chart music,” a song’s actual longevity in the cultural economy can be much longer—since the 2011 Bieber/Carey version of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” that opened this article, Carey has seen her original achieve the one-day streaming record of 17 million on 24 December 2020. It turns out in this case that the retro original has outlasted the Sloanist upgrade by a very considerable margin. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press.
TI - “This Year’s Model”: Toward a Sloanist Theory of Popular Music Production
JF - The Musical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/musqtl/gdac009
DA - 2022-10-29
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/this-year-s-model-toward-a-sloanist-theory-of-popular-music-production-0Ik7U3sgrt
SP - 320
EP - 356
VL - 105
IS - 3-4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -