Bill Bain: Droog culture - how the pop industry ate itself

Music didn’t soothe this savage beast, however – it moved him to murder. Swirling sonic euphoria soundtracked his rampages. Any thuds of empathy spat free by his charred heart were drowned out entirely.

There is no contradiction in Alex’s love for ultra-violence and Beethoven. In his thirst for a heightened emotional connection, Alex had discovered passions which made him feel utterly alive. This was comparable to an altered state of consciousness in Burgess’s near-future, where a homogenised, synthetic culture had bred a deeply malcontent youth with a taste for the extreme. Even milk – that symbol of purity – was “enhanced” with drugs in this hellish vision of modern life.

Incidentally, flunixin, mefenamic acid, diclofenac, ketoprofen, florfenicol – and the mysteriously named 17B estradiol – are just a few examples of the sex hormones, antibiotics and weirdness swimming around that carton of the white stuff in your fridge today. Perhaps that’s why Snap, Crackle and Pop always seemed so happy – same reason the Happy Mondays, right, were Happy. All upbeat japery fuelled by an exotic chemical stew.

Ironically, those Mancunian cheeky chappies aren’t that much different to Ludwig Van – both are real, imperfect and unmistakably human, the very things Alex was searching for all along. Stumbling upon just one killer riff was enough to earn young pretenders like the Mondays a hit back in the 1990s. Repeat hook three times, wee key change in the last chorus with a double-tracked vocal and it was gold discs all round.

But things are very different now – the saccharine sound of pristine pop perfection is everywhere. A magic formula has been discovered and the singers shuttled around the world to perform these immaculate, shiny songs resemble prize specimens from a eugenics factory, buffeted and varnished to a state of unattainable aesthetic transcendence. The Proclaimers’ time is not now.

Recent scientific studies suggest today’s pop songs average a new musical “high” every seven seconds – deemed to be the average attention span of listeners in our fast-food, quick-thrill culture of instant gratification.

The research also confirms what your subconscious suspects – that the vast majority of today’s pop music sounds exactly the same. You’re not Grandpa Simpson howling at the moon – you’re actually right about this one.

The University of Vienna studied 15 musical genres to lift the lid on modern pop’s depressingly formulaic nature. Software scanned timbre, tempo, instrumentation and acoustical variations, then compared the end result to overall sales. They found that in nearly every case, as certain songs become popular, the entire music industry seems to morph around the success story and to pop out countless sonic doppelgängers.

The problem is that, musically, the template has more or less remained unchanged since the mid-1990s phenomenon of US boy band Backstreet Boys, whose then-unique sound was birthed by the most successful pop star you’ve never head of – Sweden’s Max Martin.

Also the creative force behind the shimmering electro vacuum of Taylor Swift’s recent work, the songwriter-producer’s synthetic grooves have dominated the world’s airwaves for nearly 20 years.

Martin presides over an endless pop conveyor belt, effortlessly firing out number one hits for Britney Spears, Pink, ’NSync, Maroon 5, Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson from his Stockholm studio. The voice changes, but the song remains basically the same. Martin’s magic formula has become nearly as valuable as the recipe for Irn-Bru, but it’s not so much of a secret. His alchemy has been described as “Abba’s pop chords and textures ... 80s arena rock’s big choruses and early 90s American R&B grooves”.

Martin uses music creation software such as proTools in a similar way to William Burroughs’s cut and paste method of writing – chopping, rearranging, splicing, retuning, sampling, re-editing, warping, adding effects and manipulating the entire sonic spectrum – all from the comfort of his laptop. The entire lexicon of popular music is at his fingertips to pull apart and stick together as he pleases. It’s true metal machine music.

Overcooked to the point where the sound becomes plastic and unnatural, it’s an audio experience for sure, but one that qualifies as true musical composition? All in the eye of the beholder, but we’re certainly a long, long way from Woody Guthrie.

Pop’s sonic homogenisation isn’t the only way the music industry has created conditions ripe for a new generation of malcontented Droogs like Alex. It also sells something other than music – the illusion of emotional connection, that near-mystical conduit between artist and audience that puts posters on walls, fills stadiums and creates gods of mere mortals.

The Heaven Seventeen or Goggly Gogol were two sonically-perfect synthesised pop bands in Burgess’s novel, but both had failed to penetrate the crust of Alex’s desensitised layers – he had realised he needed the real thing. Centuries old classical symphonies – free from technical manipulation and created by the actual artist who performed them – filled that vacuum easily.

It is increasingly difficult to find any oasis of musical artistic integrity which we can put our faith in – the relentless digitisation of analog recording, a tiny pool of hit songwriters, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing and the afterthought of the song itself mean a very bleak future for authenticity and innovation.

Even once-powerful major record labels are now the increasingly redundant middlemen for Apple, Google and Amazon – paying these global titans serious cash for prominent spots on their digital outlets – keeping thousands of artists locked out of the online game. We are told who the stars of tomorrow will be by the multinationals who created them, on TV shows produced by them.

All are illusionary constructs, minor vocal talents controlled by a ruthless, multi-tentacled machine that prioritises everything but the song itself. Singers are told what to say, ordered what to wear (or not to wear) and taught how to act within the confines of societal conservatism. Tupac’s hologram gave better interviews.

It’s all about creating a brand of blandness from which you can sell anything, from chocolate bars eaten in Twitter photos to a new fashion label – a music career is just a promotional campaign for the new industry product: the “artist” themselves. The special connection between artist and fan is now artificially constructed and fully commercialised. In our creation of perfection, an essential humanity is lost. We can’t recognise ourselves in an ideal formula. In the end, such art will always fail to fully resonate, only connecting on a superficial surface level. “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” advised Leonard Cohen.

Burgess’s nightmare vision of thrill-seeking hedonists pushing the limits of depravity to overcome a conformist hive mindset is a warning to us all. In that future society where all the edges were cushioned by saccharine aural and visual perfection, the all-encompassing sweetness made Alex and his Droogs sick. Very sick indeed.

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DONALD Trump’s hair may be capable of solving the mysterious secrets of the human race’s origins. Allow me to explain.

In Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary, senior Republican aide Kevin Kellems was filmed earnestly licking his hands then expertly rearranging former deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz’s unruly barnet into a magnificent power-bouffant.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence President Trump hired Kellems and his slobber-coated fingertips last year.

Using another man’s saliva as hair gel may be indicative of a true age of austerity – or of a true reptilian form under the fake skin – but spit is undoubtedly one of life’s most under-valued substances.

Composed almost entirely of water, a tiny and mysterious 0.5 per cent is a potent cocktail of enzymes and electrolytes, breaking down food, protecting teeth, maintaining mouth pH balance, healing ulcers and neutralising acids among other things.

Now, scientists from the University at Buffalo College in New York have discovered tantalising evidence in saliva that a previously unknown ancient human “ghost” species – so called as no fossil record exists – “contributed genetic material” to the gene pools of people still living today.

The scientists stumbled across this incredible discovery of a new human species while researching the purpose of the MUC7 protein, which helps give saliva its slimy consistency and helps rid the body of bad bacteria.

As part of its investigation, the team examined the gene in the mouths of 2,500 people and were surprised to discover participants from sub-Saharan Africa had a version wildly different from the common-or-garden variety.

Further analysis led scientists to conclude the interbreeding between humans and this “ghost species” took place around 150,000 years ago – two million years after the two species’ evolutionary paths diverged from the same common ancestral link. The new discovery adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting sexual rendezvous between different ancient strains of human were apparently quite prevalent, with many of today’s Homo sapiens owning at least one per cent neanderthal DNA.

Apparently these throwback genetics are easily identified in members of the general population today, with physical indications being fluorescent orange skin, hunched shoulders, constipated gait, “power pouting” and other exaggerated facial expressions. They may also erupt with random exclamations of gibberish in an attempt to communicate with modern man.

However, this is still a speculative area of science and one I personally believe is insulting to neanderthals.