The problem with 2013 is the final death of the song as the main currency in pop music, it has been taken over by the track. The difference isn’t immediately obvious because the urge is to say something like as long as what you are selling are beats and what you are buying are beats and everything you build viz a viz is from the beat upwards, well, more or less, that’s nothing new. Read Paul Simon on making Graceland. But it seems that even more that that has happened in 2013, the new Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, on song after song, don’t bother with songs, they are beats and textured sounds.
If you have a good song you can strip it down or gussie it up, you can mess with it any way you like, and you will still have a good song, and by a good song I mean, melody, beat, lyric, it is like the foundation you build for a house. But what Dr. Luke has done is found a short cut by building everything from beats and leaving out melody as secondary and non existent, and while you can get away with that in rap, with hip hop and with pop it is problematic. If the song isn’t fully formed there is nothing to hold on to, at any given moment it can fall apart.
These tracks by pop stars, and even rockers like U2, is a huge problem for modern music. Since nothing makes a song stronger than a melodic hook the lack of melodic hooks in modern songs finds everything crumbling. At the heart of so many 2013 big albums, is the lack of song, from Prism to Artpop, from New to Hesitation marks, from …Like Clockwork to Britney Jean, the lack of songs kills the albums in their tracks. They don’t get heard often enough and when and if you do give them the time they need to hit your pleasure button they don’t.
The death of the song is something to be dreaded, not for disco or funk, but for soul, rock and roll and pop music, this is a sorry state of affairs. And even with that, you can arrange a good song into a dance hit but you can’t arrange a dance hit into a good song.
Do you remember where Star Trek had some sorta alternative world transfer where evil and good Jims, and McCoys trade places with evil ones; the good ones can hide their nature but the evil ones can’t hide their nature and the same is true of good songs and good tracks, good songs can adapt to any environment and good tracks can’t adapt.