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Max Martin is considered incredibly good at what he does.

https://youtu.be/DxrwjJHXPlQ?si=m-A6M8xrad5MrQqZ&t=151

Adam Conover discussed ad bumpers from the 1990s and 2000s. These were legal requirements for children's programming from the FCC. They're a compliance item, yet they were incredibly well made and creative in in many cases:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vI0UcUxzrQ

Because people at the top of their game will do great creative work even when doing commercial art and in many cases, will do way more than is perhaps commercially necessary.

So much of this AI push reminds me of the scene in 1984 where they had pornography generating machines creating completely uninspired formulaic brainrot stories by machine to occupy the proles.



Max Martin is a stand out talent.

You can take a thousand people and give them baseline technical skills for any medium. If you're lucky a few people out of your thousand will have a special kind of fluency that makes them stand out. from the rest.

Even more rarely you'll get someone who eats the technical skills alive and adds something original and unique which pushes them outside of the usual recycled tropes and cliches.

Martin is somewhere between those two. He's not a genius, but he's a rock solid pop writer, with a unique ear for hooks and drama, and stand-out arrangement skills.


Fascinating! The last sentence could also talk about the famous book.


You're saying 1984 is completely formulaic brainrot?


No not that scene, I just failed at the joke. The commercial music scene was formulaic in the 80's and earlier already. Popular culture porn.




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