DURING THE YEARS he worked as a program director at Top 40 stations around the country, Guy Zapoleon observed that popular music fads seem to move in a three-part cycle. Over time, he formulated a set of laws that, he believes, drives the pop cycle. It starts in the middle, with “pure pop.” This is the natural sweet spot for program directors, because it is the genre of music that draws in the largest number of listeners, boosting ratings. But pure pop eras inevitably give way to what Zapoleon calls “the doldrums,” when Top 40 becomes bland and boring, and ratings decline. In response, program directors row away from pure pop, toward the more perilous waters Zapoleon calls “the extremes,” in order to restore excitement to their stations. The extremes—alt-rock and hip-hop—attract younger listeners, always a desirable demographic for the advertisers (who, in a business sense, are a commercial station’s real constituency), but repel older ones, and so program directors begin rowing back toward the pure-pop mainstream, and the cycle starts again.
Tom Poleman, who took over New York’s Z-100 in the extremes of the mid-’90s, when grunge was polarizing listeners, endorses Zapoleon’s cycle, although he isn’t sure about who is at the wheel: program directors or the public. “I think sometimes cycles are caused by bad programming,” he ventures. “We do things that overdose on one style, then the consumer gets sick of that and wants something completely different.” However, he adds, “That’s also the nature of pop culture: people tend to embrace one thing, then get tired of it and want something else. So both radio programmers and the consumer are chasing that next thing and influencing each other.”
The musical movements of the ’90s were a textbook illustration of Zapoleon’s cycle. The decade had begun with New Kids on the Block, a pure-pop phenomenon if ever there was one. That phase led to the doldrums of ’92, perhaps best represented by Michael Bolton’s Timeless: The Classics, which topped the album charts that year. Grunge rock and gangsta rap combined to create an especially enticing extremes period, which lasted from 1993 until 1996. The Spice Girls’ 1997 arrival in the United States led to the rebirth of pure pop, which lasted through the doldrums of 2001, when the public grew weary of boy bands. By 2001–2002, a new extremes period was under way.
As he had been in ’92, Dr. Dre was on hand to drive the extremes part of the cycle, with his latest protégé, Eminem, whose 2000 song “The Real Slim Shady” managed to insult Britney Spears, boy bands, and the Grammys, all in one verse. The single was awarded Best Rap Solo Performance at the 2001 Grammys; the album also took home hardware. With three multiplatinum albums and a hit film, 8 Mile, which mythologized his life story, Eminem was biggest artist in the world by 2002, and the latest bracing corrective to “manufactured” artists who didn’t write their own material. He was angry, profane, and misogynistic—a mean voice for a dark time—and being white gave him a license no black rapper spitting comparable rhymes would have been granted, an inequity that made Eminem angrier still.
But Eminem was sui generis, and in spite of his insistence that
There’s a million of us just like me . . .
Who just don’t give a fuck like me
there was only one Eminem. His success redefined the rules about what you could say on the radio.
Eminem made Tom Poleman nervous. “We didn’t want to go back to the extremes we’d come out of in ’96,” he says. “And Eminem was clearly an indicator of the extremes. Playing those hard, intense lyrics at midday was a concern. But P. Diddy was writing melodic music, and even 50 Cent’s song ‘In Da Club’ with that hook ‘It’s your birthday,’ managed to combine the exciting danger of Eminem with an appealing melodic presentation. It goes back to a safe place.” Poleman adds, “I think people like to be surprised. They say, ‘Oh, that’s that cool music I’ve been hearing about. But it doesn’t scare me because it seems really poppy and hooky.’ ”
AS PROGRAMMERS FLED THE doldrums for the extremes of Eminem and 50 Cent, the Klondike days in Stockholm came to an end. Swedish writers and producers had become identified with bland, artificial boy-band pop. Also, after 9/11, American artists and A&R men didn’t want to travel to Stockholm; flying was too much of a hassle. Swedish writers and producers began a diaspora to Southern California, resulting in the large Swedish expat songwriting community that resides in L.A. today.
Cheiron Studios closed its doors toward the end of 2000, just as the doldrums began to set in. Max Martin, now the studio leader, had decided, “it’s time to quit while we’re ahead.” As Kristian Lundin says of Cheiron’s distinctive sonic tapestry: “When even our grandmothers said, ‘Oh, you can hear that’s a Cheiron song!’ it was no longer inspiration, it was just copying ourselves.”
Denniz PoP’s disciples split into three different entities. Max Martin and Tom Talomaa, who had run Cheiron’s business, formed Maratone Studio, which was named after one of Denniz’s favorite computer games, Marathon. They brought in Rami Yacoub. Kristian Lundin and Andreas Carlsson remained in the Cheiron building, but changed its name to The Location. And Per Magnusson and David Kreuger teamed up to form A Side Productions. Everyone struggled to come up with a new sound.
Even Britney, who wouldn’t be a star without Cheiron, turned away from her Swedish song makers. Her 2003 album, In the Zone, featured not a single Cheiron alumnus on it (the sole Swedish contribution came from Cheiron’s competitors, the songwriting duo who called themselves Bloodshy & Avant, and who later co-wrote one of the artist’s best songs, “Toxic”). Instead, Britney used urban producers like Timbaland, Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, and the Neptunes to give an edgier sound to her music. The times were dark—racial profiling, enhanced interrogation techniques, and a push toward war with Iraq based on false intelligence. Swedish-made pop was an ill-fitting soundtrack.
As the most successful of all the Cheiron disciples, Max Martin had become synonymous with teen pop. 1999’s “I Want It That Way,” rightly seen as a classic when it appeared, became a leading example of the kind of pure pop that radio programmers in 2002 shunned. The Swede started to have trouble getting cuts on records. Hip-hop was where the red-hot center of pop music lay now, and Max Martin didn’t have a clue about hip hop. Either he had to find a collaborator who could help him, or he needed to wait for the Zapoleonic wheel to turn again and bring pure pop back into vogue. But if the ’90s were a reliable precedent, that might not happen until the 2010s.
In fact, a new force was about to disrupt the pop-music cycle. Weirdly, it came from TV. Zapoleon had met his “Waterloo.”