Pop

Knowing when to stop

One of the rudest things you can ever say about a pop record is that it’s overproduced. We have all said it at some point in our lives, often before the age of 20, when you must repeatedly demonstrate to your contemporaries that you can hear the subtle differences between, say, Deep Purple and Boney M. In the punk years and afterwards, ‘overproduced’ was often used to describe any record that had been produced at all. In the late 1980s, though, overproduction became the norm. Bands like Tears For Fears were famous for spending weeks perfecting a computerised drum sound, when really a long holiday on a beach somewhere would have done them more good. More recently, overproduced has become a euphemism for ‘this band is using considerable quantities of cocaine’. The mid-period records of a certain Manchester band bear this out in particular. But the term can mean almost anything you want it to, which is useful. I was browsing through a Squeeze fan website the other day, the unhinged sort that gives individual reviews to every track they ever recorded, and the writer tended to use ‘overproduced’ for those completely inconsequential tracks that muddy up most of their albums. Perhaps the temptation is to overproduce songs that were never much cop in the first place. Good songs seem to emerge from the mix in far better shape.

1 | 2 Next page