The pop slop songwriting genius
Your favorite song doesn’t have to make sense.
Petal is out, the new album from Ariana Grande. I have to admit her last one Eternal Sunshine passed me by a little—I loved “supernatural” and “we can’t be friends” but haven’t returned to it much. Six or seven spins in, this new one already feels better: “freak,” “like i do,” “never get over me,” and “bad thing (bunny hop)” are already on hot rotation. But even as I dig into these album tracks, I’m still hyperfixated on one lyric on the album’s lead single.
That line? “Why you so hate to see women endure?”
It’s sung on the bridge of “hate that i made you love me”—one that makes a worthy point about a man’s insecurity, but it’s stitched together in a manner that defies the rules of syntax. The line lacks a syllable, and so Grande—alongside her Swedish co-writers ILYA and Max Martin—shoehorn one in to make it flow better. But there was a way of writing that line that made sense and hit the syllable quota: “Why do you hate to see women endure?”
So why do we have that lyric in its jumbled form instead? Well, it’s something of a pop trademark for writer Max Martin. He’s considered the God of contemporary pop music, writing for everyone from ’90s Britney to Robyn to Taylor Swift. He’s a hit machine, always has been, today living largely out of the spotlight, spotted less than a sasquatch in the wild. Grande herself has called him “a legend and an icon.”
The pair first started working together in 2014, on her album My Everything. Together, alongside Savan Kotecha and the producer Zedd, they wrote “Break Free,” her gigantic EDM banger. The song is so bombastic and overwhelming in its production (where is Zedd these days?), Grande’s voice big but famously lacking diction, that you can almost let its absurd lines pass you by. “I only wanna die alive, never by the hands of a broken heart,” she belts on its pre-chorus. Then: “I don’t wanna hear you lie tonight, now that I’ve become who I really are.”
Rumor has it that Grande suggested they change that latter line to “really am,” but Martin thought it sounded better to keep it as it was written. Back in the early days of the Backstreet Boys, he was really taking the piss with quips like this. In “Shape of My Heart” (2000), bandmember AJ was giving the banger statement “Loneliness is tragical.” Even the crux of the narrative argument in “I Want it That Way” contradicts itself: What do you mean you “never wanna hear” your “one desire” say “I want it that way?” Britney’s had her own taste of it too. By omitting the word “up” from the flirty phrase “hit me up,” we now have “Hit me baby one more time” lodged into our brains.
Martin’s impact as a connoisseur of the nonsense pop song lyric is felt everywhere: I can hum the melody of the verses of BTS’ “Dynamite” in my head, but haven’t ever processed exactly what they’re saying (ding dong, ice tea and a game of ping-pong anyone?) I think of how smarmy I felt learning the “German” lyrics to Lady Gaga’s industrial pop hit “Scheibe,” only to discover that she’s not speaking German at all—just gibberish that sounded vaguely Germanic.
The clarity, the meaning, is missing from these lyrics—but if it sounds good, does it matter? The great artists of our time bend the rules a bit. That’s part of Max Martin’s genius: His ability to find a song’s emotional heft, not letting something as superfluous as lyrical logic get in its way.
It’s August, which means we’ve reached a full decade since Frank Ocean dropped Blond. I’m curious: is there a lost artist—of any discipline—that you’re missing? Personally I need new things from Joanna Newsom and Lucas Hedges.
Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex is out in US cinemas now. Read my interview with him here!
Can we bring back movie screenshots with subtitles? I saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia this week and, between being confused as fuck by most of it, I couldn’t stop thinking about how hard this would have gone on the Tumblr grid:
