I’ll be talking about music and recording it and mixing it and producing it here, with no knowledge of the technical terminology or theories in those domains.
I think you've mostly convinced me. It's better to be more specific. But to riff on your analogy, it can be useful to say that there are too many ingredients in a recipe (there's more than one way for a recipe to be bad). Or to say that the cook has "over-spiced" a dish. Similarly, one might reach for "overproduced" to indicate that there are too many elements in the mix wearing their production character on their sleeves. I think. Anyway, just a little pushback from someone mostly otherwise convinced.
one tidbit I couldn't fit in: that year the very influential magazine Entertainment Weekly said that Alanis Morrissette was all hype and would be quickly forgotten, while Joan Osborne of "One of Us" fame would endure lol
That's pretty funny. I'll say, though, that I don't find the argument that "it was panned by the critics/intelligentsia at the time" very convincing. I'd say more that there wasn't the unified hive mind that we have now, so yeah, if you go looking, SOMEBODY important hated it. But I remember it being pretty universally liked to loved by most everyone. That doesn't happen much anymore.
I grew up in Europe and it was beloved in my country. Sold brilliantly. I had an Alanis poster in my room as well as the album - the only female musician to adorn my wall (but not the only female.)
I'm sure there were people who didn't like it but, as you say, criticism was much more diverse back then.
I don’t think it was panned by any means. I do think it’s true, though, that even in positive reviews critics talked about Morisette in a way that 2020s readers would generally find jarringly sexist. I can dig up some examples but I read some old JLP critical coverage a while back before I went to an Alanis concert (pretty sure this was in 2018 - and yes everyone was my age i.e. 20 years older than the last time we went to an Alanis concert which for me was 1998) and it was cringey. That’s not the same as being critically panned though.
“And what lines: In her songs, men take her for granted and mentally abuse her, and she retaliates by threatening to leave one of her exes’ name off her album credits (talk about a career-minded individual!)”
This is a clear reference to the lines “now that I’m miss Thing / now that I’m a zillionaire / you scan the credits for your name / and wonder why it’s not there”. Not only are those great lines, they are clearly not an actual threat of revenue from a “career-minded” (horrors!) individual.
For some reason I can’t C&P the link but you can Google the 1995 Entertainment Weekly review by David Browne.
EW has never been that influential in the alternative music genre. I was always disappointed that every edition only dedicated 2 or 3 pages total to album reviews and music biz news.
For what it’s worth, that Joan Osborne song *has* endured as literally the defining example of the “sensitive female” chord progression that defined so much of the Lillith Fair set from that time period.
One thing: that Joan Osbourne record is very good and "One of Us" sort sticks out a bit in it. Honestly, it's a truly great roots rock record, if you like that sort of thing. The single doesn't quite fit with the rest of the album. I think she's an underrated act from the 90s.
I would say that it's appropriately lavish for the song and its ambitions, although I think it does suffer a little bit with the recording of its particular era.
It's literally famous for pushing the abilities of recording at the time; the master tape they were layering tracks onto was transparent from the overdubs and bouncing. I think it's a strong case of the production matching the songwriting goals perfectly.
Yeah I'd say, given its operatic ambitions, it was pretty spot-on production-wise. But I'd also say there's a difference between something over-the-top and something too slick, too like plastic and shimmery. I think Aerosmith is a great example of this. So many of their tracks sound too perfect for their own good, like all the rough edges are rubbed away in the studio. They sound terrific but too perfect.
Now look at something like Beck's Odelay, which is certainly an album with a lot of TLC paid to the production and mixing and some very unique choices throughout, but it manages to feel pretty raw despite all the attention to detail.
Re Aerosmith, if you're talking about post-reunion (1984) Aerosmith, then yeah, you're talking about a loud, swaggering pop band, not the group of rowdy, down and dirty rock-n-rollers that the same five people were in the '70s.
The point about overproduction not necessarily being a lot of production is key. Overproduction is when - precisely as Freddie says - production gets in the way of the music. It's when it becomes an end of itself, either to try to hit a stylistic note that's very "of the moment" but doesn't sound natural, or because the producer likes his studio toys a bit too much.
In movies, it's when the director's clever angles take you out of the moment. Or layering reference upon reference so the film is really a film about how much you know about films.
In fine dining - easily the most dissolute and decadent of interests, and therefore the one in which excesses are most easily used and abused - it's when a quality ingredient is surrounded by a phalanx of gels, granitas, snows, reductions, edible flowers, gold leaves, and single-origin first-growth shitberries, all to show off how cute and radical the chef is.
In literature... Cormac McCarthy can get away with his spare style and his zero punctuation because, at bottom, he still hits the narrative notes and memorable, often shocking characterization that one expects of the novel. People trying to be McCarthy usually can't do that, so picking through their prose is like picking around the edible flowers trying to find some protein.
And in music, the likes of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson used the studio as an instrument and produced the hell out of their music - but not at the cost of coherence and a level of naturalism. That, for me, is what overproduction is. It's not elaboration, it's not even artificiality, but it's *an excess* of these things to the point of intrustion.
To (over)simplify it: production succeeds when production isn't detectable.
It's *detectable* production that the listener doesn't like. You could put a microphone in a room and let rip - Stax Records did a lot of this - and it may sound bad to someone's ear, but you can't accuse it of being over-anything.
It sounds like both of you are saying "overproduced" means the production techniques have become unduly salient to the listener.
Good production isn't literally undetectable. Even someone like me, whose experience with producing music is nearly all with live, unamplified music, can rationally detect recorded production techniques without minding them — and even appreciating them! Still, if the techniques "fit" the piece being produced, I'm not continually reminded of the production's salience. Its salience isn't part of my focal awareness, "the music" is. If the production "detracts" from my expectations of "the music", on the other hand, then well, yes, I dislike it — I dislike it for being unduly salient. To me, at least. Someone else might not find it unduly salient, might even like it. But we're social creatures, who share ideas about what music ought to be, and when we share them, at least with our subculture, we're sharing expectations. In that sense, adding production which thwarts our expectations could be described as "overdoing" it.
That is pretty much what I was trying to say. The word "unduly" is doing all the heavy lifting here. And as you say, that is subjective because one person's overwrought cacophony is another's Wall of Sound. So the expectation part might be the more relevant one here.
Right, it's subjective, but not wholly individualistic. And we're not omniscient gods. Shared, tested subjectivity is how we approximate objectivity. With something like science, if we share and test carefully, we can come gratifyingly close. With other disciplines, we'll sense something's "objectively" off because it's failing to meet shared, tested subjective standards. (How shared? How tested? Exactly.)
a lot of those early phil spector records also work because the technology literally isn't there yet to capture the sound he wants. if you listen to something like "he's a rebel" or "river deep mountain high" the vocals are almost blown out and the instruments are kind of muddy. but of course it works because it has that brilliant sense of energy and it sounds like it's going to burst out of the speakers. it's sort of impressionistic almost, like it allows your brain to fill in the gaps and it makes the experience of listening participatory. when recording technology advances to the point that you can futz around and spend millions to get anything you want, those sort of happy accidents become less common.
There are a few crucial factors in the sound of those '60s Spector productiions:
1. Spector's desire for a huge, densely-layered sound
2. Spector's goal of making sounds sound good on AM radio, rather than on a high-end stereo system
3. The limitations of four-track recording equipment, which necessitated a lot of track bouncing to make room for all the overdubs Spector wanted to do
Of those, only the last is truly a technological limitation. (1) is an artistic choice, and (2) is mostly a business decision -- if you want a song to be a hit with the young pop music audience, it has to sound good on a car radio.
Your 2nd point is worth a lot of expanded analysis. I wonder how much of the 90s "VH1 drum sound" and other excesses was related to the transition from cassettes to CDs as being the primary mode of song consumption?
Spector's production was ALWAYS "detectable". The Wall of Sound was famous because it was recognizable. When Spector seems more subtle, it's usually because the artist is holding him back, as John Lennon did.
Brian Wilson learned a lot from Phil Spector, but he applied similar techniques with more restraint. "Pet Sounds" doesn't sound like a Phil Spector production, but the influence is clear.
I suppose you're right. Maybe what I'm trying to put across is: it's detectable in that you can tell there's something at work here, that it's something recognizable, but it's recognizable without being intrusive or jarring. Which is really just another way of saying "good production isn't overproduced, and the definition of overproduction is production that isn't good." (Can you tell I'm not a musician?)
The point I think I'm getting at is, the Wall of Sound was exactly what it said: it was a densely layered 'wall' of music. It wasn't trying to be something it wasn't. It was trying to instead be more than the sum of its parts - hence the doubling and tripling (which Wilson later mastered as well). So in Freddie's example, you can hear a jumbled array of clean guitars and jangly whatevers, whereas in a Spector production you'd hear a layer of multiple instruments that, despite being far greater in number, were more harmonious together.
Yeah, I can see what you mean. If you listen to a later Spector production like George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord", you're hearing several acoustic guitars strumming together, and they blend really well so that you don't really think of it as multiple things, but just one sound.
Funny you mention My Sweet Lord. That came on my gigantic random playlist (~6,000 songs) on Saturday night while I was driving home. It still sounds amazing today.
"In fine dining - easily the most dissolute and decadent of interests, and therefore the one in which excesses are most easily used and abused - it's when a quality ingredient is surrounded by a phalanx of gels, granitas, snows, reductions, edible flowers, gold leaves, and single-origin first-growth shitberries, all to show off how cute and radical the chef is."
Did you see Pig? There's a very funny scene about this very thing.
something that's gotten worse in recent years is that all producers now have a huge sample pack of every perfect instrument sound known to man, and it's pretty easy to have someone lay down, say, a drum part and then have a megalomaniacal producer go in and replace each hit digitally with whatever he considers the platonic ideal of a drum hit. if you're a young band and you have a limited amount of studio time, this can be done totally without your consent, and then you face the choice of living with it or spending against your advance while going against the wishes of big name producer x who can make or break your career.
i'm not sure if this was happening in the 90s but it's definitely happening today. it's really bad in modern country, since it's the only modern pop music that still relies on live instruments to a degree. once you start hearing the same drum sounds on country radio you won't be able to stop.
i always show people this willie nelson cover to demonstrate how overproduction can completely ruin a song. the original one is just guitar and pedal steel and lets the lyrics and the vocals breathe (it helps that willie is a vocal genius ofc). the cover adds a bunch of unnecessary stuff including the shittiest, most sample pack-y snare hit in the world.
I’m a metalhead the same age as you, and I’m friends with some younger guys from my union local who are really into Chelsea Grin-style deathcore, and while I appreciate the sheer terror that bands like that can generate I really do not appreciate the overly slick production. It’s hard explaining that to dudes who are too young to have been into black/death/sludge when it was truly grimy, that I WANT this music to sound like that, that very few metal bands are done any favors by the Era of Perfect Music.
This is the part where as an aging metal guy I want to write a paragraph about how metalcore and deathcore are not the same thing at all but I’m trying to avoid being a silly pedant over here but look I did it anyway lol
I'm probably your age, but the complete opposite. I like harsh, dissonant music. Metal, noise rock, whatever. But I want my noise to be crisp, clear, and bright. Sparkling crystalline and sharp, instead of the lo-fi melange of a lot of older groups.
The debate in your thread is as entertaining as the original post. It makes me think that you might enjoy my French stoner rock friends Frankreich. They are admirably committed to dirty under production. I hope it's ok to post this link
Regarding the Beatles' "Let It Be", Phil Spector was not the original producer; he was brought in to "re-produce" the album a year after the Beatles abandoned it. The tapes he had to work with were a mass of rehearsals and experiments with different arrangements, and few of the songs had been brought to the point of making a final take for release. Spector did what he could to make a releasable commercial pop album out of all that, but it was an exercise in putting lipstick on a pig (even if it was a very nice pig -- this was the Beatles, after all). His natural tendency towards excess is certainly apparent on "The Long and Winding Road" and "Across the Universe", but most of the album isn't nearly that bad, and there was never any chance that the resulting album was going to be a masterpiece.
As for Alanis Morissette, I don't mind women singing about being angry, but Morrissette's apparent inability to reflect, as demonstrated by her constant attitude of "It's all your fault" (as one of the songs said flat out), is a big turn-off to me. There is a difference between making art and just blasting your feelings out. (And then there's the irony of writing a song called "Ironic" when you don't know what the word means... but that's a cheap shot.) She was different from run-of-the-mill pop stars, true, but she wasn't deep, and being different from Mariah Carey isn't much of a recommendation. Tori Amos and Fiona Apple were (and still are) better artists than Alanis Morissette on every level imaginable: more insightful, more able to translate feelings into art, better musicians, better singers.
I agree with what you say about the overly-slick production, but as you say, that was the sound of the time. Actually, it's been the sound of the time for a long time. Overproduction and slickness have been a thing in pop music at least since the '70s when 16-track and 24-track recording equipment became available, and it's still the case today. The "VH1 drums" are a particular mid-'90s thing, but other eras had their equivalents, such as the "gated reverb drums" of the '80s (think Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight").
The art of record production and mixing progressed along with the technology (actually a bit behind it, since producers and engineers needed time to figure out what could be done with each new piece of gear). Back in the '50s, making a record just meant setting up some microphones and recording a performance to tape, then releasing it. If you wanted reverb on the vocals, you had to set up a spring plate behind the singer. The introduction of multi-track recording, studio effects, and eventually digital workstation software like ProTools have gradually transformed the art of record-making to the point that it bears very little resemblance to the art of live performance, and accordingly, the finished product has, over time, come to sound less and less like real performance, and more like a sculpted and polished representation of music, which is pretty much what it is.
Largely I agree with you, but to be fair, the line "it's all your fault" is from "Head Over Feet." In context, she's singing to a person with whom she's fallen in love and saying, "it's all your fault" that you're wonderful and I'm in love with you. Not to say she doesn't imply the line in a more negative sense in other songs, but still...
Thanks for the correction about Phil Spector. As far as the lyrics of the album and their perspective goes, you're not entirely wrong, but let's remember that she was 19 when she wrote them.
And of course she *wrote* them with the assistance of a 40 year old producer/lyricist named Glen Ballard who is probably the one most responsible for the overproduction and commercial trajectory of the album.
A lot of electronic music is overproduced. If you listen back to old house and techno records, the ones that sound the least dated in my opinion tend to be more minimal. Sometimes less is more.
Agreed. "Overproduced" is a good way to describe many of the differences between much recent electronica and early house and techno. The recent "lo-fi" genre that has grown up in response testifies to that. Still some good 'minimalist' artists out there. Huey Mnemonic is an example of a younger one, I think. And, of course, people like Jeff Mills and Moodymann still put out more 'minimal' stuff that still has a lot of care and artistry put in.
Great post, Freddie. I *hated* this album when I was in high school. Alanis and Joan Osborne were only good for mockery at the time. I've softened a lot over the years to a lot of 90s music that I couldn't stand at the time because nostalgia worms its way into our brains whether we like it or not. (I'm a lot less critical of 90s pop than I was as a teenage boy, to the point where I'll happily sing along to 'Don't go chasing waterfalls' when back in the day if it wasn't grunge or gangster rap I wasn't interested--unless it was older music).
That decade was weird because there were a lot of terrific bands and albums and then there was a lot of "overproduced" stuff like Jagged Little Pill that could have been so much better if it had been more natural. Go sit around a fire and jam those tunes and record the results.
There's almost an audial Uncanny Valley sometimes. It's hard to put into words. Like adding too much sugar to something that needed more salt.
The 2000s suffered from many of the same problems, though I think a lot of smaller labels started moving in the right direction eventually. You can have pretty "lavish" productions on songs like Pure Comedy by Father John Misty but it never feels unnatural. It's big and orchestral and dramatic but it's supposed to be, and it feels natural rather than forced. Bands like The National put a lot of effort into instrumentation but always manage to stay true to their sound in the studio.
Still, a lot of great 90s stuff. Nirvana (and I still like Nevermind and think Cobain is at least partly to blame for its over-production no matter what he said later) and Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead and so many other great bands sprouted up that decade.
I still listen to Joan Osborne's 1995 album. "One of Us" is the worst song on there, and I skip it every time. The rest of the album is much better--there are some raw and funky tracks on there.
I was 12 when Jagged Little Pill came out. When I heard the hidden track that plays at the end of the album (“Your House”) I thought I was the only one who had it, and that when I came forward I would be on the news.
Anyway, my friends crushed that dream—they all had the track too—but “Your House” is an interesting contrast to the rest of the album because there are no instruments. I wish they’d ditched the heavy echo effect on her voice, though, so it would feel truly stripped down. Even for an unofficial a capella track, they felt the need to distort the vocals somehow.
This made me think so fondly of the music I loved in high school, especially those artists with relatively small-time careers who grew over the time I listened to them. There's definitely an identifiable split - some bands I stopped listening to after whatever album, and it nearly always had to do with the production. They would get enough money and studio clout to get *a* producer, as opposed to mixing on their own or with the help of more-experienced friends, but not a producer who actually cared about making the music sound like *their* music. And there are some (Vienna Teng comes to mind) who slowly notched up their production one album at a time, always trying out new stuff but always in the service of the sound they knew they wanted to make. These days I listen to the Mountain Goats in large part for their production - their lyrics are always knockout good, but every album is now a gorgeous production experiment building on previous work while trying something very new. Getting to follow the journey is a real joy of liking the band for so many years.
...And, still knowing nothing about production, I consider Lorde's "Melodrama" to be an absolute modern masterpiece of the form. The layers of sounds, the whispers, the closeness or distance of her voice from the listener... it's incredibly clean and polished, but exactly at the sweet spot, never overproduced.
Also BTS. You could think of them as having wildly intrusive overproduction -- or you could appreciate that the production *is* the music, and that it's achieving exactly the bombastic effect it's going for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LE5dSA6RFg
I'm not sure that live productions are what Freddie and the thread are talking about though. Overproduced is generally used in reference to studio albums.
Even though I like their album production, I do tend to prefer their live versions for production reasons, because it's a little easier to tell their voices apart from each other. They trade lyrical lines back a forth a lot, more like a hiphop group than a typical harmony-focused western boy-band. In my opinion, their best-produced studio album so far is probably You Never Walk Alone (which, in a weird Freddie deBoer crossover, is also a concept album based on the novel Demian!).
I gotta say, the perfectly-smooth-and-shiny quality of K-Pop has always been its biggest turnoff for me. It feels overproduced to the point of overshadowing great talent. I agree with you that the wildly intrusive production is the point, and central to the form - but it just grates on me. It's the musical equivalent of that sticky feeling on your teeth you get from drinking soda.
Recently somebody showed me that they do versions of their music videos where they JUST film the dancing, no costumes, no production, no changing camera shots, and I liked that way better! So I think it's just that something about the busy-ness of the production doesn't do it for me. Likewise, to me the live versions of the songs feel like they're getting a bunch of extraneous noise out of the way.
Yeah, their "dance practice" videos really show off how cool their dance choreo is in a more "objective" form. I think part of the reason that BTS specifically has blown up beyond the normal K-pop scale is because they have both high-production glamorous celebrity polish and also a certain "lo-fi" appeal in their behind-the-scenes videos and self-shot live streams and such (their variety show, "Run BTS" has what I can only describe as "big church youth group energy").
Sorry for trying to turn this into a BTS thread, but my wife is literally in Los Angeles right now for their concert, so it's on my mind. :)
i don't know if this is a relevant comment or not but I love your music writing so much and would literally pay for a dedicated music criticism/writing newsletter it's SO GOOD every time
I loved Jagged Little Pill. I have very fond memories of the summer of 1995 that revolve around that album. I was painting house with my friends, where we usually snuck a joint or a beer on the roof (hey, you want your house painted cheaply, you get teenagers smoking pot under the eaves). It seemed like the entire album was on permanent rotation on the radio, and it was one of the few CDs I owned that was released post-1980 or so. It might have been the greatest summer of my youth, and that album was intricately woven into it in the way music is when you're young. I haven't listened to it much since then, but it's so etched in my memory that I can still name the tracks, in order.
I agree that the mix could have been stripped down a bit, something closer to Exile in Guyville, an album I always thought Alanis owed a big debt to (though that could be more because I was listening to them at more or less the same time). That push and pull between heavy production and lo-fi integrity has been around forever. Think of the environment the Stones released Exile on Main St in.
I agree that All I Really Want is the best track by a fair distance. Hand in My Pocket is probably #2.
Off topic, but a lot of video games are arguably “overproduced,” eg too much focus on being movie-like or having a realistic open world at the expense of actual gameplay.
I think you're onto something. Open-worldism, and its ladies-in-waiting Procedural Generation and Dynamic Quests, are superb when correctly used, but all too often they're done because there's some vague feeling at the studio that that's what the kids are playing these days and that anything else would show insufficient ambition.
There's another comment on here about how fresh, new bands will find their spirited drumwork replaced with the Platonic ideal of a snare by a busybody producer. I think that's similar to this - that there's some level of guilt to being a game-on-rails* and that it's only properly produced and grown-up if there's tiresome inventory management and a level grind that you can do on a barren hillside somewhere.
*visual novels and some RPGs, such as Disco Elysium, being excepted from this.
Yeah, open-world are always better in theory than in fact. There are good ones, but I think what you want is a game that gives the illusion of an open-world but actually keeps you pretty focused. Think Planescape: Torment.
And Procedural Generation has been a "but in OUR game it's awesome, honest" mirage since Daggerfall.
Thanks this is the kind of writing I subscribed for.
One wonders what sort of audio setup FdB is listening on. Sounds like a pretty 'resolving' setup, or a very high quality built-in amp/speaker on the TV. Have you listened to this album on high fidelity headphones?
I have a Cambridge Audio AXR100 amplifier, an Audio-Technica AT-LP120 turntable, a Pro-Ject CD Box S2 CD player, Pioneer SP-BS22-LR speakers, and a set of Sony MDR 7506 cans. I'd call it on the low end of midrange.
Obviously you were talking about volume (SPL) and not speaker appearance or size (I think? - Is there a major space constraint?) which, along with price, are what really go into the WAF.
I had to compromise with my wife and sold one pair of particularly Dr. Seuss looking JBL speakers for a somewhat less ridiculous looking pair of these.
Beautiful thing about them is that they're 91dB/w/m efficient and have a state of the art tweeter & waveguide design that makes them sound just as good at lower volume as at earsplitting-yet-not-distorted volume.
Please don't look up the MSRP on those. I didn't pay anywhere near that; always buy used or open box. The crazy-looking ones I sold to buy those are also in the Synthesis line but have been discontinued. Before COVID you could buy a decent used car for the price of either pair.
I think you've mostly convinced me. It's better to be more specific. But to riff on your analogy, it can be useful to say that there are too many ingredients in a recipe (there's more than one way for a recipe to be bad). Or to say that the cook has "over-spiced" a dish. Similarly, one might reach for "overproduced" to indicate that there are too many elements in the mix wearing their production character on their sleeves. I think. Anyway, just a little pushback from someone mostly otherwise convinced.
Same!!
one tidbit I couldn't fit in: that year the very influential magazine Entertainment Weekly said that Alanis Morrissette was all hype and would be quickly forgotten, while Joan Osborne of "One of Us" fame would endure lol
That's pretty funny. I'll say, though, that I don't find the argument that "it was panned by the critics/intelligentsia at the time" very convincing. I'd say more that there wasn't the unified hive mind that we have now, so yeah, if you go looking, SOMEBODY important hated it. But I remember it being pretty universally liked to loved by most everyone. That doesn't happen much anymore.
I grew up in Europe and it was beloved in my country. Sold brilliantly. I had an Alanis poster in my room as well as the album - the only female musician to adorn my wall (but not the only female.)
I'm sure there were people who didn't like it but, as you say, criticism was much more diverse back then.
I don’t think it was panned by any means. I do think it’s true, though, that even in positive reviews critics talked about Morisette in a way that 2020s readers would generally find jarringly sexist. I can dig up some examples but I read some old JLP critical coverage a while back before I went to an Alanis concert (pretty sure this was in 2018 - and yes everyone was my age i.e. 20 years older than the last time we went to an Alanis concert which for me was 1998) and it was cringey. That’s not the same as being critically panned though.
Here’s a little example:
“And what lines: In her songs, men take her for granted and mentally abuse her, and she retaliates by threatening to leave one of her exes’ name off her album credits (talk about a career-minded individual!)”
This is a clear reference to the lines “now that I’m miss Thing / now that I’m a zillionaire / you scan the credits for your name / and wonder why it’s not there”. Not only are those great lines, they are clearly not an actual threat of revenue from a “career-minded” (horrors!) individual.
For some reason I can’t C&P the link but you can Google the 1995 Entertainment Weekly review by David Browne.
EW has never been that influential in the alternative music genre. I was always disappointed that every edition only dedicated 2 or 3 pages total to album reviews and music biz news.
For what it’s worth, that Joan Osborne song *has* endured as literally the defining example of the “sensitive female” chord progression that defined so much of the Lillith Fair set from that time period.
One thing: that Joan Osbourne record is very good and "One of Us" sort sticks out a bit in it. Honestly, it's a truly great roots rock record, if you like that sort of thing. The single doesn't quite fit with the rest of the album. I think she's an underrated act from the 90s.
I'm curious, and to establish a common scale, do you find the song Bohemian Rhapsody overpriduced?
I would say that it's appropriately lavish for the song and its ambitions, although I think it does suffer a little bit with the recording of its particular era.
It's literally famous for pushing the abilities of recording at the time; the master tape they were layering tracks onto was transparent from the overdubs and bouncing. I think it's a strong case of the production matching the songwriting goals perfectly.
Yeah I'd say, given its operatic ambitions, it was pretty spot-on production-wise. But I'd also say there's a difference between something over-the-top and something too slick, too like plastic and shimmery. I think Aerosmith is a great example of this. So many of their tracks sound too perfect for their own good, like all the rough edges are rubbed away in the studio. They sound terrific but too perfect.
Now look at something like Beck's Odelay, which is certainly an album with a lot of TLC paid to the production and mixing and some very unique choices throughout, but it manages to feel pretty raw despite all the attention to detail.
Re Aerosmith, if you're talking about post-reunion (1984) Aerosmith, then yeah, you're talking about a loud, swaggering pop band, not the group of rowdy, down and dirty rock-n-rollers that the same five people were in the '70s.
Yep, there's a stark difference between the two. Almost like totally different bands.
The point about overproduction not necessarily being a lot of production is key. Overproduction is when - precisely as Freddie says - production gets in the way of the music. It's when it becomes an end of itself, either to try to hit a stylistic note that's very "of the moment" but doesn't sound natural, or because the producer likes his studio toys a bit too much.
In movies, it's when the director's clever angles take you out of the moment. Or layering reference upon reference so the film is really a film about how much you know about films.
In fine dining - easily the most dissolute and decadent of interests, and therefore the one in which excesses are most easily used and abused - it's when a quality ingredient is surrounded by a phalanx of gels, granitas, snows, reductions, edible flowers, gold leaves, and single-origin first-growth shitberries, all to show off how cute and radical the chef is.
In literature... Cormac McCarthy can get away with his spare style and his zero punctuation because, at bottom, he still hits the narrative notes and memorable, often shocking characterization that one expects of the novel. People trying to be McCarthy usually can't do that, so picking through their prose is like picking around the edible flowers trying to find some protein.
And in music, the likes of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson used the studio as an instrument and produced the hell out of their music - but not at the cost of coherence and a level of naturalism. That, for me, is what overproduction is. It's not elaboration, it's not even artificiality, but it's *an excess* of these things to the point of intrustion.
To (over)simplify it: production succeeds when production isn't detectable.
It's *detectable* production that the listener doesn't like. You could put a microphone in a room and let rip - Stax Records did a lot of this - and it may sound bad to someone's ear, but you can't accuse it of being over-anything.
It sounds like both of you are saying "overproduced" means the production techniques have become unduly salient to the listener.
Good production isn't literally undetectable. Even someone like me, whose experience with producing music is nearly all with live, unamplified music, can rationally detect recorded production techniques without minding them — and even appreciating them! Still, if the techniques "fit" the piece being produced, I'm not continually reminded of the production's salience. Its salience isn't part of my focal awareness, "the music" is. If the production "detracts" from my expectations of "the music", on the other hand, then well, yes, I dislike it — I dislike it for being unduly salient. To me, at least. Someone else might not find it unduly salient, might even like it. But we're social creatures, who share ideas about what music ought to be, and when we share them, at least with our subculture, we're sharing expectations. In that sense, adding production which thwarts our expectations could be described as "overdoing" it.
That is pretty much what I was trying to say. The word "unduly" is doing all the heavy lifting here. And as you say, that is subjective because one person's overwrought cacophony is another's Wall of Sound. So the expectation part might be the more relevant one here.
Right, it's subjective, but not wholly individualistic. And we're not omniscient gods. Shared, tested subjectivity is how we approximate objectivity. With something like science, if we share and test carefully, we can come gratifyingly close. With other disciplines, we'll sense something's "objectively" off because it's failing to meet shared, tested subjective standards. (How shared? How tested? Exactly.)
a lot of those early phil spector records also work because the technology literally isn't there yet to capture the sound he wants. if you listen to something like "he's a rebel" or "river deep mountain high" the vocals are almost blown out and the instruments are kind of muddy. but of course it works because it has that brilliant sense of energy and it sounds like it's going to burst out of the speakers. it's sort of impressionistic almost, like it allows your brain to fill in the gaps and it makes the experience of listening participatory. when recording technology advances to the point that you can futz around and spend millions to get anything you want, those sort of happy accidents become less common.
There are a few crucial factors in the sound of those '60s Spector productiions:
1. Spector's desire for a huge, densely-layered sound
2. Spector's goal of making sounds sound good on AM radio, rather than on a high-end stereo system
3. The limitations of four-track recording equipment, which necessitated a lot of track bouncing to make room for all the overdubs Spector wanted to do
Of those, only the last is truly a technological limitation. (1) is an artistic choice, and (2) is mostly a business decision -- if you want a song to be a hit with the young pop music audience, it has to sound good on a car radio.
Your 2nd point is worth a lot of expanded analysis. I wonder how much of the 90s "VH1 drum sound" and other excesses was related to the transition from cassettes to CDs as being the primary mode of song consumption?
Spector's production was ALWAYS "detectable". The Wall of Sound was famous because it was recognizable. When Spector seems more subtle, it's usually because the artist is holding him back, as John Lennon did.
Brian Wilson learned a lot from Phil Spector, but he applied similar techniques with more restraint. "Pet Sounds" doesn't sound like a Phil Spector production, but the influence is clear.
I suppose you're right. Maybe what I'm trying to put across is: it's detectable in that you can tell there's something at work here, that it's something recognizable, but it's recognizable without being intrusive or jarring. Which is really just another way of saying "good production isn't overproduced, and the definition of overproduction is production that isn't good." (Can you tell I'm not a musician?)
The point I think I'm getting at is, the Wall of Sound was exactly what it said: it was a densely layered 'wall' of music. It wasn't trying to be something it wasn't. It was trying to instead be more than the sum of its parts - hence the doubling and tripling (which Wilson later mastered as well). So in Freddie's example, you can hear a jumbled array of clean guitars and jangly whatevers, whereas in a Spector production you'd hear a layer of multiple instruments that, despite being far greater in number, were more harmonious together.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I can see what you mean. If you listen to a later Spector production like George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord", you're hearing several acoustic guitars strumming together, and they blend really well so that you don't really think of it as multiple things, but just one sound.
Funny you mention My Sweet Lord. That came on my gigantic random playlist (~6,000 songs) on Saturday night while I was driving home. It still sounds amazing today.
"In fine dining - easily the most dissolute and decadent of interests, and therefore the one in which excesses are most easily used and abused - it's when a quality ingredient is surrounded by a phalanx of gels, granitas, snows, reductions, edible flowers, gold leaves, and single-origin first-growth shitberries, all to show off how cute and radical the chef is."
Did you see Pig? There's a very funny scene about this very thing.
No but I will now have to!
It's a very strange film but the foodie stuff is great. Nic Cage is really terrific also.
something that's gotten worse in recent years is that all producers now have a huge sample pack of every perfect instrument sound known to man, and it's pretty easy to have someone lay down, say, a drum part and then have a megalomaniacal producer go in and replace each hit digitally with whatever he considers the platonic ideal of a drum hit. if you're a young band and you have a limited amount of studio time, this can be done totally without your consent, and then you face the choice of living with it or spending against your advance while going against the wishes of big name producer x who can make or break your career.
i'm not sure if this was happening in the 90s but it's definitely happening today. it's really bad in modern country, since it's the only modern pop music that still relies on live instruments to a degree. once you start hearing the same drum sounds on country radio you won't be able to stop.
i always show people this willie nelson cover to demonstrate how overproduction can completely ruin a song. the original one is just guitar and pedal steel and lets the lyrics and the vocals breathe (it helps that willie is a vocal genius ofc). the cover adds a bunch of unnecessary stuff including the shittiest, most sample pack-y snare hit in the world.
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5pzcHY-Z2g
cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9TGi_wM68o
I’m a metalhead the same age as you, and I’m friends with some younger guys from my union local who are really into Chelsea Grin-style deathcore, and while I appreciate the sheer terror that bands like that can generate I really do not appreciate the overly slick production. It’s hard explaining that to dudes who are too young to have been into black/death/sludge when it was truly grimy, that I WANT this music to sound like that, that very few metal bands are done any favors by the Era of Perfect Music.
This is the part where as an aging metal guy I want to write a paragraph about how metalcore and deathcore are not the same thing at all but I’m trying to avoid being a silly pedant over here but look I did it anyway lol
I'm probably your age, but the complete opposite. I like harsh, dissonant music. Metal, noise rock, whatever. But I want my noise to be crisp, clear, and bright. Sparkling crystalline and sharp, instead of the lo-fi melange of a lot of older groups.
The debate in your thread is as entertaining as the original post. It makes me think that you might enjoy my French stoner rock friends Frankreich. They are admirably committed to dirty under production. I hope it's ok to post this link
https://frankreichmusic.bandcamp.com/album/frankreich
Okay, that's an interesting take.
Regarding the Beatles' "Let It Be", Phil Spector was not the original producer; he was brought in to "re-produce" the album a year after the Beatles abandoned it. The tapes he had to work with were a mass of rehearsals and experiments with different arrangements, and few of the songs had been brought to the point of making a final take for release. Spector did what he could to make a releasable commercial pop album out of all that, but it was an exercise in putting lipstick on a pig (even if it was a very nice pig -- this was the Beatles, after all). His natural tendency towards excess is certainly apparent on "The Long and Winding Road" and "Across the Universe", but most of the album isn't nearly that bad, and there was never any chance that the resulting album was going to be a masterpiece.
As for Alanis Morissette, I don't mind women singing about being angry, but Morrissette's apparent inability to reflect, as demonstrated by her constant attitude of "It's all your fault" (as one of the songs said flat out), is a big turn-off to me. There is a difference between making art and just blasting your feelings out. (And then there's the irony of writing a song called "Ironic" when you don't know what the word means... but that's a cheap shot.) She was different from run-of-the-mill pop stars, true, but she wasn't deep, and being different from Mariah Carey isn't much of a recommendation. Tori Amos and Fiona Apple were (and still are) better artists than Alanis Morissette on every level imaginable: more insightful, more able to translate feelings into art, better musicians, better singers.
I agree with what you say about the overly-slick production, but as you say, that was the sound of the time. Actually, it's been the sound of the time for a long time. Overproduction and slickness have been a thing in pop music at least since the '70s when 16-track and 24-track recording equipment became available, and it's still the case today. The "VH1 drums" are a particular mid-'90s thing, but other eras had their equivalents, such as the "gated reverb drums" of the '80s (think Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight").
The art of record production and mixing progressed along with the technology (actually a bit behind it, since producers and engineers needed time to figure out what could be done with each new piece of gear). Back in the '50s, making a record just meant setting up some microphones and recording a performance to tape, then releasing it. If you wanted reverb on the vocals, you had to set up a spring plate behind the singer. The introduction of multi-track recording, studio effects, and eventually digital workstation software like ProTools have gradually transformed the art of record-making to the point that it bears very little resemblance to the art of live performance, and accordingly, the finished product has, over time, come to sound less and less like real performance, and more like a sculpted and polished representation of music, which is pretty much what it is.
Largely I agree with you, but to be fair, the line "it's all your fault" is from "Head Over Feet." In context, she's singing to a person with whom she's fallen in love and saying, "it's all your fault" that you're wonderful and I'm in love with you. Not to say she doesn't imply the line in a more negative sense in other songs, but still...
Thanks for the correction about Phil Spector. As far as the lyrics of the album and their perspective goes, you're not entirely wrong, but let's remember that she was 19 when she wrote them.
And Fiona Apple and Laura Nyro were 18 when they recorded their first albums...
And of course she *wrote* them with the assistance of a 40 year old producer/lyricist named Glen Ballard who is probably the one most responsible for the overproduction and commercial trajectory of the album.
Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" is a song about irony which doesn't contain any actual examples of irony, which is....ironic.
Maybe she was just trolling everybody all along. :-)
A lot of electronic music is overproduced. If you listen back to old house and techno records, the ones that sound the least dated in my opinion tend to be more minimal. Sometimes less is more.
Agreed. "Overproduced" is a good way to describe many of the differences between much recent electronica and early house and techno. The recent "lo-fi" genre that has grown up in response testifies to that. Still some good 'minimalist' artists out there. Huey Mnemonic is an example of a younger one, I think. And, of course, people like Jeff Mills and Moodymann still put out more 'minimal' stuff that still has a lot of care and artistry put in.
Great post, Freddie. I *hated* this album when I was in high school. Alanis and Joan Osborne were only good for mockery at the time. I've softened a lot over the years to a lot of 90s music that I couldn't stand at the time because nostalgia worms its way into our brains whether we like it or not. (I'm a lot less critical of 90s pop than I was as a teenage boy, to the point where I'll happily sing along to 'Don't go chasing waterfalls' when back in the day if it wasn't grunge or gangster rap I wasn't interested--unless it was older music).
That decade was weird because there were a lot of terrific bands and albums and then there was a lot of "overproduced" stuff like Jagged Little Pill that could have been so much better if it had been more natural. Go sit around a fire and jam those tunes and record the results.
There's almost an audial Uncanny Valley sometimes. It's hard to put into words. Like adding too much sugar to something that needed more salt.
The 2000s suffered from many of the same problems, though I think a lot of smaller labels started moving in the right direction eventually. You can have pretty "lavish" productions on songs like Pure Comedy by Father John Misty but it never feels unnatural. It's big and orchestral and dramatic but it's supposed to be, and it feels natural rather than forced. Bands like The National put a lot of effort into instrumentation but always manage to stay true to their sound in the studio.
Still, a lot of great 90s stuff. Nirvana (and I still like Nevermind and think Cobain is at least partly to blame for its over-production no matter what he said later) and Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead and so many other great bands sprouted up that decade.
I still listen to Joan Osborne's 1995 album. "One of Us" is the worst song on there, and I skip it every time. The rest of the album is much better--there are some raw and funky tracks on there.
One Of Us is fine, it was just played to death. I haven't listened to the rest of the album in ages so I'll have to give it a go.
I was 12 when Jagged Little Pill came out. When I heard the hidden track that plays at the end of the album (“Your House”) I thought I was the only one who had it, and that when I came forward I would be on the news.
Anyway, my friends crushed that dream—they all had the track too—but “Your House” is an interesting contrast to the rest of the album because there are no instruments. I wish they’d ditched the heavy echo effect on her voice, though, so it would feel truly stripped down. Even for an unofficial a capella track, they felt the need to distort the vocals somehow.
Your House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIwFsYyroJ0
This made me think so fondly of the music I loved in high school, especially those artists with relatively small-time careers who grew over the time I listened to them. There's definitely an identifiable split - some bands I stopped listening to after whatever album, and it nearly always had to do with the production. They would get enough money and studio clout to get *a* producer, as opposed to mixing on their own or with the help of more-experienced friends, but not a producer who actually cared about making the music sound like *their* music. And there are some (Vienna Teng comes to mind) who slowly notched up their production one album at a time, always trying out new stuff but always in the service of the sound they knew they wanted to make. These days I listen to the Mountain Goats in large part for their production - their lyrics are always knockout good, but every album is now a gorgeous production experiment building on previous work while trying something very new. Getting to follow the journey is a real joy of liking the band for so many years.
...And, still knowing nothing about production, I consider Lorde's "Melodrama" to be an absolute modern masterpiece of the form. The layers of sounds, the whispers, the closeness or distance of her voice from the listener... it's incredibly clean and polished, but exactly at the sweet spot, never overproduced.
Lorde is an excellent example of overproduction that actually still sounds great. Beck is another. Check out his Morning album.
Also BTS. You could think of them as having wildly intrusive overproduction -- or you could appreciate that the production *is* the music, and that it's achieving exactly the bombastic effect it's going for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LE5dSA6RFg
The K-Pop boy band?
I'm not sure that live productions are what Freddie and the thread are talking about though. Overproduced is generally used in reference to studio albums.
That's true, after I'd posted I realized that I should have linked to the album version, not the live version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnWo9-Dioik
Even though I like their album production, I do tend to prefer their live versions for production reasons, because it's a little easier to tell their voices apart from each other. They trade lyrical lines back a forth a lot, more like a hiphop group than a typical harmony-focused western boy-band. In my opinion, their best-produced studio album so far is probably You Never Walk Alone (which, in a weird Freddie deBoer crossover, is also a concept album based on the novel Demian!).
I gotta say, the perfectly-smooth-and-shiny quality of K-Pop has always been its biggest turnoff for me. It feels overproduced to the point of overshadowing great talent. I agree with you that the wildly intrusive production is the point, and central to the form - but it just grates on me. It's the musical equivalent of that sticky feeling on your teeth you get from drinking soda.
Recently somebody showed me that they do versions of their music videos where they JUST film the dancing, no costumes, no production, no changing camera shots, and I liked that way better! So I think it's just that something about the busy-ness of the production doesn't do it for me. Likewise, to me the live versions of the songs feel like they're getting a bunch of extraneous noise out of the way.
Yeah, their "dance practice" videos really show off how cool their dance choreo is in a more "objective" form. I think part of the reason that BTS specifically has blown up beyond the normal K-pop scale is because they have both high-production glamorous celebrity polish and also a certain "lo-fi" appeal in their behind-the-scenes videos and self-shot live streams and such (their variety show, "Run BTS" has what I can only describe as "big church youth group energy").
Sorry for trying to turn this into a BTS thread, but my wife is literally in Los Angeles right now for their concert, so it's on my mind. :)
i don't know if this is a relevant comment or not but I love your music writing so much and would literally pay for a dedicated music criticism/writing newsletter it's SO GOOD every time
I loved Jagged Little Pill. I have very fond memories of the summer of 1995 that revolve around that album. I was painting house with my friends, where we usually snuck a joint or a beer on the roof (hey, you want your house painted cheaply, you get teenagers smoking pot under the eaves). It seemed like the entire album was on permanent rotation on the radio, and it was one of the few CDs I owned that was released post-1980 or so. It might have been the greatest summer of my youth, and that album was intricately woven into it in the way music is when you're young. I haven't listened to it much since then, but it's so etched in my memory that I can still name the tracks, in order.
I agree that the mix could have been stripped down a bit, something closer to Exile in Guyville, an album I always thought Alanis owed a big debt to (though that could be more because I was listening to them at more or less the same time). That push and pull between heavy production and lo-fi integrity has been around forever. Think of the environment the Stones released Exile on Main St in.
I agree that All I Really Want is the best track by a fair distance. Hand in My Pocket is probably #2.
Off topic, but a lot of video games are arguably “overproduced,” eg too much focus on being movie-like or having a realistic open world at the expense of actual gameplay.
I think you're onto something. Open-worldism, and its ladies-in-waiting Procedural Generation and Dynamic Quests, are superb when correctly used, but all too often they're done because there's some vague feeling at the studio that that's what the kids are playing these days and that anything else would show insufficient ambition.
There's another comment on here about how fresh, new bands will find their spirited drumwork replaced with the Platonic ideal of a snare by a busybody producer. I think that's similar to this - that there's some level of guilt to being a game-on-rails* and that it's only properly produced and grown-up if there's tiresome inventory management and a level grind that you can do on a barren hillside somewhere.
*visual novels and some RPGs, such as Disco Elysium, being excepted from this.
Yeah, open-world are always better in theory than in fact. There are good ones, but I think what you want is a game that gives the illusion of an open-world but actually keeps you pretty focused. Think Planescape: Torment.
And Procedural Generation has been a "but in OUR game it's awesome, honest" mirage since Daggerfall.
I think what you're indicating is that too much emphasis on making things "perfect" in a limited technical sense is bad for art.
Thanks this is the kind of writing I subscribed for.
One wonders what sort of audio setup FdB is listening on. Sounds like a pretty 'resolving' setup, or a very high quality built-in amp/speaker on the TV. Have you listened to this album on high fidelity headphones?
I have a Cambridge Audio AXR100 amplifier, an Audio-Technica AT-LP120 turntable, a Pro-Ject CD Box S2 CD player, Pioneer SP-BS22-LR speakers, and a set of Sony MDR 7506 cans. I'd call it on the low end of midrange.
Yeah that's a pretty solid little system for a smaller room. A subwoofer would probably help a lot especially for movies.
Amir at audiosciencereview liked the Pioneers for the price.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/pioneer-sp-bs22-lr-bookshelf-speaker-review.11303/
In my audiofool opinion your receiver is probably a bit constrained by them.
For another Andrew Jones speaker that's more up to par for the rest of the system check out Elac.
I'm afraid the real constraint on my amplifier is my girlfriend
Lol yep that's why audiofools concern ourselves with WAF. Wife acceptance factor.
Obviously you were talking about volume (SPL) and not speaker appearance or size (I think? - Is there a major space constraint?) which, along with price, are what really go into the WAF.
I had to compromise with my wife and sold one pair of particularly Dr. Seuss looking JBL speakers for a somewhat less ridiculous looking pair of these.
https://www.jblsynthesis.com/products/loudspeakers/series/studio-monitors/4349.html
Beautiful thing about them is that they're 91dB/w/m efficient and have a state of the art tweeter & waveguide design that makes them sound just as good at lower volume as at earsplitting-yet-not-distorted volume.
Please don't look up the MSRP on those. I didn't pay anywhere near that; always buy used or open box. The crazy-looking ones I sold to buy those are also in the Synthesis line but have been discontinued. Before COVID you could buy a decent used car for the price of either pair.