I used to think that my favourite, mm, I wouldn’t quite call them subgenres, but sounds in pop music had just sort of... materialized in a place and a time. A producer or songwriter put out a particular hit, then everyone around them copied its style, and before you know it we had a sonic trend called the Wall of Sound or whatever.
That’s sometimes the case. But, uh, often a sound coheres less because of some emergent property of space-time and more because it’s the same studio band on all of the songs.
The Wrecking Crew gave us the Wall of Sound and much of the rest of late ‘60s LA pop. The Funk Brothers played on nearly every record released by Motown. Today’s musical stylings are brought to you by Booker T. and the MGs, the Stax Records house band that defined Southern Soul.
It sounds the same because it’s the exact same musicians. Booker T. and the MGs put out some records of their own, the most famous studio bands get a name and a Wikipedia page, but most session musicians are only ever immortalized in the small font of liner notes. It seems a bit unfair.
There’s a lot of unrecognized quiet competence in this world. My uncle is a sound engineer; he says that he’s doing his job well when nobody notices that he’s there. I think that’s broadly true of “operations” work— at its best, it’s largely invisible. This is probably part of what makes it hard to recruit the office managers and administrators of the world. We need people to make everything cohere, but their success can’t help but blend into the background.
A small challenge for you, then: sometime tomorrow, whether you’re listening to a song, or riding a city bus, or enjoying a clean house, just pause for a second, and take that time to appreciate the subtle effort that went into what you’re experiencing. Attend to the quiet competence behind everything.