The one singer David Crosby felt had nothing to say: “As deep as a birdbath”
For David Crosby, the purpose of any good song went beyond being able to write a half-decent melody.
There were plenty of opportunities for people to write about their true feelings in their songs, but rarely did anyone ever capitalise on it in the same way that he saw when artists like Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan were painting their masterpieces. There were always bound to be great songwriters out there, but around the turn of the century, Crosby started to look around the pop scene and wonder where all the true voices went.
Because when you look at the era of music that was happening in the 2000s, rock wasn’t nearly the massive force that it used to be. It had been taken over by genres like hip-hop and pop, and while there were still some great bands to be found like The White Stripes and The Strokes, it’s not like the biggest names in nu-metal were going to be all that appealing to the same guy that sang on tracks like ‘Ohio’.
But looking at his favourite bands from around the same time, a lot of them seemed to be profiting off of seniority and name recognition half the time. While Steely Dan was far from past their prime in terms of musical ability, the fact that they walked away with a Grammy for the album Two Against Nature rather than Radiohead’s Kid A or even Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP remains one of the most out-of-touch decisions the Recording Academy has ever made.
When you look at the Best New Artists from around that time, though, they did have a lot of great moments as well. They would be nominating genre mainstays like Linkin Park in the 2000s, but when it came to the pop starlets, nominating someone like Britney Spears was bound to please every kid who watched TRL back in the day and no doubt infuriated every single folkie that only saw her as a musical punchline.
Years before people started to critique Spears for almost every single thing she did, Crosby held her up as an example of why there was no substance to what she was doing half the time, saying, “The current ethos in the United States of America is all to do with surface and nothing to do with substance. It doesn’t matter that Britney Spears has nothing to say and is about as deep as a birdbath. She doesn’t sing in concert; none of them do. Those are samples. Push a button, out comes the vocal.”
In his defence, it’s not like he doesn’t have a point about the live show. It’s no secret that there are backing tracks everywhere you look in modern productions, but that’s not a mark against them. They put a lot more focus into the choreography of everything, and given Crosby’s habits onstage, it’s not like he was known to be the most rambunctious presence when he stood at the mic at Woodstock.
And let’s not forget that Spears had some great tunes up her sleeve as well. It’s easy to complain about all of the layers in a Max Martin production, but the samples that they picked together led to many chord progressions that you would never see on the charts in the modern age, like the descending bassline on ‘Toxic’ or the almost classical progression in the middle of ‘Oops I Did It Again’.
So while the actual construction of the tunes were a lot different, it’s not like Spears was absolutely devoid of talent by any means. The lyrics weren’t nearly the kind of social criticism that you heard in the age of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but most people could appreciate pop starlets for what they were by that point.
