They never had buzz, or at least they didn’t have the type of buzz that was legible to my teenage self. Savage Garden weren’t part of a cultural wave, and they didn’t belong to any particular genre or scene. You’d hear these songs out in the world, and you might enjoy them without becoming the slightest bit curious about the people who made them. The duo made lighter-than-air earworms that would simply become a part of your environment. For a while, though, Savage Garden had radio programmers under their spell. They were two faintly anonymous-looking white guys who would occasionally pop up on VH1, and there was nothing especially outwardly interesting about them. Nobody knew much of anything about Savage Garden. That’s what the Australian duo Savage Garden did in the late ’90s. But under rare circumstances, a nobody can become a somebody without even having to invent some kind of narrative or persona.
#ADDICTIVE DRUMS 2 DEMO PROFESSIONAL#
In the music business, professional hooksmiths who aren’t obvious pop stars usually play behind-the-scenes roles, writing or producing hits for people who do have those qualities. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen. He has to perform the absurdity of his own stardom.Įvery once in a while, though, someone relatively normal sneaks through the system and conquers the charts.
Even a pop-star everyman like Phil Collins has to be able to communicate a whole lot with, for instance, a waggling eyebrow. Pop stars come in many different sizes and shapes, but in just about every form, pop stardom involves some sort of majestic, mystical charisma. The world has to project lust and fantasy and anxiety and parasocial friend-feelings and all sorts of other things on these people, and these people have to be able to support all of those projections.
To rack up any kind of sustained success, pop stars have to be larger-than-life figures. Pop stardom is, among many other things, a cult of personality. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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