He uses Sabrina Carpenter as a case study and, well, I feel no obligation to go hear any more Sabrina Carpenter tracks. Beato points out how many professional songwriters (or how few, really) dominate the field in writing songs for popular artists.
Now a Romantic might say this is a sign that people aren't writing their own songs but it was always true that many popular artists made hits famous that they didn't write. When Stevie Wonder wrote a song for Michael Jackson we're talking about two of the legends of 20th century popular music. When folks were writing songs for The Monkees the song factory was not cranking out actually bad songs. It can be pure rockist Romanticism to lambast collaborative pop songwriting as if it were only bad.
But to me this suggests a weakness in Romantic and post-Romantic concepts of "the genius". Now I don't think it's necessary to do what Andrew Durkin tried to argue, which was to argue against "authorship" and "authenticity". The problem with arguing against lone-genius "authorship" via Barthes is this potentially misses a basic point about authorship many people understood pre-Romanticism, that you didn't have to be "original" to do something well. Part of the art of inventio in rhetoric was picking a topic that might be ready-made. If Haydn used a Croatian folk song people recognized it wasn't held against him. If Johann Sebastian Bach (and all the other Bachs) drew upon Lutheran hymnody this wasn't counted against them either. Variations of sampling have existed for a thousand years. If anything the balkanization of poptimists and post-Romantic classical snobs have created the misleading impression that classical music "always" prized "originality" and rock has to be "authentic". Durkin's argument against "authenticity" in Decomposition could have been pointed elsewhere. I think Philip Stoltzfus' work correctly highlighted the problem with various neo-Orphic approaches to music and "authenticity", that these measures of the "authentic" trade on onerous stereotypes about race, class, gender and sex that are frequently indefensible to contemporary theologians, philosophers, artists, and theorists. Getting past Ted Gioia's dubious dualism of Pythagoras vs Empocles is still necessary.
An idea I have been mulling over in the last few months is that figures like Michael Jackson and Taylor Swift may have written a fairly big chunk of their catalogs but they don't have to write "all" of it. Co-writing has been normal. If even Duke Ellington took credit for the riffs and melodies of bandmates like Hodges or Tizol there is a possible category outside the Romantic era idolatry of the lone genius that we could use, the impresario. For partisans of Romanticism and Art Religion this would be sacrilege but for the 18th century and earlier it wouldn't necessarily be scandalous. Depending on who you asked to describe his job Franz Joseph Haydn was a kind of master of ceremonies, in charge of producing courtly dance music and event music (masses, for instance). Before the Romantic era elevated the Artist to the Genius beyond compare it wouldn't have been a shock to people if a composer made use of existing materials. Popular virtuosic variations on well-known opera songs was so normal in the early 19th century music journalists and in-the-know people sniffed in contempt at the practice.
As for Beato's point that analyzing the song lyrics of a song sung by Sabrina Carpenter is ridiculous because she didn't write those lyrics, well, I'm reminded of a snipe Eric Nisenson made in Blue: The Murder of Jazz, most rock and pop music critics have been English majors who are musically illiterate at every level who happen to know what they like and for whom the music has always been an excuse to do song lyric analyses as if they were poems by Pound or Dickenson. Since Marsalis has been writing things like a violin concerto in the last fifteen years that's some new context for "the murder of jazz", I suppose. I never much cared about the jazz wars because I am a fan of some jazz but stopped paying attention to jazz around the time Coltrane died, to be blunt. There have been post-death-of-Coltrane pieces I've heard I thought were fun or annoying but I am a classical guitarist so I admit I have been focused on other stuff.
The quip that rock and pop critics are just English majors anyone does seem to have some teeth to it.
Those are my thoughts, such as they are, on this recent Beato video.
POSTSCRIPT
Think of it this way, talking about Rite of Spring as if it were never a ballet and that Diaghilev wasn't connected to its creation, just Stravinsky, wouldn't be good arts history. Well, the same can be said about pop songs as about music that has been disconnected from its ballet. In a way Beato's complaint about analyzing the lyrics of a Sabrina Carpenter song "could" be read as a parallel-but-reverse complaint to talking about Stravinsky's music as if it weren't part of a giant collaborative project.
