Blog: Idolator

One of the stranger turning points in recent pop history occurred around 2004, when songs like Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" signaled a full shift in white Top 40 toward uptempo guitar rock, completing the trend that had begun a few years earlier with Avril Lavigne's first hits. It felt like a regime change from the bombastic synth pop of the Britney/Backstreet era, and it would've been, if not for the fact that the same producer, Swedish pop mastermind Max Martin, was behind both "…Baby One More Time" and "Since U Been Gone." Along with songwriter and co-producer Lukasz [...]