reportage
Have you ever heard of a Swedish guy named Max Martin? No? Well, he is only the most successful and influential pop music producer of the past 25 years. Let’s get introduced to the King of Pop in disguise.
Max Martin | Axel Öberg
The King of Pop W
e all know this moment when a casual garden party turns into a time travel through our recent history of pop music. I Want It That Way, Hit Me Baby One More Time, I Kissed a Girl, , I Can’t Feel My Face, Blinding Lights... Only by reading those titles, many of us can recall the songs instantly and their melodies pop up in our heads. Some of us might even get the image of Britney Spears dancing in the school hallway or the Backstreet Boys posing dramatically at the airport. Well, probably everyone knows that it was not the 16-year old Britney who actually wrote the song that made her become the most famous teenager in the western sphere and later on the most successful musician of the 2000’s. However, something that much fewer people know: all those songs mentioned above, performed by different artists and released in different years or even decades, have one thing in common the person who created them, Max Martin. It was 1971 when the Swede Karl Martin Sandberg was born in Stockholm. Even though he grew up in this golden age of
16 - VOICES
Swedish music when ABBA became the most popular band around the world, nobody could know that the person who is (at least a bit better) known as Max Martin would be the most successful producer of pop music one day. However, his success didn’t come out of nowhere. Already as a child, Max Martin encountered the world of music as a student of Sweden’s public music education program. Later on, as a teenager, he sang for a couple of bands before he dropped out of high school to focus on his music career as the singer and frontman of the funk-metal band “It’s Alive”. Eventually, the band wasn’t really successful, but the more important thing was that their second album was produced by Cheiron Studios, the label of the Swedish DJ and producer Denniz PoP, who was meant to see Max Martins
