The dirty, little secret of pop music is that is dependent on arrangers. When you listen to Paul McCartney or David Bowie or Prince and you're thinking, "This guy was a genius to think of all this!" He actually didn't. The guy who thought of it was an arranger--in this case, a highly skilled theoretician/composer/musician named Clare Fischer. Fischer was a Detroit-area jazz and classical artist who got into arranging as a way of making money. He also arranged for highly skilled musicians as Dizzy Gillespie and he was Herbie Hancock's musical hero. When these guys wrote a song, they would play it for Fischer and would tell him, "I want a sax solo here" or "I need string orchestration here." And Fischer would write it and assemble the musicians he wanted to play on it. Sometimes they handed him bare skeletons of songs and let him do his thing to put flesh on them and give them life. By rights, he deserved co-writing credits on many of these songs.
All this stuff about "The Beatles couldn't read and they were great" is all well and good but the Beatles also had George Martin who knew his music theory behind them producing and arranging their material and they knew they could do without him and kept him for the entire run of the band's existence. There never would have been an "Eleanor Rigby" without skilled writers and readers to get those strings right--that wasn't done by ear or by people making fortuitous mistakes.
In the days before recording, music couldn't be transmitted or preserved without someone to write it down and someone else to read and play it and it really hasn't changed. Music is ultimately dependent on readers, writers and theoreticians. They carry the torch for everyone else. Without them behind the scenes, what's up front sounds mediocre and amateurish. I once was sitting with a bunch of skilled folk musicians--all skilled readers--and one's birthday was that day. When it was revealed, they broke into "Happy Birthday" which they spontaneously sang in perfect harmony. It's in their blood. It demonstrates the difference between real musicians and everyone else.
Maybe that's why so much of pop has turned to crap. Less and less skilled people in the business so that even ones with good ideas can't communicate them effectively and have to settle for substandard pap. Just give it a hip-hop beat and maybe no one will notice how bad it really is. And the sad thing is, most people don't anymore.
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