Pop Music -> Formula -> APUSH

Okay, I know that people talk about all these pop songs conforming to the same old formula(s), but I never noticed how blatant this was until I heard Britney Spears' "Stronger" on the radio yesterday. At first I thought it was someone doing a cover of "Oops I Did It Again", but I didn't think the lyrics was the same. However, the structure of the song and the notes seemed eerily similar.

I confirmed it this morning after downloading the music. Well, the tempo of "Stronger" is a little faster, and both songs are in different keys, but if you listen to both songs, you'll notice that the melodic/rhythmic patterns and even the overall structure/style are very much similar. If I actually paid money for her CDs, then I would feel I've been scammed. Heck, as a fan of pop music (I know it's watered down, but still very catchy!), I feel scammed for having to put up with this crap of recycling your old music.

I went and looked up the credits for these two songs. Lo and behold, they're both by Max Martin, the Swedish pop-hit machine. No freaking wonder! It's like they took one song and altered the contents a bit to make it seem like there were two different songs. This reminds me of how we used to do some of our meaningless APUSH homework before, but that's just another aside.* =)

* Aside: Basically, we were made to outline each chapter in the textbook. Keep in mind that this was a history textbook, so it was really long and tedious. I found out that you can pretty much outline the first and last sentence of each section, and your outline would still make sense, but it was still a lot of work. After a while, some of us felt like it was just a waste of our time to do this busywork when we have tons of other more-relevant homework and activities to take care of. We pooled our resources and would divy up the sections amongst a few people, have each person outline his/her own sections in a very rough format, and then compile the final product. The thing is, each person still has to go through these rough drafts of the outline and tweak the wording/formatting/style. In the end, we each have seemingly different outlines and saved a lot of time from doing menial work. =) This is not entirely ethical, but there really was no point in doing the work. I learn more by writing down my own notes and outlines as I study, not by having to type up some fancy outline to turn in, and this was already proven by my test scores.