I guess hip-hop has this best figured out. T.I. can work with Mannie Fresh and Toomp and Just Blaze on different songs, and we can recognize that each is bringing something to the collaboration, and different contributors will affect songs differently, but also, each is playing his own part. And, sure, sometimes you might say that a song’s only good because of the producer, but no one would be silly enough to stick together a procession of Neptunes tracks and point out how similar they are.
But hip-hop has this figured out because people who talk about the music have made it an explicit point of reference when they talk about it. (And also, because the conversation about hip-hop tends to be pretty insular; if every single Neptunes track went top ten there would definitely be a clueless rant about their similarity.)
But this also provides a clue to how to talk about modern pop, which, taking the long view, basically is hip-hop only with singing instead of (or sometimes in addition to) rapping. The days when an MC was just an MC and a DJ was just a DJ are long gone, of course; but the principle of the equal(ish) division of labor implicit in
still holds good and needs to be acknowledged more.
