Concision, admittedly, is the essence of pop: its discipline, its challenge, its genius. To tell a story or sum up an attitude in a handful of sung verses or a salvo of hip-hop rhymes, and to unite them with music that lodges those words in memory  and, at best, also summons the feeling behind them  is a songwriter’s job description. And it doesn’t have to mean sacrificing ambition. A brief time frame can hold a lot: all the chordal transformations of Tin Pan Alley or 1970s R&B, all the vocal fireworks of Aretha Franklin, all the rhythmic intensity of James Brown, all the electroacoustic metamorphoses of Radiohead, all the colliding samples of Public Enemy, all the internal rhymes, comedy and psychodrama of Eminem in his prime.

Yet musical or verbal complexity can easily add clutter rather than depth, not to mention idle pretension. That’s why popular music regularly goes through back-to-basics purges like punk (both the 1970s and 1990s editions), electro (with iterations in every decade since the 1970s) and for that matter rock ’n’ roll itself.

Minimalism can be a corrective and a clarification, a reminder of primal pleasures and impulses, a knowing rejuvenation. The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica sees that spirit in the approach of Best Coast and kindred stripped-down bands that are due for albums this year, a strategy he has labeled the New Simplicity. And it’s true that if that style doesn’t generate its own orthodoxy, it could turn out to be endearing. Someone just might write the new “Wild Thing” or the new “Hey Ya!” Too often, however, less is merely less.

In a twisted throwback to the 1950s and 1960s pop songwriting has been partly returned to backstage hired guns: producers (and teams) like Dr. Luke, Max Martin, Stargate, Polow Da Don and David Guetta. They’re not concentrated geographically in places like Tin Pan Alley or the Brill Building though, and they’re not the total Svengalis of the old days. Instead they send digital files that bounce around the world for tinkering, and their singers supply some portion of lyrics or personality. But all the songwriting by committee inevitably leads to homogenization, and it’s also constricting pop’s subject matter.