Two questions were rattling around in my skull while I was working on “The Song Machine“—or “Inside the Sausage Factory” as some have referred to it—my piece about how Top Forty hits are made. The first question was whether it matters if an artist writes his or her own songs. Lady Gaga writes most of her music, while Rihanna writes hardly any of hers. Does that make Gaga a greater artist than Riri, whose crack songwriting team—the top-line writer Ester Dean and the producers Tor Hermansen and Mikkel Eriksen, known as Stargate—are the focus of my piece?

Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and Glen Campbell didn’t write their songs. Abba did (so go figure). Billie Holliday did not help write “Strange Fruit,” although she claimed she did (it was written by the Jewish poet and civil-rights activist Abel Meeropol). Michael Jackson wrote most of his songs, yet Rod Temperton wrote “Thriller,” his biggest hit. Neil Young has to write “Sugar Mountain,” and James Taylor has to write “Sweet Baby James,” because that’s who those guys are: balladeer poets, belonging to a tradition that predates recorded music by centuries. But Madonna doesn’t have to write “Papa Don’t Preach” (Brian Elliot wrote it) because she can inhabit the role, as a great actress would. (And unlike the balladeers of old, she can make music videos.)

Moviegoers don’t expect the lead actors to have written the screenplay, but listeners want to believe that singers write their songs. Acting can move you to tears, but a great song touches places in your heart that spoken words can’t reach, and it enhances the experience of hearing the song to believe the artist wrote it. Discovering that the singer is merely following a script, too, can be something of a letdown, which is partly why Colonel Parker always insisted on a songwriting credit for Elvis. (Doc Pomus, who together with Mort Shuman wrote twenty-five songs for Elvis, including “Little Sister” and “Surrender,” never even got to meet the King.) People who grew up with Dylan and the Stones may be forgiven for believing that singers should write their own songs, but before the rock era there was a longer tradition, stretching back to the early twentieth century, of specialized songwriters, producers, and publishers supplying artists with material. Now, in the twilight of the rock era, that older tradition has reemerged, which is kind of what “The Song Machine” is about.

The second question was whether it matters if music is made by hand—played on real instruments by the musicians who are making the music—or if it’s made on machines, with synthetic instruments and programmed beats. Almost all the music you hear on Top Forty radio these days is made on machines. You may hear a real guitar once in a while, but an actual drum sound is pretty rare. The singing is still done by humans, but the voices are never ever off pitch, thanks to Auto-Tuning. Is there a problem here? Dave Grohl, in accepting the Foo Fighters’ award for Best Rock Album at last month’s Grammys, indicated there was. “The human element of music is what’s important,” he said. “Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do. It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in a computer.” A few days later he took it back, when he explained in a press release that he wasn’t putting machine-made music down, and that he loved Skrillex, too. “So, don’t give me two Crown Royals and then ask me to make a speech,” he joked.

But was it just the whiskey talking, or was Grohl onto something? The gist of the backlash against his comments was that in extolling the playing of an instrument over the programming of a computer, Grohl was privileging rock over dance, electronica, and hip-hop. Rock just so happens to have brought together the folk tradition of the poet balladeers with the virtuoso musicianship of the great lead-guitar players, and that happy confluence created the expectation in the minds of several generations of listeners like me that music should be played by people. Therefore, even when we are told by no less of an authority than Bruce Springsteen that it doesn’t matter how the music is made, we are naturally skeptical. In his recent keynote address at SXSW, he said, “The elements you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way of doing it. There’s just doing it.”

Really, Boss? Et tu, imprenditore? If only there were a synth for Clarence Clemons.

Illustration by Michael Gillette.