Is Mark Ronson a Pop Star or a Svengali?

Even before he started circling the limelight, Mark Ronson already had the clout. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the retrophiliac music producer starred in a Tommy Hilfiger campaign alongside Aaliyah, and DJ’ed for New York’s Sidekick-wielding fashion set. He racked up the kind of bookings that would make a National Enquirer reporter gag, playing both Martha Stewart’s Christmas party and the wedding reception of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, hosted in a 15th-century Italian castle.

Ronson’s own cult of personality has largely rested on a cluster of artists whom he helped shepherd through their imperial period, including Amy Winehouse on her immortal 2006 album Back to Black, and Lily Allen on her sly 2006 debut Alright, Still. On the back of these successes, a New York Magazine feature the following year described Ronson as “the architect of a new white-soul movement.” Also in 2007, The New York Times asked, “Could this rock star D.J. actually become a rock star?”

Twelve years on, Ronson isn’t quite a rock star, but his super producer status has reached a new plateau. Even if the 43-year-old hadn’t already won multiple Grammys throughout the last 11 years, he would have gotten halfway to an EGOT in the last 12 months alone, thanks to a co-write on Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born anthem “Shallow” and “Electricity,” a clubby bop by Dua Lipa and Silk City, the production duo Ronson formed with Diplo. Yet Ronson has consistently shown an itchy discomfort with the spotlight. Perhaps the closest he has ever came to a brag was on 2010’s “Record Collection,” where in a rare vocal turn he speak-sings, “I get preferential treatment at the Marriott.”

Speaking to the New York Times’ Joe Coscarelli this June, Ronson said, “I’m definitely not a pop star.” As Coscarelli notes, that distinction itself is of questionable relevance, given “the rise of DJs and producers as pop stars” such as Diplo, the Chainsmokers, and Calvin Harris. In this sense Ronson is an outlier among his peers, and due to his work with Winehouse, holds an extra cachet of credibility for music fans of a certain stripe. You can’t quite picture him playing a washboard in a Lil Nas X video, like Diplo; but with his multiple interviews promoting his new album Late Night Feelings, neither is he the Bel Air recluse of Harris.

By farming his productions’ vocals out to others, Ronson decidedly side-steps much of the personality game demanded of A-list pop stars, while still reaping the benefits afforded by having a No. 1 single. In some cases, as with his recent Miley Cyrus collaboration “Nothing Breaks Like A Heart,” the quality of the work justifies his seeming desire to have it both ways. But often, Ronson’s wide-ranging approach to music feels like an exercise in personal brand building as much as an artistic pursuit. His influence is evident in the number of amateur DJs you’ll find at Silver Lake or Shoreditch bars with laptop sets that range from Ghost Town DJ’s to Steely Dan and end with a self-satisfied smirk.

Ronson’s first big production gig was with the soul-pop artist Nikka Costa, a former child star who’d once sung with Frank Sinatra at the White House, and who Virgin Records was prepping for a career reboot. Their 2001 song “Everybody Got Their Something” sampled a guitar hook from George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass while also bringing to mind a then-current Faith Evans hit. Costa’s comeback failed to bother the charts much, but sample-heavy soundalikes turned out to be smart business for Ronson. His 2003 contribution to the Honey soundtrack, “Ooh Wee,” featured new Ghostface Killah and Nate Dogg verses over music culled from Dennis Coffey’s Motor City classic “Scorpio” and Boney M’s “Sunny.” The song turned out to sync perfectly with quick-cuts of Jessica Alba making cocktails.

Ronson certainly wasn’t reinventing the wheel when it came to sampling, given its foundational status in hip-hop, but he was right on time and well positioned for the mash-up boom of the mid-’00s. Running tandem to Ronson’s production breakthroughs was the Limewire-addled rise of era- and genre-splicing (white) artists like Girl Talk and fan-made novelties like “A Stroke Of Genie-us,” a combination of the Strokes’ and Christina Aguilera’s first hits. In Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom, writer Rob Sheffield recalled his reaction to an early ’00s James Murphy set that blended Donna Summer into Hawkwind. “I was like, ‘Holy shit! That is some visionary shit!’” If you heard it now, you’d barely blink.

Ronson’s urge to reassemble classic records seemed to be the guiding principle for his 2007 album Version. He produced and played at least seven instruments on the album, and his face was prominently placed on the cover and in the accompanying music videos. Yet uncharacteristically for a songwriter, he didn’t sing on the record at all. This didn’t exactly free him up to create genius-level productions: Version’s horn-riddled covers and mash-ups were assembled with a level of curation that made human nostalgia vacuum Moby look like Grandmaster Flash. Hits from the Smiths and the Supremes were cynically merged into a dull husk of the originals’ glory; Britney Spears’ “Toxic” had the indignity of being drowned in blaring brass; Amy Winehouse just about saved her inexplicably-beloved cover of the Zutons’ “Valerie” through the magnetism of her own voice. Ronson basked in the wattage of voguish guest artists like Winehouse and Allen while also remaining incubated from the spotlight’s harsher glare.

Ronson’s svengali-like tendencies were at play even as he found new focus on 2015’s Uptown Special, a collection of loungey psych-pop touched by Kevin Parker and Stevie Wonder. Oddly, the Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Michael Chabon was called on for lyrics about New York’s socialite den Paul’s Baby Grand and spacing out on Adderall. Ronson later admitted that there was a “science-project aspect” to the assembly of the album, which is not a turn of phrase that exactly invites an emotional connection to the music. The ratio was clearly off in other ways too: Ronson faced lawsuits from three separate artists alleging that his Bruno Mars-led boogie pastiche, “Uptown Funk,” had infringed on their copyright.

In a 2014 TED Talk, Ronson showed how his musical sausage gets made. On stage, he manipulated soundbites from past TED Talks and elongated the organization’s jingle, creating an airy boom-bap beat punctuated with phrases like “pop into the discotheque” and “turn up the dials.” Later in the talk, he elaborated on the central philosophy to his own sample-heavy work:

Ronson’s choice of words like “bully” and “co-opt” is unfortunate. It conjures the image of an unscrupulous manipulator who plunders key moments throughout musical history for their own gain. That charge could reasonably have been levied against the producer circa Version, but it also brings to mind Brian Eno’s slightly more generous assessment of the contemporary artist’s role in culture. “[He] re-mixes,” Eno said, speaking in a 1986 interview later quoted in Simon Reynolds’ Retromania. “He perpetuates a great body of received cultural and stylistic assumptions, he re-evaluates and re-introduces certain ideas no longer current, and then he also innovates. But the ‘innovation’ part might be a much smaller proportion than we usually think.”

If Eno’s words conjure a vision of modernity where artists are fated to endlessly re-jig innovators of the past, then it’s a limitation that Ronson aims to resist on Late Night Feelings, released this week. Themed around his own post-divorce heartbreak, the album edges Ronson ever closer to the sound of current streaming pop. The YeeHaw disco bop “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” is Miley Cyrus’ freshest-sounding single in a half-decade; King Princess, signed to Ronson’s Columbia imprint Zelig Records, shows up on the strutting Haim-soundalike “Pieces of Us”; Camila Cabello, who Ronson has called “our first lady of emo-pop,” repurposes her teen angst to giddy effect on “Find U Again.” Yet despite the album’s range of genres, its songs share a certain contrived sheen, the way that Netflix originals ranging from teen soaps to murder mysteries seem molded from the same glossy goop.

In a recent interview with the British Independent, Ronson said that, on Late Night Feelings, he wanted to move away from an “idea I’ve always had that I do serious or deep music on other people’s albums.” But then he found himself erring on the side of melancholy. “I probably didn’t realize [until] I was doing it, ‘Oh, I’m making a breakup record,’” he added. The album’s cover art even depicts a heart-shaped disco ball cracked down the middle, an image that Ronson has tattooed on his right bicep. But on a patchy album, his tactic of recruiting buzzy women singers as ciphers for his message reads as a cloaking device, allowing him to remain, Oz-like, behind the curtain.

In this, it’s hard not to think of the songwriter-producers behind ’60s girl groups, like Phil Spector, Tamla/Motown’s William “Mickey” Stevenson, and Shadow Morton, who masterminded the Shangri-La’s lachrymose melodramas. But the retrograde pick-and-mix-style curation of Late Night Feelings clashes with a pop milieu that’s characterized by an eroding binary between production svengalis and charismatic stars. Though the CD era’s Brill Building-grade heavyweights like Max Martin and Stargate still produce reliable smashes (and a new crop of prolific songwriter/producers like Pop Wansel and Louis Bell nip at their heels), pop’s creation process has been decentralized to an extent in the streaming era.

Increasingly, it seems that pop’s most interesting producers are those who closely align themselves with a small community of artists, or even just one. Billie Eilish’s record-obliterating debut was entirely produced by her brother FINNEAS, with a dentist’s drill and an Easy-Bake Oven timer adding eccentric flair. A.G. Cook and SOPHIE helped hotwire Charli XCX’s futuristic fembot sound. Sometimes the producer is also the star, as dazzlingly evidenced by Rosalía and Christine and the Queens. The production credits on many of pop’s biggest albums still run the length of a CVS receipt, but young stars like Lorde and Ariana Grande have taken on more of a directorial role in their collaborations, gathering up executive-producer titles like their name is Beyoncé.

So where does this leave Ronson, squarely more of a traditionalist? For the moment, his approach is working: “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” was, deservedly, his biggest hit since “Uptown Funk.” The appetite for Ronson’s music has not been quite this voracious since his mid-’00s boom, perhaps due to the relative nuance he has acquired along the way. But on Late Night Feelings, he merges into a tasteful wallpaper of happy-sad mood music, his production merely the window dressing to the gravitational pull—and emotional delivery—of his vocalists. Ronson’s position at the fulcrum between reclusive producer and spotlight-wielding star may turn out the trickiest place of them all: there’s a danger to hovering in midair for too long.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork