A new beat

Why Euro and new R&B are flying high

by Michael Freedberg

Both Neil Strauss's recent New York Times front-page story on the current state of the US pop-music industry and a similar article in Time came to the same conclusion: the trouble with pop is the failure of alternative rock. But what if Time and the Times are wrong? Pop-music genres have peaked before. The essence of rock and roll, it was once said, was to capture the moment and be gone. "Three minutes of genius," the hit single was called. It wasn't until the shift from AM rock-and-roll radio to FM "rock" radio that albums became the medium of choice. Then "rock" peaked, and the forum moved from FM to the dance club, where the 12-inch single reigned. Then disco peaked, and the forum shifted back to FM, to college stations block-programming new wave and punk, especially import 45s from the UK.

College radio proved to be the next big thing, all right, but that era is now over. The audience for "alternative" was never as polymorphous as it claimed. Where earlier forms of pop had beckoned the whole world, alternative invited only the chosen few. It was an honor student's music, a diversion for the future meritocracy. Its angsts were a way of saying, "We are the A team. And you are not." But the music of one-upmanship has peaked.

While college, and now "modern rock," radio has been playing out its narrow hand, other pop-music genres -- uncommented on by the alterna-mags, unplayed on alterna-radio -- have gone from success to success. Disco failed to sustain a pop audience in the US, but it always held onto the clubs, and in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Quebec it took over. Today's surge of Eurobeat, led by La Bouche, Real McCoy, Corona, Robert Miles, and Los Del Rio, is the outcome of that conquest.

Moreover, as Strauss's own article points out, the years 1985 to 1992 saw the triumph of rap, new jack, and Hispanic pop, as America's people of color, growing in number and market power, witnessed their own generational revolution. Previous forms of black American pop had appealed to all age groups; rap and new jack, however, were specifically geared to a youth image and young people's preoccupations. And sure enough, the same economics that had made teen music such a success among white kids -- youth's need to show off to parents and pals, plus bargain-basement recording costs and a blues-based music -- made this music a success again. Black kids bought the new music, and so did white kids. It was the 1950s revisited, as a city-born "rhythm & blues" took suburbia by storm.

When the new "urban" pop surged, the music magazines were caught short. Although they wrote about hip-hop (not so often about new jack), alterna-radio could not play the music without losing its core fans. Meanwhile, the FMs that did play hip-hop and new jack couldn't draw those fans if they were to play alternative. Since the college stations and music magazines had already dismissed Eurobeat, their inability to get aboard the new "urban" music left them without a future. This mattered. Because during the college-tastes era of pop music the entire music establishment had geared itself only to college tastes. A&R men were hired to sign alternative bands. Which was to decide the question ahead of time, because Euros were likely not to be bands at all, but instead one or two guys in a room, with a computer and maybe a diva singer. MTV, too, looked and sounded the way it thought 17-to-24-year-olds wanted to look and sound. But only certain 17-to-24-year-olds. The Arabic, Greek, Italian, and Asian kids popping up in ever greater numbers in US cities had Euro tastes, but they weren't asked about it and it sure wasn't addressed. As for people over age 30, they were off the screen.

Meanwhile, the rest of the entire pop world was doing just fine. Last year the Economist ran a lengthy article about the enormous expansion of non-English-language pop and European dance music. It told how PolyGram, Europe's biggest pop-music corporation, was enjoying 10 percent growth per year -- five times as big a growth rate as Strauss reports for the US record industry in 1996. Strauss's article includes a display box showing the market collapse of acts like Hootie and the Blowfish, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Sheryl Crow, and Nirvana: yet the same display box shows that Celine Dion's new English-language CD has sold 4.7 million units, up from 3.2 million for her last English-language release. Dion, of course, is a Québecoise with a base in European pop and a huge audience in Francophone countries. She sings sturdily about immutability in love -- a theme as unlike the shifting ironies of alternative rock as possible. No wonder her sales are surging. No wonder the bypassed US music pundits don't take her into account. But they should. As Strauss himself writes, "In the world of pop, the only sure thing this year seems to be Celine Dion."