Reality check

Why pop must become a relevant music again

by Michael Freedberg

In the countries most affected by hit music, more people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before. The fastest-growing age group in the First World is the over-80s: every decade out to the 2030s, it'll double. By the year 2000 there'll be almost a million people age 100. People are working longer, too, past age 65 -- the age at which Social Security was originally designed to begin -- and into their 70s and even their 80s.

These are socio-political facts. What do they have to do with music? Just this: at the same time that the demographic in pop music's target countries is growing older, pop music is aiming itself chiefly to youth. As hit music's target audience becomes an ever smaller percentage of the whole, hit music's importance in the marketplace shrinks too.

It's hard to see how this can go on. Hit music being a business, it hardly wants to address fewer and fewer of those who have ears to listen. Yet that's what it continues to do. The most-listened-to FM radio stations talk the argots of teens and college kids. MTV sends out its "Rock the Vote" bus to college campuses and hires appropriately nerdy DJs; its videos look like high schools in recess and frat parties on the loose. Hit music's female stars, when they're not chasing "the cheap ironies of post-modernism" (as Newsweek's Malcolm Jones Jr. describes the current cultural condition), act and dress like child prostitutes. Some of its male icons also troll the wreckage of failed ideals; the rest have nothing to do but hang, wearing sneakers shaped like paddy wagons and cop-car sirens. The message in the music can only be you-know-what: fuck the system, indulge your desires, shop for clothes, spend your money.

This cannot stand, and even the target age group knows it. How else to account for last year's craze for Tony Bennett? Or for the excitement that -- in Europe, at least -- accompanies Tina Turner's new tour, which plays the non-youth act Gipsy Kings to packed houses, which keeps Barry White, Neil Young, and even Etta James going strong?

Yet not even Turner has automatic entree to MTV. Why has it taken six months to get her new CD, Wildest Dreams (Virgin), released in the US even though it's sold millions of copies in Europe? Dreams is 13 songs (including an eye-to-eye duet with Barry White on the title cut) sent directly to the listener by a singer who means who she is and has the courage to stand up to it. Given her loss of star power here in the land of her birth, Turner's remake of John Waite's "Missing You" sounds like a personal blues. Her voice sweeps across the widely orchestrated "Whatever You Want," "All Kinds of People," and "Unfinished Sympathy" without losing its focus even for a second.

There never has been a soul singer steadier than Turner. At age 58, she flexes the muscles of "Dancing in Your Dreams," a song of affirmation unto death so resolute that it scares you. Still, one US critic recently dismissed the CD's big-bodied shouts, deeply pensive ballads, and lush production as "Turner's fifty-something pop." I suppose he prefers Ian Curtis's walled-up death rock, or perhaps Kurt Cobain's fate as a magazine cover .

People ages 40, 50, 60, 70, and, yes, even 80 or more have hearts and desires, maybe more so (may I say it?) than kids do, and they struggle and fail, they succeed, they think about the future of the world, they get the blues. These are real-life events. They deserve to be addressed and expressed, popularly, to all people, and without the distraction of irony. But how? Hit music continues to target "youth culture" because after three decades of "youth culture" the over-40s don't buy albums and, indeed, dismiss hit music as a kid's preoccupation -- which it now is. The entire apparatus of A&R, promotion, and publicity, as well as the media, concert-tour, and rock-magazine bizzes, draws its cash flow from the only age group that spends money on hit CDs.

The new hit music will have to create its own apparatuses. As a start, I propose an entirely new esthetic. First, the music must go back to basics: who we are, how we relate to external reality, and what we must do about it. Here, a model is readily available. Soul and funk, the great musics of the '60s and early '70s, commanded the pride of an audience called to great deeds. Soul meant faith and funk meant work. When Aretha Franklin in concert asked for "Respect" and James Brown did the James Brown, people of every age and condition attended, and not only to be entertained. Through the voice of Franklin the Deity made Itself manifest to the audience; through the sweat of Brown, His commandments.

Today, funk has disappeared from hit charts even more completely than soul, which survives, in an ironic form, in diva-style disco. But the need to work and to take pride in accomplishment has moved (in part by way of the new Welfare Reform bill that President Clinton has signed) to the top of the nation's "must" list, and I'll be surprised if the anthems that made funk speak so loudly -- get-on-up, go-to-work, keep on pushing, or, as James Brown so truly put it, "If you don't work you can't eat" -- don't soon return to favor.

As for soul, the back-to-church melodic certainties of Oleta Adams's Moving On (Mercury) oppose the disbelief and cuteness that rule the video milieu. Her music is what it is, nothing more; it can be trusted. In concert at Scullers recently, Adams sang and played piano; she sat barely two feet from the front row. She had nowhere to hide, no room to profile or flirt, and no inclination to look in any direction but straight ahead as she sang about things to do or not to do. And she sang "Slow Motion," "My Heart Won't Lie," "Why We Sing," and "I've Got To Sing My Song" in a voice whose steepness demanded that her audience be sure of its footing.

Second, the music must have authority. Those who sing it must merit being listened to. Here is where "fifty-somethings" like Turner matter, not to mention even older singers and monologuists now enjoying a bit more attention: Abbey Lincoln, Shirley Horn, Melvin Van Peebles, and Fontella Bass, for example. A singer who has done and seen, and turned life every which way, and lived to talk frankly about it has a right to sing about real-life decisions and the truths of the heart. This is the fundamental idea of the blues.

The new hit music will probably include a lot of blues. The difficulty here is that blues lyrics and arrangements have long since crystallized, so much so that blues verses and guitar riffs can be manipulated, in songs like Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason," into affectation. And affectation is the dismissal-of-fact mode most common to youth pop. (Blues riffs appear rarely in current hit music -- in Beck's "Loser," but Beck's model is Captain Beefheart, whose blues reconstructions feel like blurred vision, a very different teleology.)

A far better blues-feeling CD than Chapman's is J.J. Cale's Guitar Man (Virgin), a dozen songs that loosen up the space in between 12-bar blues, Southern rock, and honky-tonk without ever resorting to these genres' usual chord progressions. Cale's message is "Why am I not somebody other than who I am?" -- a question that drives songs like "If I Had a Rocket," "This Town," and "Doctor Told Me." His voice lacks all the attributes expected of a blues singer. He doesn't distort or rasp, he has no range, and he intones quietly and flatly, like your next-door neighbor or the guy snoring at the far end of the bar. All you can do with underperformed numbers like "Perfect Woman," "Days Go By," and "It's Hard To Tell" is take the lack of voice as it is and sing along or tap your toe. Cale's hard-times music runs silently underground, like a telephone wire. Little wonder that after 11 CDs he has an international cult following but only one pop hit, the dog-eared "Cocaine," which Eric Clapton carried up the charts. In the new esthetic he'll have more.

Lastly, the new hit music must avoid irony. The premise of irony is that things are not what they seem, a useful vision if the civilization you inhabit refuses to allow difference of opinion. But the need of the First World today is for things to start seeming again, for having an opinion about the basics at a time when the thing forbidden is to have such an opinion. The new hit music must look the real world in the eye, and make you look too, because it enjoys things as they are and asserts that the true path is to look, and see, and use music to sing about it, and dance.