Millennium Jukebox
A juggling of genres and mixing of musical styles will sound the anthem for a global village
By Letta Tayler
Staff Writer
EARLIER THIS SUMMER at Jones Beach Theater, a little-known band called Ozomatli offered an intriguing vision for pop music in the new millennium.
Ozomatli's nine-man band is a world mosaic, featuring Mexican-American horn players, an African-American rapper, a Cuban-American singer, a Japanese-American percussionist and a barrio-raised white bassist. The group's sound is equally diverse: Its members sing in Spanish, rap in English, and mix influences ranging from funk, ska, jazz and hip-hop to raga, salsa, mariachi and cumbia.
The majority of Ozomatli's listeners are white, but the fan base includes Latinos, Asians and African-Americans. A growing number of fans are from Europe.
"We've turned all kinds of people on to all kinds of sounds," said Wil-Dog, Ozomatli's bassist and a founding member. "We're taking old styles and turning them into something new."
Ozomatli's eponymous debut album, released last year, has sold only 107,000 copies -- less than one-tenth the 1.13 million copies that "Millennium," the new album by the teen heartthrob vocal group the Backstreet Boys, sold in just the first week of its release. But in five, 10 or 20 years, Ozomatli's genre-blending, multiethnic style could be as ubiquitous as traditional three-chord puppy love ballads.
There are few certainties for pop music on the eve of a millennium in which the industry's monopolies are consolidating at an unprecedented pace, baby boomers raised on raucous rock are approaching their golden years and digital technology is expected to revolutionize virtually every aspect of how we compose, receive and listen to music, eventually making the CD and the brick-and-mortar record store as antiquated as the gramophone.
But as the minority populations of this country continue to grow and as the Internet turns the world into an increasingly close-knit global village, one given is that North American pop will be infused with a vast array of additional sounds, cultures and even languages -- such as Spanglish, a contemporary blend of Spanish and English.
"You'll see cross-cultural influences make their way into pop music as never before," predicted Mike Greene, president and CEO of the National Recording Academy of Arts and Sciences, which produces the Grammy awards. "We're going to be much more open to the idea of Vive la Difference."
"Cultural purists are going to go crazy," said Nelson George, an expert on African-American music whose latest book is "Hip Hop America." As foreign sounds make increasing inroads, he added, "America as a cultural fortress is going to break down."
With music from around the globe accessible with a click of a mouse, composers "will get inspiration from Bali or Brazil" as readily as from the 12-bar blues of Mississippi or the Cajun strains of Louisiana, said Robert Santelli, vice president of programs and education for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Another certainty is that there will always be superstars. "To say that we've given up looking for that kind of inspiration, that kind of group catharsis is to say we've come to the end of the line as a civilization," said Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke.
But guessing which hybrids within the future sonic mosaics will top the charts or create a new cultural revolution is like guessing the future of the stock market. If Capitol Records had realized in the '60s that four mop-topped Liverpudlians would rule the music world, they wouldn't have sat on the Beatles' first singles for a year. In the early '80s, if the mainstream music industry had realized the staggering growth potential of rap, it wouldn't have dismissed hip-hop as a mere fad.
Still, a few scenarios seem likely. One is that much mainstream pop music in this country will still in 10 or 20 years contain a core melody structured in the traditional western format, with choruses and verses and hooks. Another is that it will in its purest form be a voice of youthful frustration and rebellion, and that economic and social developments will shape its sound, as they did with rock, punk, grunge and rap.
Almost certainly, love will continue to be one of pop music's predominant themes, especially when it caters to the mainstream. "There will always be room for the heartfelt pop song -- the one sung by the Celine Dions and the Backstreet Boys that expresses love in its most innocent and simple state," said George. "But everything else around that is more fluid."
Already, pop instrumentation -- which traditionally featured guitars, bass, and drums, sometimes with horns and keyboards -- has become vastly more varied. Drum machines, turntables and increasingly sophisticated samplers that produce a mind-boggling array of noises are now commonplace, blurring the lines between live and pre-arranged sound.
"Kids today don't have a desire to go out in a garage band and spend years perfecting their craft as musicians. They'd rather log on to their computers and arrange beats and sounds. That's where pop music is going: less performing, more programing," said Andy Schuon, general manager of Warner Bros. Records and former executive vice president of programing for MTV and VH1.
In the not-too-distant future, some experts predict, deejays half-hidden behind a glowing panel of knobs and dials could sell as many records and concert tickets as a swaggering Mick Jagger or Ricky Martin.
The digital technology will continue to spread to all styles of music, not just the genres such as techno and drum-and-bass that are known as electronica. "Ten years ago, rock musicians would never listen to dance music and dance musicians would never listen to classical music," said Moby, a techno-guru renowned for genre-bending whose latest release, "Play," blends hip-hop breakbeats with pre-World War II black folk songs. "Now, most of the rock musicians I know own samplers and most classical composers I know also are listening to dance music."
 Photo by Dennis Fujimoto Rocker Todd Rundgren has created an Internet service that offers listeners his songs as soon as he has written and recorded them. |
African-Americans, who brought this country jazz, blues, soul, rock and hip-hop, will continue to trailblaze new musical trends, George predicted. But he added that their sounds may well become "whitewashed" as they are assimilated by non-blacks: "We may still have Anglo gatekeepers," he said.
With Hispanics poised to become the nation's largest minority group by 2020, accounting for at least one in every six residents nationwide, Latin music will be a signficant force in pop as well.
"Latin music is going to explode," said Cuban-born, Miami-based Emilio Estefan, the godfather of Latin pop and the husband of Gloria Estefan, who became the first female Hispanic crossover star.
In the early '80s, when Emilio and Gloria launched the Miami Sound Machine, "nobody wanted to hear the Latin sound," he said. "They said, ‘Take the conga out, take the percussion out.' Now, it's a fusion that people are embracing."
Just how strong the Latin quotient in the fusion will be is uncertain. Given the insular attitudes of many of this nation's English-speakers (remember the widespread opposition to bilingual education), many observers believe that most Anglos aren't any more likely to be humming hits in Spanish than they would be in Arabic, Mandarin or Swahili.
"There will always be exceptions to the rule and my guess is, there will be the occasional hit in a foreign language," said Marc Nathan, senior director of artists and repertoire for Universal Records, noting the popularity of the "Macarena" a few years ago and "Guantanamera" a few decades earlier.
But even though the top-rated radio stations in both New York and Los Angeles currently are Spanish-language, he continued, "will a middle-class Anglo-American all of a sudden turn the radio dial to these Spanish-language radio stations? Not likely."
A more likely scenario is an increase in lyrics in Spanglish, a term for dialogue that alternates words or phrases from both languages. Though Latin heartthrob Ricky Martin wowed this country with a Spanish-language performance on the Grammys, his hot new eponymous album, which contains his mega-hit "Livin' La Vida Loca," is in Spanglish, with the balance tipped heavily toward English.
But Spanish-language lyrics can sell. "Pintame" ("Paint Me"), the latest album from Puerto Rican Elvis Crespo, who combines glossy pop with the strutting merengue rhythms of the Dominican Republic, recently debuted at No. 49 on the Billboard pop charts even though he sings in Spanish.
Latin music sales -- defined as music in which more than 50 percent of the lyrics are in a Latin language -- represent only 4 percent of the U.S. market. But they are growing at more than double the increase for record sales of all genres, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
The rise in Latin music's star hasn't gone unnoticed among non-Hispanic performers and producers, many of whom are eyeing Latino listeners as a vast, untapped crossover market.
Andy, a 39-year-old Armenian-Iranian singer based in Glendale, Calif., who has sold millions of records in the Middle East, is looking to expand his audience in this country by releasing his first album in another language -- not in English, but in Spanish.
Sting, Madonna and Celine Dion are among stars who've already recorded in Spanish. Rap impresario Sean (Puffy) Combs just released his new single, "PE 2000," in three versions: hip-hop, rock and Spanish-language.
Combs' strategy aims to address another trend that will likely carry into the new millennium: As this nation's pop music absorbs more influences from other cultures and genres continue to morph, the market will become even more fragmented, continuing the trend of the past several years. That means there may be more musicians who appeal to smaller and smaller clusters of fans.
That also means there likely will be fewer multiplatinum-selling artists, and those who do achieve global fame often will do so by becoming a franchise, branching out to books, movies, television and other media to capture the public's attention in a world where music is just one in an increasing number of entertainment choices.
"We're no longer going to have a majority of the public sitting in front of their TV sets on a Sunday night watching the Beatles make their debut on Ed Sullivan," said Nathan, of Universal Records. "We're fragmented, our attention span is shorter, we have far more outside stimuli, we have computers and computer games, we have multitiered cable operation systems... We're part of a more, more, more generation, and it's not going to shrink.”
Contributing to the continuing fragmentation of the music market is the Internet, which in the past year has begun offering music -- purchased, pirated or legally free -- through formats such as MP3 that fans can listen to on their computers and also download for later playback on portable devices such as the palm-sized Rio, which hit the market last year.
For consumers, the potential rewards once such systems become ubiquitous could be enormous.
"Not only will you be able to customize your own personal music library, you'll be able to take it with you in a whole variety of devices that sound a whole lot better than the ones we have today," said Chris Dixon, an entertainment industry analyst with Paine Webber. With distribution costs reduced to virtually nil, the price of music will likely decrease as well, he predicted.
The effect on major record labels is less certain.
Schuon, of Warner Bros., recalls recently trying to interest a Stanford University student in some of his label's new artists. "He said he really doesn't listen to the radio that much, rarely watches television, gets most of his music information off the Internet," Schuon recounted. "He told me he spent three days checking out a bunch of Brazilian music on some Web sites that he would never have had access to before."
"My biggest fear is a kid like that," Schuon continued. "He might never find his way to my label's records because he's buying Brazilian music on the Web and turning five kids on to it at school."
Precisely for that reason, many artists see the Internet as a major democratizing force in music. They relish the notion that they can take their wares directly to the public, breaking the stranglehold of major labels and Top 40 radio stations, both of which have undergone massive consolidation in the past decade.
Already, stars from Alanis Morissette to Tom Petty have offered songs via the Web for free downloading. The seminal rap group Public Enemy recently offered an entire album that can be downloaded for $8 -- about half the price of a CD in a record store. "I'm in the nitty-gritty, fighting, trying to throw the bomb at the industry," said Public Enemy's Chuck D, who hails from Roosevelt.
Veteran rocker and multimedia pioneer Todd Rundgren has created an Internet service called PatroNet that offers listeners his songs as soon as he's written and recorded them -- in some cases, they also get works in progress. The cost to subscribers, regardless of how much music Rundgren puts out, is $25 a year.
"What I've done is created an end-to-end service," said Rundgren, who likens his system to cable television because of its flat-fee pricing. "I've allowed my fans to replace the record company by allowing them to directly underwrite my work."
As online music offerings increase, however, Web cruisers will still seek guidance in navigating the thickets of sound, and some of that guidance will continue to come from the major labels and their enormous promotional machines.
"People are still going to download those artists with whom they're most familiar. And the way they become familiar with stuff is through the conventional means of radio and promotion from the major labels," Moby said.
Eventually, many experts believe, online music distribution and sales may well make the CD and the traditional music store almost obsolete. "The MP3 or a similar device will be as ubiquitous in the year 2010 as the compact disc player is today," Dixon said.
This trend will benefit computer-savvy seniors as much as young listeners, Dixon said. "If you're a jazz fan and you want to find the Dave Brubeck Quartet, chances are you're going to have to go into a record store, deal with a 23-year-old who still has a skin problem and say, ‘Do you know who Dave Brubeck is?' Whereas if you go online and punch in Brubeck, you can order that music or maybe even download it with your MP3."
Studies vary on just how fast the music downloading trend will accelerate. A recent survey by the Internet think tank Webnoize showed that only 5 percent of 770 university students surveyed last December downloaded music (either legally or illegally); a follow-up survey of the same students four months later showed a jump to 33 percent. However, Jupiter Communications, another Internet research firm, predicts that only 3 percent of computer users will download music by 2003.
But when MP3-style formats become ubiquitous, the concept of the LP may be headed for the ash heap as Internet users opt to download favorite songs instead of favorite albums.
"The artist who thinks, ‘Now I'm going to sit down and write 60 minutes of music that people will listen to' is tripping," Rundgren said. Nathan disagrees. "Right now, a good portion of kids are interested in as much music as the Backstreet Boys can make," he said. "There are always album buyers, and that's not going to change."
As technological advances continue to improve the quality of music that can be heard at home (imagine lying on your couch in a home entertainment center equipped with wrap-around sound, clicking your mouse for an Internet linkup to concerts from around the world with the same ease as you channel surf on TV), will there still be an incentive for people to go out to live shows? The consensus among experts is, yes.
"Even if we get to the point where the technology can offer something even remotely comparable to the live concert experience, it's a no-contest," said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the concert industry magazine Pollstar. "It's the same thing with sports. There's no doubt that you get a better view of the football game from your TV: You get instant replay and a much better view. But there probably isn't anybody who'd prefer to sit home than go to the Super Bowl."
The tough part will be affording to go out. Pop concert ticket prices have skyrocketed and they show no signs of letting up.
For those who can pay, however, the concert experience will be plusher than ever before, offering luxury more evocative of the Metropolitan Opera House than the communal havoc of a Fillmore East. Already, wine bars and waitress service are becoming standard, along with VIP sections and corporate boxes. Even Westbury Music Fair now has a separate entrance and lounge for VIPs.
These changes are linked in large part to the aging of baby boomers, who have plenty of disposable income and still want to hear the voices of their youth, but in comfort.
In middle-age and golden years, "You want to be able to get in, have a nice beverage and be entertained without being harassed," said Mitch Slater, the co-CEO of Delsener/Slater Enterprises, which runs the Jones Beach Theater concert series. "The experiences of, ‘Hey, man, get off my blanket' and ‘I'm not going into that porta-potty' are the ones we don't have to regret passing up."
Wine and cheese won't be the only changes. Sound quality will continue to improve as venues are constructed with an ear to acoustics as well as an eye to sports viewing. And medium-sized arenas cropping up in smaller cities will attract performers who previously had bypassed what they considered backwaters, bringing quality talent to more people.
Technological advances also risk turning the large scale concert experience into even more of a formal spectacle -- expect more lights, more smoke and more video displays. That, in turn, will widen the separation between listeners and the larger-and-life performer.
Whatever the music of the future brings, it will always include writers and performers who catch our ears with glossy confection and others who bare their souls in ways that compel us to reflect on the world and our place within it.
"There will always be melody and lyrics and hits and non-hits," said Nathan of Universal Records. "And the hits will reach the most people and turn the most people on. And songs that are not hits are going to find their niche, and there will be a core of people that love them faithfully."
In whatever new hybrid they come in.