January 6, 2006
Critic's Notebook
Pop Comfort Over Ambition By JON PARELES
The full tallies were released by Nielsen SoundScan this week, and it's official: 2005 was a year for unheroic, unambitious pop with little more to say than "Play me on the radio."
Voting with its dollars, the public ignored the esoteric favorites championed by critics and went for music that offered a little comfort and dance beats. Entertainment, not ambition, was the priority.
Entertainment is always part of the story. Getting heard widely and regularly is the essential part of becoming a pop phenomenon. Yet through the years, the most memorable blockbusters have aspired to something beyond popularity. They set out to inspire, to startle, to define an era or to defy it. For the likes of Nirvana, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Eminem, Alicia Keys, Metallica or Bruce Springsteen, catchiness has been a means rather than an end. By those standards, million-selling pop in 2005 was downright quiescent. That may be part of the reason that album sales dropped again in 2005: mass-market hits felt disposable, like a momentary pleasure rather than like something worth owning.
The best-selling album released last year was Mariah Carey's "Emancipation of Mimi," which shuns eccentricities to offer radio-ready R&B songs about hooking up, breaking up and making up. In the last weeks of December, its sales edged out the routine gangsta rap of 50 Cent's "Massacre," which substitutes belligerence for romance but is no less circumscribed. Between 50 Cent's threats, catalogs of weapons and step-by-step sexual instructions, "The Massacre" makes sure to include raunchy, catchy pop like "Candy Shop."
Compare 2005 with 2004, which yielded albums like U2's "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" - full of compassionate songs that grappled with faith and science, fame and family - and Green Day's "American Idiot," which was nothing less than a rock opera about 21st-century alienation. Those albums continued to sell through 2005 because there was little to supplant them.
A war is still on, but mass-market pop is steadfastly ignoring it. When 50 Cent raps about "My Toy Solider" on "The Massacre," he's rhyming about his personal posse, not Iraq, and when he talks about war, it's the battles between gangs or between rappers. Black Eyed Peas used to flaunt its social consciousness in its raps. But its 2005 album, "Monkey Business," stuck to cheerful boasting, battle-of-the-sexes shtick (and the goofy anatomical pride of "My Humps"), until the album's closing message song, "Union," which offers, "We don't want no war, can't take no more." Pop 2005 focused on the private and the local: a romance, a neighborhood and the internecine hip-hop squabbles that fill the Game's raps on "The Documentary."
Some of 2005's blockbusters were knockoffs that traded expansive thoughts for petty ones. Coldplay, the English band that's openly eager to become "the next U2," came up with more of its grand, chiming, would-be anthems, only to ruin them with lyrics unworthy of the music's splendors. Like a cheesy self-help guru, Coldplay inflates listeners' vague fears and insecurities, then offers itself as a panacea: "I will fix you," Chris Martin vowed.
In the wake of Green Day, the year's new punk-pop sensation was Fall Out Boy, which sold 1.65 million copies. The band has a sense of humor as snappy as its melodies, with song titles like "Champagne for My Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends." But the perspective of its songs is proudly myopic and self-absorbed, as the songs concentrate almost completely on gripes about girl trouble and the music business.
There are ample reasons for pop's narrowed ambitions in 2005. For one thing, 2004 was an election year in the United States, which clearly prompted some thoughts about the wider political and social situation, while 2005 was its aftermath, full of unhealed divisions. Singing about private lives - love affairs, individual longings or the local beefs and exploits of hip-hop - was the safest route to a mass audience.
Meanwhile, major recording companies are still unable to stop the declining sales that they blame on the Internet rather than on their uninspiring products. As they grow more worried, they're taking fewer chances on music that's not geared for instant radio acceptance, and radio stations have never exactly welcomed innovation. (And as the New York State Attorney General's investigations showed, there's still payola around.) Preferably, the songs will also do double duty as a commercial or a TV-show soundtrack: something noticeable but not too demanding.
Yet timidity and calculation aren't the only forces at work. Popular music now competes in a digital din of cable television, DVD's, video games and Web surfing. Separate songs, not sweeping album statements, are the currency of radio, MTV, iTunes, self-promotional sites like Myspace and the shuffled playlists of countless portable MP3 gizmos. Why devote attention to a big statement when there's another great groove just a click away?
With all of those choices further diluting a potential audience, it's astonishing that Ms. Carey or 50 Cent could each garner nearly five million album buyers in the first place. Pop stardom has always been about more than the songs; it's also an alchemy of longing for the star, identification with what the songs say, and the knowledge that thousands or millions of people feel the same way. Ms. Carey and 50 Cent are more eager to please than to inspire; their respective fans can take home neatly circumscribed, high-concept fantasies of romance or machismo.
They're as functional and one-dimensional as a fashion magazine or an action movie, and fully content to fit within their formats. Their niches, fully exploited, are large enough. They don't set out to surprise the paying customers, or to leverage popularity into leadership.
Only one full-fledged star tried that in 2005: Kanye West, whose second album, "Late Registration," exulted in his own success without settling into formula. The album expanded his musical sources, found comedy and sorrow, and raised questions about temptations and responsibilities amid the boasts. He even acted like a star by daring to make a controversial statement - "George Bush doesn't care about black people" - on live television. Mr. West's year was a rare show of the old pop ambition - the kind that's validated by album sales and radio play, that pleases a mass audience but doesn't kowtow to it.
It's going to be harder to maintain that kind of large-scale public dialogue in a culture of atomized individual preferences. Independent companies, small and large, are claiming an ever larger part of the music market, bypassing radio to apply the old do-it-yourself strategies of touring and noncommercial media, and the newer ones of file-sharing and word-of-blog.
Paradoxically, though, far-reaching ambitions are re-emerging on the do-it-yourself scale. Where indie-rock was once a realm of self-conscious modesty - a refuge from the arrogant blare of Top 10 rock - acts like Bright Eyes, Animal Collective and Sufjan Stevens used their 2005 albums to make the kind of grand statements that bigger stars shied away from. They orchestrated elaborate sound worlds and grappled with big ideas rather than petty concerns, and they found audiences that made up in devotion what they lack in numbers.
There's less guarantee than ever that someone has heard of, much less heard, her neighbor's favorite act, as the Internet encourages people to start, or join, a microcult of their own. That's a blow to the monolithic blockbuster mentality, and a clear gain for cultural diversity. Yet it would be a shame if the old pop-star ambitions were to be replaced by a strict choice between innovation for an exclusive cult and shallow catchiness for the crowds. The challenge, now as ever, is to make innovation catchy - and with any luck, the pop stars of 2006 will rise to it.
