[Dixielandjazz] Let Me Entertain You

[Steve barbone]

Tom Wiggins wrote sagely about "Entertainment". Here is what the record
buying public said, with $$$$$, about entertainment. CAVEAT, it is a long
article, about Pop music. BUT you can see the parallels with OKOM or any
style. If pressed for time, just read the first 3 &1/2 paragraphs. The
bottom line is there and it is spelled ENTERTAINMENT + COMFORT + DANCE BEAT.

Cheers,
Steve



Critic's Notebook

Pop Comfort Over Ambition
The Year's Top Albums in Sales (January 6, 2006)

NY Times - JON PARELES - January 6, 2006

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.