1999 In Review

In the decade I’ve been writing about music and popular culture in the pages of Z, I can’t recall a year when the pop music mainstream seemed more empty of soul and critical thought than in 1999. Commercially speaking, this was a year dominated by a steady flow of cheap thrill rock and pop acts such as the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Christina Aguil- ara, Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, and Jennifer Lopez. The “comeback” of Carlos Santana, with the hugely successful Supernatural, offered some relief from boy/girl pap and male meathead bluster, but ultimately this trendy demographic-driven concept album doesn’t compare to any of Santana’s great work of the last three decades.

Still, for those searching for music to subvert the personal and cultural sensibility of the status quo, there were sounds resonating meaning and emotions beyond the marketplace. Although here and there, some of this music dented the airwaves and sales charts, most of the year’s more challenging albums found only niche or semi-popular appeal with audiences of distinctly “outsider” tastes. But for a believer (like me) in the power of music to change the world, all these less accessible trends seem a source of hope.

Throughout the 20th century various strains of American popular music have been able to soothe and entertain in ways that reinforce dominant social relations. But because most of the nation’s popular music has been derived from the most disenfranchised sectors of society, it has also mirrored glaring social and economic contradictions in ways that raised questions about the rightness and wrongness of the American social order.

The music of the century’s greatest artists (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Curtis Mayfield, Bill Monroe, Aretha Franklin, Patsy Cline, Sam Cooke, Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder) upsets the easy everyday consensus by demanding more of life than the system is willing to give. It puts us in touch with feelings and perceptions that provoke a reinterpretation of the world around us. On occasion, it is music of explicitly stated protest and critique.

Because virtually all of the century’s music has been absorbed and translated to suit the needs of a market driven culture, it is not easy to hear any expression of the country’s popular music heritage as a threat to society. Blues, jazz, country, folk, cajun, rock, and hip-hop, however, were all born in cultures of the working class and poor and all were greeted with some combination of derision and fear by elite and middle class society.

In the first half of the century, of course, all forms of black popular music seemed “lewd,” “vulgar,” and “inferior” to white America. But respectable mainstream musical tastes also maintained contempt for the “ignorant” folk and country traditions of poor white southerners. While the early music industry was willing to exploit these expressions to “race” and “hillbilly” markets, color and class realities set the music apart from wholesome and generic sounds acknowledging no social divisions.

With the growth of the mass media, most of America’s roots music has gradually been welcomed into the big-time music market. Certainly in the second half of the 20th century, traditional musical forms have provided the vitality and edge to the nation’s most important pop music. Reflecting as it does the voice of ordinary misfits and underdogs, this music has given us hidden truths of how we think and feel and live. Unconstrained by requirements of education, income, or social approval, outsiders from Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson to Woody Guthrie, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Tupac, Sleater- Kinney, and Rage Against The Machine have registered “people’s history” reflecting a multiplicity of race, class, gender, and age realities that mainstream media ignored or minimized.

Today a voracious and all pervasive corporate culture has the power to absorb and defang almost any outsider voice in an instant. Nonetheless, music industry bosses, for all their control over marketing, production, and distribution, cannot invent musical creativity or audience response. Though they may maximize trends and hits and deny visibility to all sounds deemed uncommercial, corporate executives have a miserable record (roughly 90 percent of their products realize no profit) of forecasting next-big-thing success. While throwing money at all kinds of acts that might possibly turn a hit (but don’t), industry giants usually wind up chasing after styles and performers that sound like some already existing chart topper. So it is that strange and innovative music often lives outside the margins of mainstream pop.