1992: The Year in Music

AS 1992 DRAWS TO A CLOSE, artists, fans and the music industry as a whole are looking ahead to an extremely uncertain future. Sales are down and for reasons more complicated than the recession. Speculation that the rock era has run its course has escalated, though no one – not even that renowned bastion of pop-culture insight the Wall Street Journal, which declared in a page 1 story that ROCK IS SLOWLY FADING – will venture a guess about what, if anything, will rise to take its place. No one has a sure sense where music is heading or whether the fission of the “rock audience” – if it is any longer possible to use that term with any degree of precision – will ultimately prove to be a positive or a negative development.

For all the hand wringing and prognosticating going on, however, there is at least one genuine cause for optimism: Great music is still being made by artists new and old in every field – from Arrested Development to Wynonna Judd, from Morrissey to Lindsey Buckingham, from PJ Harvey to En Vogue. Listeners who didn’t find any sounds to their taste last year simply weren’t looking — to paraphrase the old blues song, it’s your own fault. And though the current musical climate may occasionally seem confusing, times may never have been better for people whose palates are receptive to a wide range of flavors.

But for the most part, rappers, metal bands, country musicians, alternative and aging rockers and more obscure artists in the dozens of subgenres splintering off in myriad ways seemed content to speak exclusively to their own specific audiences. With a few notable exceptions, like the U2-Public Enemy tour or the Lollapalooza extravaganza that ran the gamut from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Ice Cube, no one was truly able – or much interested in making the effort – to reach across boundaries and address what many people have come to envision as the new multicultural America. Some people believe that a coming together of the tribes may not even be possible anymore.

But if popular music is eventually to play a cultural role in the next century of anything near the significance it has enjoyed in the second half of this one, a determination to bridge racial, generational and gender gaps will be the principal reason why.

Before that can happen, however, the music industry will need to wake up and recover from the aftereffects of its Eighties hangover. The commercial expectations engendered during that decade – when the ascent of MTV, the dramatic development of CD technology and an economy racing on debt-driven energy combined to make multiplatinum sales a prerequisite for success – need to be scaled down to a more reasonable level. The past year has shown demonstratively that even the artists who established those inflated standards have not been able to meet them in the Nineties.

The clearest example of that is Michael Jackson, the self-designated and now deflated “King of Pop,” whose 1982 blockbuster Thriller created the model for the modern album that was supposed to linger in the upper reaches of the charts interminably, spin off an endless series of hit singles and achieve double-digit platinum sales. Dangerous, which was released late in 1991, never approached the numbers attained by Thriller or even the somewhat less prodigious showing of Bad, Jackson’s 1987 follow-up. Nor is it likely that anything Jackson releases will perform that well ever again.

Does that mean Dangerous wasn’t a good album or that Jackson is washed up as an artist? Not at all. Jackson has undermined himself not through his inability to match his earlier achievements – no rational person could expect the once-in-a-lifetime success of Thriller to be duplicated – but through his attitudes. Jackson made it clear that as far as he was concerned, nothing short of topping Thriller could make Dangerous a success. That isn’t aspiration or ambition; it’s simply substituting commercial goals for artistic ones. From the moment of its release, virtually all discussion of the album centered on its potential in the marketplace; whatever Jackson had to say with his music was largely lost.

As a result of all that, Dangerous, which has sold more than 4 million copies in the U.S. alone – roughly the same number as the initial sales of Off the Wall, the solo album that first propelled Jackson to superstardom in 1979 – is widely perceived as a failure. Can Jackson possibly be pleased to be judged by so cold and unforgiving a standard – ironically, one that he himself has enshrined?