February 16, 2003

Singing to the Grown-Ups, and Selling

n June 2002, shortly after Norah Jones's debut album, "Come Away With Me," passed the million mark in sales, Virgin Records, a sister company of Ms. Jones's label, Blue Note, commissioned an up-tempo remix of the hit "Don't Know Why." It is difficult to imagine a song less likely to incite a dance floor stampede. "Don't Know Why" is a pretty ballad that moves at a saunter. Like all the songs on "Come Away With Me," it inhabits a mellow middle ground between blues, folk, country and 70's soft rock: Ms. Jones sings in a bashful voice, gently accompanied by a three-piece band and her own tinkling piano.

Predictably, the "Don't Know Why" remix sounded silly. A computer-generated drumbeat churned behind Ms. Jones; her voice was swathed in reverb, and she had suddenly developed a house music diva's stutter: "Don't know why-why-why." Ms. Jones declared the song "absurd," and her record company agreed to shelve it as a misguided attempt to bring the singer's music to an audience it has eluded: people her own age.

Ms. Jones is just 23; most of her fans are at least a decade older. For months her songs have haunted the airwaves of adult-oriented radio; on the strength of constant touring, television appearances and heavy rotation in coffee shops, cocktail parties and other places where grown-ups gather, "Come Away With Me" has turned into the music industry surprise of the year: a modest record, released with little fanfare on a jazz label, that became a blockbuster. Last month, nearly a year after its arrival, "Come Away With Me" reached the top of Billboard's album charts. It has sold more than four million copies.

Its success will very likely be capped off at the Grammy Awards ceremony next Sunday. Ms. Jones's music is nominated for eight awards, including record of the year, song of the year, album of the year and best new artist. In a music industry that for the last several years has been obsessed with catering to youth — with the teen-pop, hip-hop and rap-rock music that dominates commercial radio — the triumph of this young star with old fans and a traditional sound has registered as a shock.

"Older listeners are gravitating to the authentic, organic sound of Norah's records," said Zach Hochkeppel, the director of marketing at Blue Note. "She speaks to a huge group of people that the music business has forgotten and declared irrelevant."

The latest sales statistics confirm the relevance of that neglected group. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, consumers 45 years and older now constitute a quarter of the record market and are the fastest-growing group of music buyers. Smarting from the economic downturn and the explosion of Internet file-sharing among teenagers and twenty-somethings, the record industry is increasingly turning its attention to "adult music," a broad category that encompasses everything from Tony Bennett to John Mayer to India.Arie. The renewed commercial might of the adult audience calls attention to a widening musical generation gap: the gulf of taste and musical values that divides Norah Jones's fans and Norah Jones's contemporaries.

IT is very easy to like Ms. Jones. She has a lovely, pure voice that crackles now and then with a pleasing hint of grit. Her Texas upbringing can be detected in the slight drawl that adds earthiness to her performances of urbane songs, like the Hoagy Carmichael standard "The Nearness of You." Her vocal timbre and jazz-informed phrasing have been compared to Billie Holiday's; closer models are Bonnie Raitt — whose voice Ms. Jones's at times eerily echoes — and Rickie Lee Jones, another singer who combines jazz and folk influences to make sophisticated contemporary pop. Ms. Jones is gorgeous, yet unlike most pretty pop stars, she has shown no interest in striking sex kitten poses to sell records. In the video for "Don't Know Why" — her one concession to the demands of modern divadom — she gamely stalked a white sand beach, lip-synching through flyaway hair; to her credit, she looked uncomfortable doing it. Indeed, everything about Ms. Jones seems to stand for a time-honored kind of authenticity. From top to bottom, "Come Away With Me" is steeped in sounds that signal rootsy sincerity: the high forlorn whine of slide guitar above, the tumbling bass notes of gospel piano below, Ms. Jones intoning earnestly in between.

It is that warm, familiar sound — old-fashioned acoustic instruments playing old-fashioned songs — that has endeared Ms. Jones to listeners who could be her parents. Once, adult music was shorthand for schmaltz: the sickly strain of ballad singing practiced by Barry Manilow, Whitney Houston and Celine Dion. As the rock 'n' roll generation has aged, adult music has gotten more muscular. The maudlin sound of Adult Contemporary has given way to Adult Album Alternative, or Triple A, a more varied radio format that reaches both baby-boomers and older Gen-Xers.

Today, adult music, as reflected in the playlists of Triple A radio stations and Billboard's Adult Top 40 charts, is the most stylistically broad category in pop music. Ms. Jones shares the adult charts with everyone from Paul McCartney to the Dixie Chicks; rock stalwarts like the Rolling Stones sit alongside modern rockers like Coldplay and No Doubt; the pop-classical singer Josh Groban nudges up against the neo-punk stars the White Stripes. Neither region nor musical generation is a factor in adult taste. The adult charts have been home to records by Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club and Ireland's breathy mystic Enya, by teenagers like Michelle Branch and sexagenarians like Bob Dylan.

In fact, adult music in the year 2003 is defined less by what it is than what it is not: hip-hop. In their various musical styles, all "adult" artists embrace a form of instrumental traditionalism that speaks to an audience put off by the electronic beats, samples and rapped verses that have overtaken the pop mainstream. Rita Houston, the music director of New York's WFUV, one of the country's leading independent Triple A stations, identifies that "organic" musical texture as the common denominator linking its various artists. "There's a sonic universe that WFUV lives in that is acoustic-based," she said. "When you listen to 'FUV and other adult stations you might not know the song — it could Cuban music, it could be Elvis Costello — but there's a certain sound there, and you know where you are."

Pop music history has been marked by periodic debates about the sound of authenticity — clashes between sonic universes. In 1965, Bob Dylan was branded a traitor to folk for plugging in his guitar; in the early 1980's, roots rockers championed three-chord guitar songs — the chugging sound of heartland earnestness — in response to the glacial synth-pop that had conquered hit radio. The narrative of 20th-century pop might be told not as a series of fads or styles but as a succession of favorite machines; just as Tin Pan Alley's pianos were replaced by rock's guitars, guitars have yielded to the tools of hip-hop and techno: samplers, beat boxes, sequencers, laptop computers.

Among adult listeners, resistance to those machines is intense. Nearly a quarter-century after hip-hop first penetrated the mainstream, it remains the most divisive music in the history of American pop; if the adult charts are any indication, older listeners are becoming more entrenched in nostalgia. The biggest commercial surprise of 2001 was the soundtrack to the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," a collection of rural blues, bluegrass and gospel that sold millions and won the album-of-the-year Grammy. It is a great record, but one is tempted to read a subtext in this latest revival of homespun folk: scorn for the musical present.

Norah Jones offers a similar kind of nostalgia trip. She plays the piano — a dowdy instrument that has made a comeback in recent years — and moves fluidly between old styles: a blues, a tango, a Hank Williams cover. All of her songs are pretty and beautifully sung and arranged with elegance and restraint; in fact, "Come Away With Me" is so tastefully made that the only thing disagreeable about it is its oppressive good taste. In this respect, Ms. Jones is typical of adult music performers. From David Gray to Aimee Mann to Sheryl Crow, the genre's stars make records that sound nice, ooze skill and professionalism and are, by and large, boring. They invest their music with little deep emotion and provide little catharsis; a song like Ms. Jones's "Turn Me On" offers blues form devoid of blues feeling. They value craft over innovation; while they display an admirable awareness of the past, few dare to envision the musical future. Triple A music might be "adult," but there is nothing particularly mature about its complacency.

The best hip-hop has a grown-up sense of adventure: a willingness to risk pratfalls and bad taste in the interest of moving music forward. Ms. Jones may well clean up at the Grammys, but the year belongs to the Neptunes, the producers whose joyful, inventive, garish songs for Nelly, Justin Timberlake and a host of other rap and pop artists made listening to the radio fun in 2002. Hip-hop is undergoing its own spasms of "old school" nostalgia, but the genre's devotion to new sounds keeps it from getting quaint. The best rap album this year was Missy Elliot's "Under Construction," a theme record about the good old days that set its reveries to an outlandishly cutting-edge soundtrack of beats and blips.

Of course, musical history is fated to repeat itself. Before too long, hip-hop will lose its vitality and its grip on young listeners; the first generation to come of age with rap as mainstream pop music will grow up and hit singles will recede, along with hairlines, into an idealized past. Surely, adult music will be redefined accordingly. Break beats and turntable scratches will conjure a lost world of authenticity, just as the growl of a Stratocaster or the twang of a pedal steel does today, and a future generation will make strange new music with as yet undreamt-of machines, while today's kids — tomorrow's adults — plug their ears at the dreadful noise.  

Jody Rosen is the author of ``White Christ mas: The Story of an American Song'' (Scribner).