MUSIC: WAITING FOR THE NEXT BIG THING

Like a bored cross-country driver scanning the radio for one good song, the American music industry is searching for a fresh new musical trend. The $12 billion business, which had been growing at a 10%-to-12% annual clip in recent years, has expanded only 2% so far in 1996, a development that falls somewhere between a worrisome lull and a full-blown slump.

The prime suspect is alternative rock, a genre that fueled a good deal of the industry’s growth at the beginning of this decade but now, as rock’s dominant genre, is sounding a bit cranky and old as it turns up in car commercials, movie sound tracks and award shows–not a good thing for a form supposedly powered by energy and youth and anger. The music started out as an antidote to the processed pop of the ’80s; instead of sex and spandex, alternative rock was supposed to be about passion and honesty, about taking the focus off performers’ gluteal muscles and putting it back on the music.

But maybe that’s not always a good idea. This year R.E.M., Pearl Jam and Nirvana, three of the genre’s biggest and most critically acclaimed bands, all released new albums with comparatively little fanfare–and all three albums sold poorly, relative to the huge hits these groups have scored in the past. The chart slippage of these and other megagroups, coupled with the sad state of the industry in general, has set music executives abuzz–about the declining aesthetics of alternative rock, about what the next Next Big Thing will be, and especially about the tenuous status of their jobs (several labels, including Atlantic, have had staff cutbacks recently; and three music chains, Wherehouse Entertainment, Camelot Music and Peaches Entertainment, have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past 18 months).

In another signal that alternative rock is facing rocky days ahead, MTV plans this month to start playing less alternative rock and to program more of other genres, including electronic dance music and traditional pop, which could spell trouble for bands like the Presidents of the United States of America that have thrived on video exposure. “What MTV does is both lead and reflect what’s going on out there,” says MTV programming director Andy Schuon. Some observers partly blame the channel’s haste to introduce new acts for the current industry downturn. “MTV often breaks acts too quickly,” says a lawyer for several well-known pop acts. “As a result, bands don’t have the fan base they would normally develop by touring–they don’t have a chance to build an audience. MTV also burns out its acts. They take alternative bands and play them to death.” Example: semialternative pop-folk singer Sheryl Crow. Videos from her first album, Tuesday Night Music Club, were as inescapable as death, taxes and junk mail on AOL. By the time she released her new album, Sheryl Crow, a lot of people seemed sick of her–sales of her sophomore album have been underwhelming. And it hasn’t helped matters that the album’s contents are about as inventive as its title.

“Alternative rock has become Top 40 rock,” says Jason Markey, an artists’ representative for Arista Records. “Top 40 rock has always been disposable, and that’s where alternative rock is now leaning.” David Sonenberg, who manages the Fugees, Joan Osborne and other music acts, says too many record companies have signed too many one-hit alternative acts and thus diluted the quality of the genre (it’s an old musical story–just see Tom Hanks’ period comedy on the subject, That Thing You Do). “With a lot of the music, it’s hard to distinguish one band from another,” complains Hooman Majd, executive vice president of Island Records. “I’ve seen A&R people [the executives who are responsible for scouting and signing bands], who know music better than anyone, hear a record come on, and even they can’t tell which band it is.”

Sometimes a record label’s attention span is even shorter than the public’s, which means that even promising bands don’t have a chance to develop followings. “A major label will sign an alternative-rock band and put in six months of invested time,” says Wendy Powell, assistant to the senior vice president of retail sales at Tower Records. “Then, if they are not making superstar sales, they stop pushing them, and they become a write-off.”

On the other hand, some musicians have nothing but their own bad luck, or bad attitudes, to blame for their commercial missteps. Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and Nirvana did not mount much of a publicity campaign or tour to support their new albums because, in the case of Pearl Jam, the band has become too haughty to do interviews and is involved in a long-running feud with Ticketmaster; in the case of R.E.M., the band was plagued with health-related problems and decided to skip a major tour; and in the case of Nirvana, the record–a live album–was released in the wake of lead singer Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and the trio’s surviving band members could not mount a successful tour. Of course, the problems might also have been due to the fact that the R.E.M. CD was not as strong musically as some of the band’s earlier efforts, and that Pearl Jam’s CD was also substandard.

Not all the pop-music news is dire. While Hootie and the Blowfish’s current album, Fairweather Johnson, has not sold as well as the affable Southern band’s debut, it has moved a hefty 2 million copies, which is more than one would expect a band with the word Hootie in its name would ever sell. And while homegrown talents struggle, two of the best-selling performers in the U.S. this year turned out to be Canadian–Alanis Morissette, a wishy-washy pop singer turned vengeful rocker, and Celine Dion, a wishy-washy pop singer who has become an internationally best-selling wishy-washy pop singer. The Haitian-American hip-hop band the Fugees also scored a breakthrough this year with their sophomore album, The Score, which has sold more than 5 million copies so far (their debut sold only 130,000). A look at any recent Billboard chart shows that hard-core rap continues to be a best-selling genre. And the Smashing Pumpkins’ double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which has sold more than 7 million copies so far, demonstrates that when a band does take chances and makes great music, the alternative-rock genre can still be rewarding and lucrative.

Alternative rock’s leading lights shouldn’t be written off–R.E.M. and Hootie probably both have more than a few big, interesting albums left in them. It’s worth remembering too that the music business is cyclic. Every few years critics proclaim that rock is dead, and then a band like Nirvana–or the Sex Pistols before them–comes around and changes everything. Now the hunt is definitely on for the next Next Big Thing. Ska is a candidate, with groups like No Doubt racking up sales. Trip-hop is another contender, with performers such as Tricky and Portishead. There are also electronic-dance-music forms like Jungle. “We see 1997 as a time of exploration in the music biz,” says MTV’s Schuon. Explains Lisa Cortes, former president of Loose Cannon Records: “People are hungry for different stories.” While alternative rock tended to be mostly white, the newer genres tend to be multiethnic. The alternative to alternative could be bands that look less like a stereotype of suburbia and more like America.

–Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and David E. Thigpen/New York