STUPID PUBLIC, STILL CRAVING BEAUTY...

SLOW BURN:
Norah Jones’s eternal afternoon. (SASHA FRERE-JONES, 2004-03-22, The New Yorker)

Norah Jones is apparently very boring. Recent reviews of her new album, “Feels Like Home,” use words like “tepid,” “blank,” and “dull” to describe her music. She has been referred to more than once as Snorah Jones. But there are at least twenty million people who have a different take. Her 2002 début album, “Come Away with Me,” which sold eight million copies in America and ten million overseas, and won a number of Grammys, is the flag waved by record executives every time another article about the end of the music business appears. Like many mega-platinum records, “Come Away” succeeded without the benefit of much critical support, and “Feels Like Home” has sold two million copies in the first month of its release. How her records do what they do is a topic that is annexing its own wing of journalism. Some credit marketing, but record companies regularly promote releases by sending out advance copies to critics, buying ads, licensing songs to Starbucks compilations, and the like. It’s what record companies know how to do. Yet the records they push rarely sell eight million copies. Eight million means there are no red states or blue states. Eight million means everyone voted for you.

There are sociological explanations. Critics point out, accurately, that young artists like Jones, who is twenty-five, and Josh Groban and Michael Bublé are selling soothing songs by the seashore to a much older audience. These artists’ faith in melody and acoustic instruments ostensibly provides evidence that not all musicians below the age of thirty are getting tattooed with runic symbols and sending viruses to each other on tiny, inscrutable batphones. Record companies have agreed to think that the older audience is their pot of gold. This is half science—the percentage of records being bought by listeners above the age of thirty is growing—and half hearsay. Older listeners are continually saddled with the calumny that they are too dumb or scared to download music for free.

There is the aesthetic explanation—Norah Jones and her foot soldiers are organic, grass-fed artists taking back the castle from the injection-molded, polyblend popbots who are accused of a number of crimes against music. (These crimes are often what drew people to pop in the first place, but what are a few false dichotomies when you’re mourning your youth?) Jones’s sound is distinctive enough to have created its own subgenre, and new singers like Katie Melua, possibly against their wishes, are being sold as post-Norah artists. Jones has managed to make music that is universally useful, like a paper clip, but personal enough that listeners think they discovered it for themselves.

There are two plausible explanations for all this smoke and fire: Norah Jones is actually pretty good. And she is selling the all-time No. 1 hit song—sex.

Who but the critics would be stumped by the popularity of melody?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 28, 2004 8:36 AM