Understanding the music of the new generation - Special Issue - The New Generation of the '90s

Ebony, August, 1990 by Charles Whitaker

Jackson's Rhythm Nation album, a sensation on both the pop and R&B charts, already is a 4 million seller and is gaining rapidly on the 5 million mark set by her previous hit Control. The fact that her music crosses a variety of racial, cultural and linguistic boundaries speaks to the messages of world harmony and Black pride that Jackson, Jam and Lewis have laced through the album's eight songs.

While the 45-year-old father of one Chicago teen claimed only to hear "a muffled voice and a lot of noise" whenever his 16-year-old daughter punched Rhythm Nation up on the family compact disc player, new generation listeners are being swept up in the infectious rhythm and contemplating the album's themes as Jackson would wish.

As she told Ebony last winter: "I believe that there are people out there who are listening to the album and are considering some of the social problems I'm trying to address--bigotry, illiteracy, drugs, violence, the homeless. Even if only one person out of all those who listen to the album makes a change, that's an accomplishment."

Not that the new generation's commitment to social responsibility has dampened its appreciation of a song that does nothing more than celebrate the joys of love and romance. Afterall, it is this same generation that has produced the likes of a 26-year-old Regina Belle, a rising songstress in the full-throated, blues and gospel-influenced tradition. Belle has a sexy way with a song that conjures up images of torch singers of yesteryear. That's not surprising, since so many of her role models were singers of past eras. "I grew up listening to people like Aretha Franklin, Nancy Wilson and Billie Holiday," she says. "That's the kind of music that had an influence on me."

Like a great many Black music stars, Belle has musical roots in the church. But unlike a generation ago, when Gospel singers had to cross over into secular music to gain widespread recognition, the new generation is giving equal attention to gospel artists and raising them to the status of pop stars. Groups like the acappella sextet Take 6 and the brother-sister duo of Bebe and Cece Winans draw concert crowds that some pop stars would kill for.

Some attribute the generation's hunger for spiritual music to the heightened interest in religion among the young. "This is a generation that is turning to a variety of sources for the inspiration and strength to cope with the world around them," says UCLA's Walter Allen. "One of those sources is religion."

But there are a variety of influences that determine who and what the new generation listens to. Perhaps that's why this generation, more than any other, has such eclectic musical tastes and has created music that owes so much to the past. "It's not that our music is just this weird noise," says 20-year-old "Fast Eddie," the electronic wunderkind who is credited with originating the precussive dance sound called "house music." "We've just taken the music and sounds that we've grown up with and taken it in new and different directions.