Hey, They’re Only Following the Money

One of the biggest myths of the music business is that record companies are the ones with the power--the ones who shape the nation’s tastes by simply deciding which acts or styles to put their millions of promotional dollars behind. It was even an underlying theme of the recent U.S. Senate hearings about the marketing of pop culture.

Trust me: If the top echelon of record companies could control the marketplace, the biggest-selling rock album this year from the Universal Music Group would be the new U2, not the new Limp Bizkit or Papa Roach. Executives may bring home Bizkit’s “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water” or Roach’s “Infest” for their kids, but U2’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” is in their CD players.

The truth is that the most successful record executives don’t create trends. They are simply the ones who react fastest to emerging trends or most shrewdly exploit them.

The fact that the power rests with the consumer is why it’s so hard to predict winners in the industry. Label after label passed on the Beatles in the ‘60s and on U2 in the ‘70s and on Garth Brooks in the ‘80s before someone took a chance on each of them.

It’s this unpredictability that is why each year record companies routinely write off millions of dollars on bad signings--advance money for acts that never connect.

But executives have learned one way to reduce their financial risk on a signing. If consumers like a particular sound, the chances are they’ll like--and buy--a lot more of it.

That’s an important point to remember when critics accuse record companies of being the ones responsible for all the anger in rock (and rap music) today.

Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, to cite two of the year’s biggest-selling rock acts, aren’t good bands, but they are timely and lucky bands that feed a tremendous youthful appetite for angry, aggressive music.

Parents may ask what young people today have to be so angry about (just as parents did in every other rock era), and parents may feel all the bands sound alike (just as parents felt in every other rock era), but there is no denying the fact that Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, Korn and others touch a nerve.

Or, more precisely, they have tapped into a nerve that has proved so reliable an investment for the record industry in the ‘90s that Angry Rock was the equivalent, in terms of financial return, of an index 500 mutual fund.

There have been elements of Angry Rock with us since the beginnings of rock, starting with the playful tones of the Coasters’ “Yakety-Yak” and Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.” (Limp Bizkit even recycles one of the key lines from the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown” in a song on its new album: “Why is everybody always pickin’ on me?”)

The tone got much darker in the ‘60s and ‘70s as rock matured, but it entered its modern phase in the late ‘80s with the rise of Metallica. The California band’s torrent of guitar, drums and bass was so merciless that it offered its young fans a total, if temporary, escape from the frustrations and confusions of the day.

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Metallica, which was considered a thinking man’s metal band, brought a sense of integrity to rock ‘n’ roll that stood apart from the show-biz calculation and pretense of such heartless, mainstream hit-makers as Whitesnake, Bon Jovi and Poison. By doing so, it reached an audience beyond the one-dimensional heavy-metal contingent.

Standing backstage at a Metallica concert in Oakland in 1991, Bill Graham, the late San Francisco concert promoter who knew the importance of divining emerging trends, was more intrigued by what he saw in the stadium crowd that day than what he heard in the music itself.

“In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was a lot of hope along with the rebellion in rock,” he told me. “But there are a lot of kids . . . 15, 16, 17 . . . whose anger seems to grow out of their feelings of no hope. They see what’s happening every night on television, and they have a lot of questions. Are the wars ever going to stop? Is there ever going to be an honest politician? Who’s going to turn up with the next video of a police beating?”

Even as he spoke, there was an underground movement exploding in Seattle that would elevate Angry Rock to new levels of popularity and critical respectability, thanks to songs such as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which featured Beatles-esque melodies and seductive guitar lines.

Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, both of whom spoke about their troubled childhoods and low self-esteem, filled their songs with dark, unsettling themes of betrayal, hypocrisy, abuse and self-destruction.

Parents, once again, wondered what young people had to be so angry about. They complained about the lack of celebration and optimism in the music. Many dismissed the anger as just a marketing tool.

Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, an acclaimed member of the Seattle scene whose own songs have been described as “doom-laden,” scoffed at the time at suggestions that the anger in the songs was fake--and he warned about even darker music to come.

“I can see how an older generation which thinks it already has dealt with the problems we went through doesn’t want to hear any more about it. I can see them thinking, ‘Shut up and stop whining,’ ” Cornell said in a 1994 interview.

“But the anger in rock ‘n’ roll is going to get worse. Just as the world was a harder place for my generation, it’s even tougher for kids who are 10 and 12 today. It’s so much of a jungle out there . . . so much negativity and violence and with no family support system for millions of those kids. If you think I’m angry, wait until you hear the music they’re going to make.”

If grunge made Angry Rock the dominant theme of modern rock, the sonic models for the current barrage of bands are Rage Against the Machine, the Los Angeles group that combined the fury of hip-hop and punk/metal, and Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails, which offered new levels of intensity in both explicit language and desperation of theme.

To sophisticated ears, most of today’s bands seem like hollow retreads of those two great bands. The newer groups substitute predictable, cliched images for powerful and challenging ones. But they sell millions of albums because their rock audience hasn’t lost its taste for the Nirvana/Rage tradition.

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When this cycle of Angry Rock ends, the Bizkits and Roaches will probably be forgotten--just as the scores of bands before them that rode on the coattails of trends.

The question is whether the next cycle will be another round of creative bands--Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails--that take us into a whole other level of anger.

Or will the next wave of creative bands bring us back to the optimism and idealism of U2, R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen?

Whatever the shift, labels will follow the fans’ lead and invest in it. If it’s away from anger, what will those executives do? The savvy ones will be first in line to replace parental advisory labels with happy-face stickers.

Until then, the success of the Bizkits and the Roaches serves as a sort of optimism of its own for those who care about the future of rock.

When observers complained in recent years about the death of rock, they were lamenting the absence of challenging and innovative bands. There was little heart left in mainstream rock.

But the success of these bands shows that fans themselves haven’t lost faith in the music. The fact that they will respond so strongly to these cardboard heroes suggests the energy and sales that could be unleashed when some creative figures return to the scene.

Record executives are drooling at the prospect.

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.