Will Pop Success ’89 Echo Pop ‘88?

What does it say to the pop music industry when 1988’s two biggest breakthroughs came from completely opposite ends of the pop landscape?

One is Tracy Chapman, a black, folk-flavored singer whose examinations of the soul of poverty and injustice racked up more than 2 million in U.S. sales for her Elektra debut album.

The other is Guns N’ Roses, an L.A. street-rock band that blasts through urban decay with boastful, rowdy rock that scored more than 5 million in sales.

In a business notorious for the cloning of successes, it says ’89 will be the year of Tracy and Roses sound-alikes.

“Most record companies play follow-the-leader,” said Tom Zutaut, the Geffen Records talent/production executive who signed Guns N’ Roses to the label.

“People are signing up folk females like they’re going out of style, and I know for a fact that a lot of mediocre metal bands are being signed up, and there will be a glut of the stuff that won’t do well and people will say, ‘OK, that wave is over now.’ ”

The real secret for success, Zutaut suggests, will be to look in an entirely different direction.

“It’s the guy out there who’s signing stuff totally different from hard rock and folk that will do well,” he said.

“If I were going to put my money on the best bet for next year, I would say there will have to be a male singer-songwriter. There’s a market for that music, but (so far) it’s all women. Are the guys not good enough? Or have they just not been found? So while every other company looks for the girl, I would look for the guy.”

Looking between Chapman and Guns N’ Roses to the lesser, though still significant breakthroughs of ‘88, Zutaut’s advice would appear to be sound. The year’s notable additions to the pop consciousness cover an extremely wide terrain, from Texas troubadour Michelle Shocked to Iceland’s quirky alternative rock band Sugarcubes to a choir of female Bulgarian folksingers to a band of French Gypsies.

Observed Dick Odette, vice president of purchasing for the 660-outlet Musicland record store chain: “There’s just generally an interest in music, and it doesn’t seem to be coming from any one age group or taste.

“You look at the current top product today and you’ve got a range from heavy metal to the Traveling Wilburys to Barbra Streisand and Anita Baker--the young kids’ rock ‘n’ roll, the older rock ‘n’ roll and the mainstream pop.”

Seems like a fairly fuzzy picture from which to glean any kind of clues as to what will or will not be successful.

But the people whose jobs depend on being able to gauge the public pulse insist that the signals are quite clear. The message: Quality sells.

“In the cases of Tracy and Guns, they’re both real artists making real music,” said Zutaut. “People are getting tired of prepackaged pabulum. Deep down there’s a hunger for real music about real life.”

Record companies bent on playing follow-the-leader could do worse than follow the lead of Elektra Records, which enjoyed an extraordinary year with such varied successes as Chapman, Baker, the Sugarcubes, 10,000 Maniacs, the Bulgarian Women’s Choir, the Gipsy Kings and heavy metal heroes Metallica.

Elektra chairman Bob Krasnow believes his roster reflects the state of the world.

“People are exposed to so much by the media or travel that their tastes are incredibly wide today,” he said from his New York office. “It challenges you to try to satisfy that. . . . We have a great opportunity because of people’s increased openness.”

A good bet for 1989 is that more and more labels will try to mirror the diversity of Elektra. One that has already taken steps in that direction is PolyGram.

Where until recently the label’s successes were limited to metalish acts like Def Leppard and Bon Jovi, PolyGram reached out this year to the likes of troubadour Michelle Shocked and Irish soul-rockers Hothouse Flowers.

“You have to continue going after something unique and real, which means challenges,” said Bob Skoro, PolyGram vice president in charge of signing and developing talent, West Coast, giving his latest signing as an example.

“I have a band I just signed, called Darling Cruel, and I’ve never heard anything else like it,” he boasted. “It’s kind of like ‘Rocky Horror’ meets David Bowie.”

Geffen’s Zutaut, who counts jazz-folkie Texan Edie Brickell and New Age Japanese musician Kitaro among his other surprise successes, agrees that Elektra is very much the model for the future of the record industry.

“The sign of a great record company is that it has successes from all walks of music,” he said. “Elektra and Geffen both do a good job of that.”

Covering a wide range isn’t too hard for record companies and retailers. All they have to do is sign or stock an array of styles.

For radio, however, it’s a tougher job. How can a mass-oriented station play to a large spectrum of tastes without losing the interest of some listeners along the way?

One local station’s changes over the past year reflect that dilemma. KNX-FM, once known primarily for emphasizing the softer side of adult-oriented rock (Fleetwood Mac, Dan Fogelberg and the like), has been making a concerted effort to expand its play list to include harder-edged and more adventurous artists.

“No one can eat porridge all day,” said Kurt Kelly, who came to KNX as program director two months ago after having left KLOS-FM.

But Kelly also said that not all listeners have the same ranges of taste.

“Everybody pushes (station tuning) buttons, right?” he said. “The reason people push buttons is they’re not getting what they want on one station.”

Yet he also felt it would be impractical for his station to try to please everyone all the time.

“We’re doing contemporary adult rock,” he said, acknowledging that by design the format excludes all but a handful of black artists, and that the more unusual, “alternative” acts like the Sugarcubes have to “prove” themselves in the marketplace before he would be willing to take a chance with them.

Still, he sees a change coming in radio that reflects a significant change in the rock radio’s listenership that will be reflected in programming.

“We have a whole generation that grew up with rock ‘n’ roll,” he said. “If you’ve been to a rock concert lately, you realize it’s not all kids. There are a lot of people there with suits and ties and short hair.

“Remember the good old free-form radio days of the early ‘70s?” he said when asked if it would be possible for one station to appeal to both kids and parents. “That kind of mix existed then, so why can’t it today?”