POP MUSIC : Grown-Up Rock or Just Old Dogs Trying New Tricks? : Call them the Pop Sophisticates and give them credit for growing artistically as well asplotting a future course for rock

Rock was built in the ‘50s around a musical energy and spirit that so perfectly reflected the independence and celebration of youth that any words beyond Little Richard’s awop-bop-a-loo-bop alop-bam-boom sometimes seemed irrelevant.

The cultural explosion that gave us rock was followed, in the ‘60s, by Bob Dylan and the Beatles, who showed how you could add ideas to rock ‘n’ roll. It is sign of both rock’s initial greatness and its current malaise that the music still feeds off those two breakthroughs.

Now, however, a group of singers and songwriters--including Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Sting, Peter Gabriel and David Byrne--are moving beyond the boundaries of conventional rock. They’re experimenting with jazz or Third World rhythms, more diverse instruments and more complex musical structures, in addition to writing lyrics that deal with subjects far from the standard pop love song.

True, these artists are proven pop stars whose previous success gives them the clout to flout the conventions of today’s Top 40. But they were willing to risk that clout; Simon and Sting left the guaranteed commercial success of Simon and Garfunkel and the Police to plot new courses in their work. Mitchell began experimenting after her own biggest success, “Court and Spark” in 1974.

It’s not clear whether there’s a mass audience for music for pop driven by Brazilian drumming or West African guitars, or for the literate musings of Mitchell or Gabriel. Still, there are signs that pop and rock are opening up to a new musical sophistication. Is it a third stage in pop’s evolution, or is it a whole new style of music?

* Sting’s new “The Soul Cages”--a somber, intensely personal work that reflects on the death of the British rock star’s father and the philosophical changes in his own life--is the fastest-rising album in the nation.

Selling more than 1.3 million copies in four weeks, the album is No. 3 on the Billboard magazine charts, adding the only touch of artistic grace to a Top 10 that is otherwise dominated by the hollow, commercial exercises of such acts as Vanilla Ice, Mariah Carey, Wilson Phillips and M.C. Hammer. The album, too, is the centerpiece of a Sting tour that promises to be one of the most acclaimed of 1991.

* Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints” album is another cross-cultural feast in the tradition of “Graceland,” though the featured rhythms are tied more to Brazilian drumming than South African guitars, and the themes--lost ideals in these troubled times--may be even more personal.

The album has been in the Top 20 for four months and has sold more than 2 million copies. It, too, is being spotlighted in a festive Simon tour that will also be among the year’s most celebrated pop experiences.

* Mitchell’s “Night Ride Home” album, due in stores March 5, may bring the Canadian singer-songwriter, one of the most acclaimed artists of the ‘70s, the renewed attention that Neil Young’s “Freedom” and “Ragged Glory” did for him.

It’s a work of considerable imagination and grace, touching on questions of heart and home and honor. Where her move toward a more sophisticated pop style--in which she experimented with jazz and Third World rhythms--was widely criticized in the ‘80s, she seems right back in step with the heart of creative pop.

* Gabriel’s “Shaking the Tree/Sixteen Golden Hits” album, which has sold more than 700,000 copies, is an absorbing chronicle of Gabriel’s music over the last decade.

A leader in the use of international textures in rock, Gabriel has also examined social matters--from political oppression to social indifference--with an uncompromising sense of artistic integrity.

“You know the old song ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die?,’ ” Mitchell said during a recent interview. “Well, rock ‘n’ roll was dying in the ‘70s. It needed new tributaries and some of the new tributaries have come to pass.”

One of the needs, she felt, was new rhythms, which led her back to the roots of rock, including African drumming. She used a tape loop of African drums--an early use of “sampling”--on a song called “The Jungle Line” in her 1975 album “The Hissing of Summer Lawns.”

Byrne, working with Brian Eno and with Talking Heads, also turned to some of those same drum rhythms, and eventually moved to his own musical canvas that, like Simon, led him to Brazil.

There are other writers who are working in a similar manner--including Randy Newman and Tom Waits. But it’s a relatively exclusive club because you’ve got to have immense talent as well as creative daring. It takes courage to move against the commercial grain in an industry that all too often measures worth simply by sales.

Simon, remember, was virtually written off by the pop world after the commercial failure of “Hearts and Bones” in 1983, though it contains some of his most imaginative and sophisticated writing.

The songwriter enjoys pointing to a radio programmer who told a trade publication shortly after “Hearts and Bones” that it was time for new blood, that radio wasn’t going to be playing people “like Paul Simon anymore.” Two years later Simon bounced back with “Graceland,” perhaps the most admired album of the ‘80s.

Similarly, Sting continues to run into charges of “pretentiousness” and “overwrought ambition” even though he has shown increased craft and growth with each of his three solo albums, including “The Soul Cages”--a work that has been described as too “literary” and too “serious.”

Replies Sting, “I think pop music can be literary. I think it is a serious art form. There’s no law that says pop music has to be trivial or limited to doggerel.

“It’s not wrong for pop music to be sophisticated. It has to reflect the people who make it. I am a sophisticated person and I know a lot of other sophisticated people who make pop music . . . Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen. And there’s obviously an audience for that music.

“We’ve all grown up on rock ‘n’ roll, but rock itself has to grow if we are going to be able to continue to speak honestly as artists.”

Numerous artists have written eloquently about mature themes, including what happens after the world of possibilities has narrowed and youthful dreams have either been realized or lost.

But these artists--including Springsteen, Young, Don Henley, Tom Petty, Bob Seger, John Mellencamp--have usually done so within the restrictions of rock, both lyrically and musically. Most artists don’t show any maturity at all; as their careers lengthen, they simply recycle the same formulas that worked ni the past.

Simon widened the range of possibilities by not only addressing more mature themes, but also opening the Western pop experience to new color and textures--elements that help freshen the music and more precisely punctuate the images.

Mitchell’s controversial use of jazz and World Beat textures after “Court and Spark” in 1975 also stands as an early step toward this cleansing new pop spirit.

For those longtime rock fans who are also eager for more mature themes, this new movement is especially inviting.

Without it, the older audience has had to choose between oldies, the placid Top 40 world of Wilson Phillips and Paula Abdul, easy-listening music or country music (which has recently begun to regain its own creative momentum).

Thanks to albums such as “Graceland,” “The Soul Cages” and Mitchell’s new “Night Ride Home,” there is mature music that builds upon the passion and purpose of the best rock.

In “All This Time,” the hit single from “The Soul Cages,” Sting deals eloquently with topics far from your average pop fare--sadness over his father’s death and his frustration with religious rites:

Two priests came round our house tonight

One young, one old, to offer prayers for the dying

To serve the final rite,

One to learn, one to teach

Which way the cold wind blows

Fussing and flapping in priestly black

Like a murder of crows.

And all this time, the river flowed

Endlessly to the sea

If I had my way, I’d take a boat from the river

And bury the old man

I’d bury him at sea.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that such unlikely pop bedfellows are united in the movement.

It’s not only the first revolution during the rock era launched by veteran musicians--as opposed to Young Turks--but also led by artists who were, in various times, attacked for deviating from the pop-rock norm.

Simon a decade ago was viewed--unfairly--by the rock community as someone who was gradually moving into a bland pop mainstream. There was even some grumbling when his name was brought up at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a few years ago by people who argued that he wasn’t really “rock.”

Mitchell, after her string of brilliant ‘70s albums, was similarly dismissed by many as too preoccupied with jazz and politics. One writer said she had gone from being a poet to a journalist. Sting a decade ago was considered by most of the adult pop audience as the pretty-boy lead singer of a “new wave” rock group, the Police.

Peter Asher, who manages Mitchell as well Linda Ronstadt, who has also shown considerable musical daring in recent years by moving into fresh areas, said change is always risky for artists, but “absolutely essential or they will end up a parody of themselves. They have to grow and be willing to cut themselves off from the old image or the old audience, if that’s what it takes.”

The independent development of Sting, Mitchell and Simon was chiefly a reflection of changes in their own artistic impulses.

They all were inspired by rock ‘n’ roll to be musicians: Simon listening to the Everly Brothers and the doo-wop groups around New York, Sting by Elvis and Beatles records and hearing Jimi Hendrix live, Mitchell by attending rock ‘n’ roll dances, then by hearing Dylan.

But their influences were never limited to rock. Sting, for instance, was so excited as a teen-ager by Hendrix’s ability as a guitarist that he moved into jazz, where he felt there was more of an emphasis on virtuosity than in pop-rock. He didn’t return to the pop-rock world until he joined the Police when he was in his late 20s.

Today, he is more likely to mention Mozart or Gershwin for inspiration rather than Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley, as likely to mention novelist Paul Bowles (whose “The Sheltering Sky” inspired the song “Tea in the Sahara”) as Dylan.

For all three--as well as Gabriel, Byrne and others--music was always a growing experience, and when they found they couldn’t find sufficient nourishment within rock, they looked outside of it. Their musical experiments were also an early recognition that rock was losing some of the creative momentum.

Like Sting, Simon said he simply follows his creative interests.

“There’s no game plan,” he said in an interview last year. “You can’t sit down and say, ‘Hey, this is where pop music is . . . this is what everybody wants, so let me make that record.’ The radio is already full of those records.

“In the Simon & Garfunkel days, when I was the same generation as the average record buyer, whatever I was interested in was in perfect sync with what the mass audience was interested in.

“Then, I was lucky again because when I left Art (Garfunkel) to explore other kinds of music, it was the era of the singer-songwriter, which was fine because that’s what I was doing.

“But then it started getting scary because you start getting interested in things that are outside of the marketplace--songs that are written in a different style, like some of the music on ‘Hearts and Bones,’ and songs that employ the rhythms of other cultures, like ‘Graceland.’ And you don’t know if anyone is going to still be interested.”

Sting agreed in a separate interview.

“At the end of the day, this is a very selfish process. You write for yourself and, in a way, perform for yourself. What you do in a record is say, ‘Here I am, these are my interests, my enthusiasms, my current beliefs.’ And it’s terribly gratifying, on every level, when people respond. All of us who you are talking about are lucky that we are able to express our feelings and still have an audience at a time when pop music has become very generic.

Mitchell said she feels encouraged and a bit vindicated by the success of “Graceland” and Sting’s solo albums in recent years.

“It’s very nice to see what has been happening,” she said recently. “You feel all your albums are babies and you want them appreciated, and it made you angry and hurt when some of them were ignored or attacked because people thought they were a too radical or whatever.

“But you also feel pleased for pop music itself . . . that there is a nourishing spirit in pop music that is strong and true.”