For EW's 35th, read our first cover story, featuring k.d. lang and Neneh Cherry — in full online ...

launched with our Feb. 16, 1990, issue, which highlighted two singers we thought deserved more attention than the Grammys gave that year. For EW's 35th, read ou

launched with our Feb. 16, 1990, issue, which highlighted two singers we thought deserved more attention than the Grammys gave that year.

For EW's 35th, read our first cover story, featuring k.d. lang and Neneh Cherry — in full online for first time

launched with our Feb. 16, 1990, issue, which highlighted two singers we thought deserved more attention than the Grammys gave that year.

By David Browne

David Browne is EW's music critic and author of ''Dream Brother: The Lives & Music of Jeff & Tim Buckley'' (HarperCollins)

EW's editorial guidelines

Published on August 13, 2025 04:46PM EDT

Leave a Comment

k.d lang and Neneh Cherry on the cover of 's first issue from Feb. 16, 1990.

*launched with its first issue on Feb. 16, 1990, featuring a cover story entitled "The Mix Masters," which explored (in a cover line much longer than anything we'd do now) how "In today's divided, divisive music scene, Neneh Cherry & k.d. lang rise above the rest by stirring up smart new sounds." As EW celebrates its 35th anniversary, here it is in its entirety for the first time online.*

Nobody ever said that awards shows were on the cutting or even the dull edge of entertainment. But this year's Grammys — to be telecast live from Los Angeles on Feb. 21 — explore new horizons of boredom; they are as safe as a pair of kindergarten scissors.

Don Henley, Billy Joel, Bette Midler, and the rest of the major nominees may be nice to have around during a long drive down the turnpike — but you could have been listening to the same voices 10 years ago.

They are easy choices. It's no surprise that the Grammys found no breakout new talent this time. There isn't any.

There is no Tracy Chapman, no Elvis Costello, no Cyndi Lauper. Nobody can stand out from the pack because the pack is so diverse.

Music is a universal language no more — instead, it's shattered into dozens of narrow audiences: rap, metal, dance, classic rock, white, black, young, old. Splinter groups that often seem to resist any attempt to reach out to a wider audience.

k.d. lang in 1992; Neneh Cherry in 1993.

Paul Natkin/Getty; Steve Eichner/WireImage

But some promising musicians do at least try to find a tie that binds. Walk into a record store and guess where Neneh Cherry is filed (rap? dance? jazz?), or k.d. lang (country? punk? standards?Canadian?). They don't fit into a niche, a prefabricated and predictable genre.

Both have looked over all sorts of musical styles and traditions, picked out what they like, and paid tribute by synthesizing them into music that is uniquely theirs.

In a time of divisiveness and division in music — of racism, anti-Semitism, chauvinism, and censorship — these two musicians and a few more like them (Living Colour, 3rd Bass) find a way to bring the musical edges of America to a new center. So we celebrate them and award Cherry and lang our first (and maybe annual) UnGrammys (just fairly cheap ** mugs — but they're worth about as much as any award is, right?).

k.d. lang performing (circa 1990).

Mick Hutson/Redferns

Kathy Dawn Lang — otherwise known as k.d. lang, no capitals, please — is an androgynous Canadian country singer with a short punk hairdo and a penchant for wide-shouldered men's suits. Neneh Cherry is a Londoner who uses cushy lips and a mix of rap and funk to dismiss anyone who gets in her way.

Ten years ago, they would have been cult figures, if they'd existed on the charts at all. But in 1990, both lang and Cherry receive the kind of media attention normally bestowed on ex-Beatles, sell plenty of records, and are nominated for Grammys. And both dismantle pop's walls by nonchalantly leaping over musical styles and bringing a new audience along with them.

If that's not progress, nothing is.

Few crossover-dream tales are as striking as that of lang, 28, whose soaring, Patsy Cline-influenced voice has led to three major country Grammy nominations this year (Best Country Song, Best Country Vocal Collaboration, and Best Country Vocal Performance, Female).

It wasn't shocking when the self-consciously quirky lang was embraced early on by the hip rock crowd, which is more accommodating than the notoriously conservative Nashville community. But even there, she has been endorsed by the likes of Loretta Lynn (who joined her on lang's well-received 1988 album of country standards, *Shadowland*).

Her success broke barriers that have existed in country for years, barriers still fueled by specialized radio stations, record company marketing strategies, and the stratification of the *Billboard* charts.

k.d. lang accepting her second Grammy just days after EW's cover story in 1990.

Part of the reason for her acceptance is technical: lang *sounds* like a country singer, she can write some barroom-perfect lyrics ("I can hear a howling wind that sweeps away the pain that's been"), and her band, the reclines, knows its way around a truck-stop guitar lick.

The result, combined with vocal chops and a fondness for irony over sentimentality, merged yuppie rock fans, aging punk-rockers, Nashville regulars, and *Tonight* show viewers (where lang has appeared several times) into one of the broadest possible pop audiences.

"The term 'country singer' means a whole lot more than just singing country music," lang told an interviewer last year. "I prefer to be user-friendly, rather than a stationary figure in Nashville." There's nothing elitist about lang; everyone's invited to her party.

Neneh Cherryperforms at a concert held at Wembley Stadium in London on April 16, 1990.

Georges De Keerle/Getty

There could have been plenty elitist about Neneh Cherry. The product of a multinational household — daughter of a West African percussionist and a Swedish designer, stepdaughter of avant-jazz trumpeter Don Cherry — this year's most daring Best New Artist nominee went on to join several abrasive and ear-shattering British punk bands in the early '80s.

Rather than limit herself, though, she tossed all those sources into a Cuisinart and came up with *Raw Like Sushi*, a brazen debut album filled with up-front sexuality, sassy come-ons and put-downs, and a sense of tough self-reliance.

Not since the Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde (and possibly Madonna) had a female pop icon shoved such intelligent attitude and audacity into the face of pop fans, and listeners had no choice but to pay attention.

As much as her image, though, it was Cherry's music that connected the dots between pop communities. On *Sushi*, vivid splashes of R&B sleekness coexist with rap interludes, herky-jerky dance rhythms, and even a bit of jazzy trumpeting.

Neneh Cherry attends the Brit Awards in 1994.

Duncan Raban/Popperfoto via Getty

"The best blessing I've had in my life," she has said, "is feeling I don't have to define the various influences. "Now we're going to do a reggae song, a jazz song. " The *Los Angeles Times* went so far as to dub the 25-year-old the "Joni Mitchell of hip-hop" — a not entirely inappropriate comparison given that her songs tackle such unconventional subjects (for dance music) as parenthood ("Inna City Mamma"), sexual independence ("Buffalo Stance"), and noncommittal lovers ("Manchild").

In some ways, it doesn't matter whether Grammy voters opt for Milli Vanilli's hair or the Indigo Girls' ultra-sincerity over Cherry's sass, or whether they bequeath statuettes to such veterans as Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris over lang. Cherry and lang already have won battles that mean much more. And their revolution reaches beyond country and dance music, judging from the rock fans who pump their fists to Living Colour, the rap and metal fans who play air-guitar to Tone-Lōc's "Wild Thing," and the easy-listening and Latin crowds who dance side by side at Gloria Estefan concerts.

As Neneh Cherry puts it in "The Next Generation": "Don't be messin' with our future."**

Original Article on Source

Source: "AOL Music"

Read More

---

Source: Astro Blog

Full Article on Source: Astro Blog

#LALifestyle #USCelebrities