Dakota Johnson, left, and Jamie Dornan appear in a scene from “Fifty Shades of Grey.” (Photo credit: Universal Pictures and Focus Features)

By Chris Jones
Chicago Tribune

Ascending the stage at the Grammy Awards, the British crooner Sam Smith observed that before he made his winning hit, “Stay With Me,” he’d been doing everything possible to try and get his music heard. Alas, “awful” music had resulted from such conformity and compromise. “It was only until I started to be myself that the music started to flow and people started to listen,” Smith said, slightly and forgivably mangling syntax in his sweet acceptance speech. “So thank you guys for accepting me for being different.”

Ah, just being yourself — the magical formula for success in the entertainment business?

For sure, that advice was spouted by star after star at the Grammy Awards. The likable Smith is 22, presumably idealistic, and far too young to be cynical. And he must have felt like he was on a rocket to the stars, as indeed he was earlier this month. Smith won four Grammys in all, including record and song of the year, as well as best new artist. But the just-be-you truism also emerged from the mouths of artists who’ve been around plenty long enough to know the world is full of people just being themselves but that success is far more likely to flow to those who somehow fit a need, satisfy a hunger, occupy a niche among those doing the accepting of Smith, and the buying.

It’s not that hard, really, for power brokers in the entertainment industry to see such sweet spots. Those needs don’t change much over time.

How different, really, is Smith? In his perceptive review of Smith’s recent sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden, New York Times critic Jon Pareles noted that nearly every ballad on the singer’s “In the Lonely Hour” debut album drew on “1960s and 70s soul.” Albeit between the lines, Pareles was really arguing that Smith’s popularity comes from a voice that is at once pure and akin to a choirboy, but that also happens to come with the built-in soulful tropes of the blues. One tends to think of the latter as an earned entity. Smith was gifted with a short cut.

Smith has a distinctive instrument, which is part of what makes him “him,” of course, so fair enough there. But his sudden popularity surely also has something to do with the popularity of Elvis Presley, whose voice allowed him to combine the wholesome and the dangerous other, ideal for white audiences during Presley’s racially divisive moment in the 1960s. Or even the Rolling Stones, who also appropriated, re-styled and re-packaged the blues. Or even the half-forgotten Boy George, who sold outre sexuality but crucially claimed to prefer a cup of tea.

Smith is clearly a hugely talented young singer, but his meteoric rise is not just, or even mostly, about originality. That’s a nice thing for a young artist to believe, but au contraire, Mr. Smith. It is also about somebody in a suit realizing that you were a perfect fit for a market that has existed now for more than half a century: sultry sweetness, pure longing, safe danger. There is no shame there. You walk that line exceptionally well.

Smith has honed in on the great Anglo-American cultural paradox — often infused with race, perennially to do with sex — that actually never, ever goes away. Heck, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a franchise that shrewdly dances between eroticized romance and personal degradation, is riding that very paradox to untold riches even as we speak, even though it is widely accepted that the entire enterprise is, artistically speaking, completely bogus. I could have written it. So could you. We’d have done better. The point is that we failed to seize the opportunity, probably being too busy being ourselves.

Benign pain? People just cannot get enough. Art has nothing to do with it.

The lack of any particular merit simply does not matter when it comes to the world of “Fifty Shades.” Its pull is too strong for anyone in the media to resist. Its subject is too primal to prevent the plethora of sex toy tie-ins; DJ conversations; interminable should-I-see-it-should-I-not debates; ad-heavy, morning-zoo bickering about what this says about gender and power — and it’s all just in good fun. The brilliance of this thing has nothing to do with its edge; it’s all about how skillfully it has stayed just safe enough.

“Fifty Shades” may be many things, but original is not one of them. If you substitute pornography for the blues (and I mean no insult there to the blues), it is doing much the same thing as Smith’s “In the Lonely Hour.”

That should not be insulting to Smith. The ability to navigate such waters is a far greater predictor of success than originality. Not in every case, though. Take NBC anchor Brian Williams — regarded, until the last few days, as a supreme navigator of the line between personality and journalist, entertainer and newscaster, personal storyteller and impartial observer. In the new media landscape, he was regarded by those who signed his paychecks as someone who got it, who leveraged it, who kept everything in balance. Williams could make the news safer. It seemed to work for him to be himself, not merely a man in a line of great anchors.

But then he slipped up. The reality of war and the sacredness of heroism crashed his ongoing party. And Williams fell off his tightrope.

A lonely hour, indeed.