news analysis:
Pre-millennial pop is anything goes

Best known for his pop hit "Livin' la Vida Loca," Ricky Martin won four awards for his song at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards

By Mark Harris Assistant Managing Editor Entertainment Weekly

(CNN) -- Year-end entertainment wrap-ups usually focus on two things: The mainstream events that achieved blockbuster status, and the fringe movies or TV shows or CDs that suddenly and surprisingly broke through to popularity.

Try to sum up 1999 that way, and it's not so easy: This was the year when the very definition of words like "mainstream" and "fringe" became exhilaratingly blurry.

Consider the year's top music personality (no arguments, please): Ricky Martin. Is he "fringe" -- a star in a comparatively small segment of the music market, Latin pop, who achieved crossover success? Or is he, as the numbers suggest, a mass-market, multimillion-CD-selling superstar who, with one simple swivel of his hips, turned Latin pop into a mainstream category? Did he jump into the mainstream, or did the mainstream redefine itself to include him? It hardly matters.

Similarly, the biggest story in music technology was the emergence of MP3. (Never heard of it? Ask your kid.) Yesterday it was a for-technogeeks-only music delivery system. Today it is the way millions of consumers are getting and sending their music. Tomorrow, it may well be the ONLY way.

Jumping to television

Once a mainstay of 1950s television, wrestling is again a prime-time spectacle, exemplified by this scene from UPN's "WWF Smackdown"

Remember when wrestling was a borderline phenomenon, confined to the upper reaches of your cable dial and the outer limits of your bedtime? Today -- thanks to "WWF Smackdown!" -- it is a prime-time spectacle embracing guest stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and single-handedly keeping UPN from becoming a distant memory.

And remember when game shows were something your grandmother watched in the afternoon? That was before "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" became the program that ate the sweeps and turned Regis Philbin, after a mere 40 years, into TV's most valuable player.

Were these cases of "fringe" forms achieving mainstream status? Hardly. Just go back to the mid-1950s and check out the prime-time schedules during TV's infancy. Two of the most reliable mainstays? You guessed it: game shows and wrestling.

A year of cult hits

Scenes from "The Phantom Menace": If few people liked the movie, why did it gross $400 million?

You see it everywhere. At the movies this year, the most profitable horse in the box office derby -- in fact, the most profitable movie in history -- was "The Blair Witch Project," a $60,000, black-and-white faux documentary that debuted one chilly midnight at last January's Sundance Film Festival and went on to gross $140 million.

At what point did it turn from cult hit into mainstream smash? It's hard to gauge -- just as it's hard to explain how the year's most anticipated movie, "The Phantom Menace," could have grossed more than $400 million without anybody liking it very much, or how "Pokémon" -- had we even heard of it at this time last year? -- could have grabbed $50 million in its first five days of release.

The lesson of "Pokémon" is the lesson of 1999: The mainstream is what entertainment consumers decide to make it, and when it comes to their choices, anything goes.

Mark Harris is an assistant managing editor at Entertainment Weekly magazine.