So did the utter whiteness of pop radio pre- Thriller, as Eric reports in his Isley Brothers chapter black hits constituted a paltry one-tenth of the Top 40 by 1982.Īnyway, there's a lot to pull out of this book, and there's a particular interest of mine that the book doesn't address at all - dance music. So Dolly Parton's shrewdness in mass-marketing herself ("TV appearances became the most complete way to experience Parton's multiplicity," Eric writes) and negotiating the mainstream market (her producer, Gary Klein, "represents the middlebrow middleground in our business," said an exec) resonated. What I recall from that period - and this is undoubtedly down to being around people with fairly tame musical tastes, which isn't a judgment - is a lot of AC (adult contemporary), and a lot of country crossover. days), but you wouldn't hear either on rock or R&B radio for a long time, except as the occasional novelty. The most exciting new music around was post-punk (broadly defined) and hip-hop (still in its pre- Run-D.M.C. Right after the big post-disco crash of the record business in late 1979, when what had previously been described as a "recession-proof" business had overextended itself, radio buttoned up. That chapter almost uncannily mirrored my memory of every major rock-radio shift through the late Nineties.īut the early-to-mid-Eighties particularly interest me, across Democracy's chapters. That shift happened at WMMS-FM in Cleveland, as well. It featured, for surely the first and last time since the very early seventies, at least, actual contemporary black music, and not just "Purple Rain" - a song that, as Alan Light reveals in his new Let's Go Crazy, Prince played after calling up Neal Schon, just to make sure he wasn't accidentally ripping off a Journey song. It could be done, easily.) That was a fecund time, and certainly a world-building year as music fan for, I would imagine, everyone here to one degree or other.Ī while back I came across a year-end playlist for KQRS-FM, the AOR/classic-rock warhorse of Minneapolis/St. (I requested a sequel of the 100 best non-Hot 100 hits, but no dice. Michaelangelo Matos: Last September, Rolling Stone's website asked Maura and I to help determine and write up a list of 1984's greatest Hot 100 hits. Normal, in music, became a bunch of different, simultaneous, normals: parallel and jostling mainstreams, rather than everybody forced to fit into the same blockbuster formula or accept marginal status. Think of the Grammy Awards, which routinely dwarf the Oscars in the number of categories represented and in demographic range. In catering to chunks of everybody, not everybody all at once, what I call Top 40 democracy produced a pop scene of striking diversity, armored by commercialism. But the cynicism of lowest common denominator formats was good, I argue in my book, because even idealistic gatekeepers like music snobs are inherently narrow minded. True believers could fume all they wanted, and they have, from Elvis Costello attacking "Radio, Radio" in his punk days to Public Enemy's Chuck D questioning black radio's blackness. That's formats, not genres: Radio sold listeners to advertisers, not music to fans, and that meant being pragmatic about the tastes of groups highly defined by age, gender, race and class, not vaunting musical standards. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Top 40 Democracy Subtitle The Rival Mainstreams of American Music Author Eric Weisbard