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Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music
If you drive into any American city with the car stereo blasting, you’ll undoubtedly find radio stations representing R&B/hip-hop, country, Top 40, adult contemporary, rock, and Latin, each playing hit after hit within that musical format. American music has created an array of rival mainstreams, complete with charts in multiple categories. Love it or hate it, the world that radio made has steered popular music and provided the soundtrack of American life for more than half a century.
In Top 40 Democracy , Eric Weisbard studies the evolution of this multicentered pop landscape, along the way telling the stories of the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, A&M Records, and Elton John, among others. He sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the past fifteen years and their implications for the audiences the industry has shaped. Weisbard focuses in particular on formats―constructed mainstreams designed to appeal to distinct populations―showing how taste became intertwined with class, race, gender, and region. While many historians and music critics have criticized the segmentation of pop radio, Weisbard finds that the creation of multiple formats allowed different subgroups to attain a kind of separate majority status―for example, even in its most mainstream form, the R&B of the Isley Brothers helped to create a sphere where black identity was nourished. Music formats became the one reliable place where different groups of Americans could listen to modern life unfold from their distinct perspectives. The centers of pop, it turns out, were as complicated, diverse, and surprising as the cultural margins. Weisbard’s stimulating book is a tour de force, shaking up our ideas about the mainstream music industry in order to tease out the cultural importance of all performers and songs.
In Top 40 Democracy , Eric Weisbard studies the evolution of this multicentered pop landscape, along the way telling the stories of the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, A&M Records, and Elton John, among others. He sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the past fifteen years and their implications for the audiences the industry has shaped. Weisbard focuses in particular on formats―constructed mainstreams designed to appeal to distinct populations―showing how taste became intertwined with class, race, gender, and region. While many historians and music critics have criticized the segmentation of pop radio, Weisbard finds that the creation of multiple formats allowed different subgroups to attain a kind of separate majority status―for example, even in its most mainstream form, the R&B of the Isley Brothers helped to create a sphere where black identity was nourished. Music formats became the one reliable place where different groups of Americans could listen to modern life unfold from their distinct perspectives. The centers of pop, it turns out, were as complicated, diverse, and surprising as the cultural margins. Weisbard’s stimulating book is a tour de force, shaking up our ideas about the mainstream music industry in order to tease out the cultural importance of all performers and songs.
312 pages, Paperback
First published October 27, 2014
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About the author
Eric Weisbard
12 books4 followersEric Weisbard is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama and the author of Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 22, 2021
A longer version of this review appears https://kdhx.org/articles/music-news/....
Rush Limbaugh calls us LICs, the Low Information Crowd, the idea being that we filter, and nowhere is this more true than in our music, where our "tastes" become what the French called la politique des Auteurs or a politics of authorship. We block out the robust production that overwhelms us, or is beyond our understanding. The cultural politics runs that we make nescience a knowledge, an art (if not a science). So it is with genre in music; connoisseurship runs toward creating taste cultures around artist-bands in whose stock fans can see themselves as early adapters, risk-less investors. The pursuit of this kind of political clarity in consumption is very hip; the unhip, meantime, listen to the radio. Or at least that is a premise. On Eric Weisbard's account, radio formats operate so that those whose time will not permit such connoisseurship can hear a range of work within what Weisbard calls "the rival mainstreams": Top 40, Urban Contemporary (black modernist music), Country, Classic Rock, and Adult Contemporary [what used to be called Easy Listening, or middle of the road-- MOR]. Dial-flipping allows you to tune-in, across demographic lines. Weisbard's subjects are the genre-invaders The Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, Elton John, the Cleveland classic rock station WMMS, and the MOR label, A & M. No artist, label, or format has more virtue in this conflict between genre and format; Weisbard's politics are with the poptimists, who dabble and do not collect. It has itself become a politics. Streaming has interrupted this politics, since it's possible to collect in a dabbling way on Spotify, or what have you. Moreover, in places like St. Louis, there's this thing called community radio, supporting the bands and the connoisseurship of Alt-Country, "heartland rock," singer-songwriter, and a million Spotify playlists. Techno-interruptus becomes a fetish among the young, allowing them to ignore "lifers" whose musiking is a spiritual gaming, a politique.
Rush Limbaugh calls us LICs, the Low Information Crowd, the idea being that we filter, and nowhere is this more true than in our music, where our "tastes" become what the French called la politique des Auteurs or a politics of authorship. We block out the robust production that overwhelms us, or is beyond our understanding. The cultural politics runs that we make nescience a knowledge, an art (if not a science). So it is with genre in music; connoisseurship runs toward creating taste cultures around artist-bands in whose stock fans can see themselves as early adapters, risk-less investors. The pursuit of this kind of political clarity in consumption is very hip; the unhip, meantime, listen to the radio. Or at least that is a premise. On Eric Weisbard's account, radio formats operate so that those whose time will not permit such connoisseurship can hear a range of work within what Weisbard calls "the rival mainstreams": Top 40, Urban Contemporary (black modernist music), Country, Classic Rock, and Adult Contemporary [what used to be called Easy Listening, or middle of the road-- MOR]. Dial-flipping allows you to tune-in, across demographic lines. Weisbard's subjects are the genre-invaders The Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, Elton John, the Cleveland classic rock station WMMS, and the MOR label, A & M. No artist, label, or format has more virtue in this conflict between genre and format; Weisbard's politics are with the poptimists, who dabble and do not collect. It has itself become a politics. Streaming has interrupted this politics, since it's possible to collect in a dabbling way on Spotify, or what have you. Moreover, in places like St. Louis, there's this thing called community radio, supporting the bands and the connoisseurship of Alt-Country, "heartland rock," singer-songwriter, and a million Spotify playlists. Techno-interruptus becomes a fetish among the young, allowing them to ignore "lifers" whose musiking is a spiritual gaming, a politique.
October 27, 2015
The same problem that 90% of music critics have: a writing style that's more intended to show you how smart the author is rather than just convey information, which makes for a laborious read.
In general, though there was some interesting stuff here, I really am not sure what the author was on about.
In general, though there was some interesting stuff here, I really am not sure what the author was on about.
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February 5, 2026Read this for a book club I'll be joining this sunday! As a historical survey, it was pretty interesting - I liked the chapters on the Isley Brothers and the gradual transformations of rock radio the best. But overall I felt it was lacking much of a real thesis, despite the author's seeming implication that there was one being argued here. It also kind of feels instantly dated, having come out in 2014 and focused almost entirely on the impact of radio on pop music between about 1960 and 2010.
July 22, 2020
Due to my musical tastes & where I was raised, I preferred the chapters on The Isleys, Elton, & WMMS, but a cool read throughout.
June 20, 2016
It's commitment to radio format in telling the history of pop music from approximately 1965 to the present is both its great strength and weakness. It's smart, but the fastidiousness with which he discussed the role of radio verged on fetishizing (and romanticizing) radio in the ways people discovered music in the recent past. I saw echoes of myself in there, but also some serious dissonance that didn't quite jibe with what I saw around me in those crucial years when music was so crucial to my sense of identity and the identity of those around me.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews