Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music

by Eric Weisbard

By the mid-1970s, the format system I will focus on offered different musical flavors of Top 40, rooted in divisions of age, gender, race, region, and economics but also blurring and crossing between those rival categories. The result was a particular model of commercialized cultural pluralism: a formatting of publics.

Radio formats created, I’ll argue in this book, multiple mainstreams: distinct, if at times overlapping, cultural centers.

The bigger story, it seemed as I began conceptualizing, was a mainstream one, how the range of hits produced by the supposedly stifling corporate structures of radio and records effortlessly—and without an ounce of idealism required—exceeded rock in its range of sounds, artists, audience, and creativity. Could one account for this, but also for the fact that so much eclecticism had been met with so much scorn?

Formats let music occupy a niche in capitalism

Formats, radio, and pop music deserve a much bigger place in the history of American culture than accounts rooted in genre and isolated records have afforded them.

we can benefit from learning to think about music in the manner of the radio stations

and the record industry that generated the songs those stations needed for airplay: in terms of formats and the artists and publics who embodied them. The payoff would be this: we’d rediscover the middle of American culture as a place at least as complicated, diverse, and surprising as the margins.

Did the format destroy the genre? The best answer interrogates the question: Didn’t the commerce-first pragmatism of formatting, with its weak boundaries, free performers and fans inhibited by tighter genre codes?

Top 40, like the jukebox before it and MTV afterward, channeled cultural democracy: spread it but contained it within a regulated, commercialized path.

Formats began as theatrical structures but evolved into marketing devices—efforts to convince sponsors of the link between a mediated product and its never fully quantifiable audience.

What fueled and fuels such attitudes toward popular music, ones hardly limited to rock alone, is the dream of music as democratic in a way opposite to how champions of radio formats justified their playlists.

The mostly female listeners of the Top 40 pop formats bequeathed by Storz’s jukebox thus confronted, on multiple levels, the mostly male listeners of a rock genre that traced back to the anti-commercial contingent of Riesman’s interviewees. A democracy of hit songs, limited by its capitalist nature, was challenged by a democracy of genre identity, limited by its demographic narrowness.

The friction between competing notions of how to make and sell music had resulted in a staggering range of product, but also intractable disagreements over that product’s value within cultural hierarchies.

The multiple-formats system succeeded because spreading affluence justified accommodating different collective identities.

Yet postindustrial trends after the early 1970s worked to widen wealth gaps. Neoliberalism, the notion that privatization unleashed productivity, favored yuppie and New Economy ideals of personalized consumption.29 Here, one shopped to become different, not to validate a mass or group identity. Already divided against itself by genre/format and rock/pop dualities, the system of radio and records that peaked in the 1970s came under siege from these trends—advertiser insistence on reaching affluent buyers in the 25–54 category clashed with much of the pop music core audience. Top 40 itself, the mass-appeal approach of playing the widest variety of hits, was especially challenged, with stations abandoning the format at the onset of the 1980s and even more decisively in the early 1990s, but similar concerns faced black-oriented stations leery of playing hip-hop and rock stations whose heavy metal offerings were seen as blue collar in appeal.

This consumerism did not always follow divisive pathways: formats grouped audiences as much as it splintered them,

Formats needed to convince advertisers that the public being addressed separately was commercially worthy.

Every attempt to oppose a format mainstream, by renouncing capitalism or compromise, registers entitlement and privilege:

telling popular music history as a tale of multiple formats up-ends conceptions bequeathed by focused genres. Fragmentation or commodification by one group’s standards becomes the occupation of the center by other actors.

even in a “rock era” of unprecedented commercial and cultural clout, pop multiplicity was the more lasting story.

I have learned to love listening to a mainstream extending itself even more than to an underground emerging.

the format system has provided a stable means for groups on the margins of public discourse, including oppositional discourse, to sing and feel things together.

Formatting impelled a push and pull between reinforcing group identities in one mode, such as rock and soul, and complicating them in another, such as AC or hot new country.

Corporate America did not reify or exaggerate differences, but it did format them: growing black-oriented expression into a parallel mainstream. Artists like the Isleys were central to the process.

“That Lady” heralded a second arrival: R&B radio as a self-consciously executed format, rather than a cast of DJ personalities or unstructured effort to reach black consumers.

almost every instance, the original Black Power political agenda . . . yielded to the station’s profit-making mission.” This was not simply white control:

The corporate soul formula worked. Where their previous albums had varied widely, the Isleys’ Columbia-distributed releases, virtually all of which hit gold or platinum between 1973 and 1984, maintained an almost brutally consistent image.

The Isley Brothers and major-label soul had become a staple commodity. Yet this formatted consumer experience produced cultural transposition, much as “Shout” had surfaced out of traditions that few within the pop world of 1959 would have recognized.

even as African American identity fragmented along class lines, R&B offered symbolic racial unity as an ongoing commercial product.

As a pop hit with lyrics about unspecified “powers that be,” “Fight the Power” was as ripe for appropriation as “Shout.”

the class divisions that rivaled racial divisions played out in gendered language, as rock became associated with moneyed, aloof, and sexually suspect hippies. Working-class white boys felt instead a class and male kinship with black music, as the Isleys gave them a sense of the “streets.” Yet their experience of the music was mediated, learned through radio or Soul Train, not socializing. And there was no compunction about using “Fight the Power” for political ends opposite of a group who named their label after an integrated suburb.

Within countercultural rock, a related dynamic arose: whites who no longer shared the present with black culture, revering older variants of African American music, from jazz to blues, but castigating contemporary material.

In attacking Top 40, rockers undercut the primary channel that let black music reach a white audience.

Rock, as it turned into a format, segregated itself racially as Top 40 never had.

By 1975, Ronald Isley rued, “The FM progressive stations don’t play us because they have us classified as R&B.”

The alternative, in reaching beyond black audiences, as Kelly Isley had noted, was disco, like a twist craze or bubblegum single in being open to black music—but only within tight, deracinated parameters.

The disco backlash swept aside nearly all black commercial music apart from R&B radio.

Despite two dozen subsequent black radio hits over the next three decades, the Isleys never again received significant airplay outside R&B.

integrate and normalize hip-hop. Top 40 was less white than ever. Yet

Crossover success continued to elude meaningful racial engagement.

formats, which created an African American mainstream but on materialistic and precarious terms.

As Gilroy judges history, “I have watched their oppositional imaginings first colonized and then vanquished by the leveling values of the market

R&B, born out of the shift in African American life from a predominantly southern and rural existence to a predominantly northern and urban one, ultimately evolved into a black-oriented segment of mainstream commercial culture. Neither pure crossover nor purely separatist, neither as culturally integrated as rock and roll’s mythologizers might have hoped nor as transgressively nationalist as advocates of black power might have dreamed, R&B in its most mainstream guise still offered African American culture a format where black identity, no matter how it diversified and permeated, was always a dominant concern.

Parton’s

format leap: from country to middle of the road/adult contemporary (MOR/AC).

pop musician navigating intersections of entertainment and identity with a political acuity akin to her exact contemporary, Bill Clinton. And as a representative figure in the story of how country music the genre and country music the format, two very different beasts, have rubbed each other the wrong way, if to sometimes profitable ends. The 1970s and 1980s, the decades of Parton’s greatest fluctuation, were the period in which, through formatting, country established itself as ...

Country the genre, especially so-called hard country and its patron saint Hank Williams, located its soul in honky-tonk: the music as working class, rowdy, publicly performed, and male. Women could survive in this conception, but mostly as voices from the mountains, representing roots, as epitomized by the Carter Family and Loretta Lynn.

“Dolly Parton is

the best example, male or female, of how country—the genre of working-class and rural white southerners—reinvented itself.

Too often viewed as conservative or betraying rural tradition, country became pop with a different accent,