Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music

by Eric Weisbard

It may seem a backhanded compliment to celebrate Elton John for “positioning and ‘heart share,’” the latter a marketing term for the psychographic intangibles that companies like Starbucks identify as crucial in creating the kind of customer identification that cements brand loyalty. But this is part of the interpretive challenge that the Top 40 format and Top 40 artists present. Top 40 preceded the rock and roll era, accompanied and then outlasted rock’s dominance. It needs to be understood as an enduring, if less than clear, force for a different kind of popular music upheaval. Wed to the new, its Americanization became globalization, its coded messages and protest songs with the explanatory lyric cut out came to include queer royalty, and its pop tweaks to rock, hip-hop, and other genre verities became a reliable mass-appeal format. Rock and roll, the mythicized genre that John often saw himself embodying, may have splintered. But Top 40, and the pop modernity whose entry gates it maintained, seemed destined to endure forever.