Kindle Notes & Highlights
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September 19 - September 29, 2024
Jewish entertainment gave priority to creative misappropriation.
At a time of youthful brides and mothers, many in the MOR demographic were like Alpert and Moss: older than rock and roll fans but children of postwar affluence.
In the battles between New Left and cultural-front variety, younger radicals branded the earlier style “easy listening.”
Alpert’s reception changed dramatically. He was dismissed by rock-identified critics as an “uppity brand of Muzak” and “music that simulates excitement.”
A&M’s rock rebranding, however, still needed an MOR fast becoming AC.
Labels like A&M knew each big genre had become a mainstream. While rock held sway ideologically, what triumphed commercially was a range of revamped pop centers. As A&M demonstrated, hip was a continuum, not an absolute.
Joe Cocker makes everybody else on the label just a bit more believable,”
In a time remembered for rock and identity movements, growth in record sales owed much to MOR/AC success.
what made A&M, in Denisoff’s study, “the hot company of the 1970s” had less to do with rock authenticity than mainstreaming unlikely music.
A&M’s marketing turned on courting multiple categories. Music promotion remained how Moss started, pushing stations in a region to play singles, but now a team of forty hectored nationally across formats.
Long after hip marketing campaigns faded into painful memory, it remained the achievement of labels such as A&M that music had diversified its portfolio. The record industry had transferred its “serious” designation, in part, from classical and jazz to rock. Arguably, it had done poorest not by rock purists so much as by the MOR fans who confirmed or, as with the Carpenters, created its greatest sales achievements. At a time when African Americans used music to explore black power, country fans to modernize the South, and counterculturalists to draw boundaries across age, MOR fans were
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A common view, in need of deconstructing, is that popular music at the end of the seventies became too middle of the road: grouped in formats so defined, musically and demographically, and so expensive to penetrate, that newcomers had little success.
The backlash against disco and Frampton fed off misgivings about indulgence creating economic stagnation, social unraveling, and cultural mediocrity.
Consolidating to white male guitar acts, freeform stations renamed themselves album-oriented rock (AOR).
Across multiple formats, upwardly aspiring centrist acts created a musical variety responsive to social experimentation. But accompanying this was hostility to extremes of sound and ideology.
The most controversial pop sound, disco, was much like the music of 1962: driven by MOR and Top 40 singles, a pleasure product open to international beats and created, primarily, by independent labels.
Will Straw, whose dissertation on this era is the most systematic study, makes a contrasting argument to period claims: record companies overvalued rock and “serious” music and failed to validate MOR and AC.
Record companies, Straw argues, overinvested in rock career artists at a time when AOR was relatively closed to new performers. AOR acts formed a “canon,” he notes, while MOR/AC acts were not given “contextualizing discourses wherein the coherence and continuity of particular performer careers were established.”
Billboard noted “the shift of many MOR stations to adult contemporary formats, eschewing show tunes and soft pop for playlists that are often nearly indistinguishable from the Top 40
Assumptions about pop weakness proved inaccurate in the 1980s, as centrist approaches dominated.
A&M revived in part by again pursuing adventurous rock.
The Police in particular became A&M’s leading group.
But much A&M prosperity came once more from niches outside rock.
Windham Hill
AC radio took a back seat to resurgent Top 40 (now contemporary hit radio, or CHR) in the early 1980s moment of MTV’s emergence, but grew dominant again as the decade progressed, emphasizing current songs that fit its scope.
Slotted and safe, adult pop fed on movie synergy and overpriced CD profits, not risk taking—hip-hop
Nonetheless, as corporate consolidation accelerated, the overall number of American radio formats kept increasing, fostering sonic diversity.
Technological shifts—Internet downloading, iPods, satellite radio, American Idol, YouTube, social networks, and so forth—ensured that commercial pop remained far from static. From hip-hop to boy bands, the content continued to require a balancing act between margins and mainstreams.
the cultural middle in music acted as a counterweight, defusing the ideological tendencies of rock, R&B, country music, and other coherent genres, translating subcultural products into suburban staples. It kept any one sound from drowning out all others, accruing an enormous catalogue along the way, for the economic benefit of a few but the aesthetic benefit of a great many. If the great achievement of the decentralized popular music industry was sustaining multiple and rival formats that nourished disparate publics and could stretch globally, much owed to the record man’s eclecticism and
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Adopted by American radio after television captured network programs, Top 40 played pop as a category unto itself, guaranteeing a familiar experience each time listeners tuned
Top 40, renamed contemporary hits radio (CHR) in the 1980s, was another genre-mixing format. History credits Top 40 with popularizing rock and roll.
But, such narratives continue, the approach’s commercialism came to seem corny. “Freeform” (free of format) rock took the Woodstock Generation forward. Yet Top 40 remained powerful long after portions of the baby boom deemed it déclassé.
Top 40 endured as a space for new cultural arrivals to announce themselves, resisting countercultural disparagement of blatant promotional processes.
If MOR/AC represented a bourgeois center, Top 40 brandished aspirational modernity. Chart climbing equated with social mobility.
In sum, youth- and modernity-oriented Top 40 staged identity explorations across physical (transnational), socially imposed (queer-inflected), and mass media (crossover pop) boundaries.
Beatlemania charmed adults into supporting a youthful format.
Rock fans romanticize its rhetoric of anti-commercial revolt but ignore how the genre’s style drew boundaries.
Top 40 made a comeback in the early 1970s, maintaining female listeners while exchanging middle-class young men for older, working-class, and minority groups.
As Lennon understood, what John faced and the Beatles had not was the antipathy FM rockers aimed at Top 40—the commerciality, however self-conscious and campy, of a “Crocodile Rock” was beneath them.
to appeal across demographic lines he resisted strong signifiers of genre and counterculture.
This notion of Top 40 consumption as an entryway to freedom appealed to many Americans less assertive than those in the counterculture.
In seeing his troubles as behavioral, essentially as overconsumption, John universalized them—befitting his crossover gifts. Just as gay subculture deserves a central place in accounts of transatlantic pop modernity, the backlash against homosexuals in the disco and AIDS era must be set against broader splinterings in Anglo-America’s “tradition of the new,” dwarfing earlier rock/Top 40 frictions.
Both the United Kingdom and United States experienced a conservative insurgence
the inability of liberal social democracies to maintain public legitimacy, creating a crisis of representation.53 American Top 40’s rhetoric of classlessness and democratizing consumerism came under question, as the format twice, at the beginning of...
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As the 1970s ended, that challenge took two seemingly opposite pa...
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“It was time to say goodbye to everyone’s song, to the idea that a vast nation could build its shared memory from one set of voices in the night.”
Album sales plunged between 1979 and 1983. Falling ad revenues prompted a move within Top 40, defensively renamed CHR (contemporary hit radio), toward safer adult pop sounds by white performers, with resistance to black records declared at “an all-time high” in early 1982.
If political culture had become more conservative, John could take comfort in the widening of his previously Anglo-American appeal into pop globalization.
The CHR format, now moved to FM, resurged alongside MTV, consultant Mike Joseph persuading station owners that a youth-oriented mix could attract older listeners.
The new stars of CHR—Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna—duplicated John’s reach across demos and outside rock, routinizing what his concerts had hinted at.
