Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music

by Eric Weisbard

By 1989, the rising popularity of hip-hop and hard rock, favored by young listeners but disparaged by the adults that sponsors craved, further pressured the original hits format, prompting Radio & Records to ask, was CHR “Losing Its Niche?” A station like Z100, which claimed that the 75 percent of its listeners over the age of eighteen accounted for 90 percent of ad revenue, faced questions of whether to play all hits or just a slanted fraction. Race factored heavily into the answer programmers came up with, as the new category of “rhythmic CHR”—aimed at both black and, increasingly, Latino urban listeners, on stations such as LA’s Power 106, vied with newly dubbed “mainstream CHR” stations.

To Z100, a mainstream CHR that programmer Steven Kingston called “the music 2.4 million white suburban females are passionate about,” John remained a “core artist.” At rival “ethnic” Hot 97, where GM Judy Ellis said, “We play hit music that sells, and I’m proud of our Hispanic audience,” he was invisible. “All-things-to-all-people CHR is over in major markets,” Radio & Records concluded.

Top 40’s place as an Ellis Island into pop modernity—associated with Americanization, consumerism, and youth experimentation—had made rebellion mainstream. Yet many in the 1980s lost confidence about such processes. Growing income disparities froze standards of living for industrial workers. On US radio, former DJs Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and Don Imus were now “shock jocks” playing to audience alienation. Gil Troy describes a resultant “culture of confusion, a culture of moral crusading and vulgar displays.”

The Elton John who emerged from rehab in the 1990s embraced his position as rock royalty, publicly asserting sexuality and status in place of private explorations and coded pageantry. Aligned with an international fashion designer and media-savvy princess, his new role illustrated how culture, politics, and capitalism had converged to produce a celebrity immune to both counterculture and backlash.

Three subthemes have run throughout this chapter: pop modernity as it extended from Americanization to globalization; the evolving place of gay identity within that youth-identified realm; and the conflict between a rock notion of authenticity and its Top 40 inverse of theatricality and mediation.

And an “idealized entry into normalcy” is at the heart of Top 40 assimilation.

It was easier to “live off cume,” meaning large numbers of listeners rather than a qualitatively differentiated niche, when part of a chain whose sales managers could offer a balance of different demographics.

A new wave of boy bands (Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync), pop princesses (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera), crossover R&B (Usher), and power balladeers (Celine Dion) pushed Top 40 into the next century.

“Say what you will about consolidation,” another story concluded, “but it has been great for CHRs by allowing them to finally focus on their specific audience, primarily the 18–34 demo, because chances are their sister station is covering 25–54.”78 Top 40 stations, despite subdivisions, remained the most likely to target racially mixed and working-class listeners and challenge niche capitalism with novel inclusiveness.

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.

album-oriented rock (AOR), the most successful new radio format of the 1970s. In the process, rock, a refashioning of 1950s rock and roll for the late 1960s counterculture, took on a new identity: blue collar as much as collegiate.

WMMS presents this transformation, and its ambiguities, in a highly influential microcosm. Late 1960s rock had refused Top 40 radio formats, with underground stations proclaiming themselves “freeform.” The anti-commercial insistence concealed far less progressive tendencies, including a severing of rock from contemporary black-music making and female audiences. Still, the most complicated dynamic involved the class position of the young white men who anchored the format that did emerge. AOR’s insistent populism fantasized the music as both maverick and massive—amplified rebellion. But with advertisers to please, and working-class income declining, a format built on the loyalty of fans in black T-shirts at arena shows struggled with the implications of a new media fetish: the yuppie.

AOR, a format, extended countercultural rock’s reach but unmade many of its ambitions.

Rhythm and blues (R&B) as a commercial format absorbed soul, funk, and hip-hop to ensure black pop’s “changing same.” Country, an industry of southern modernization, took pride in its status as a consumer mainstream, keeping the format from subdividing. In rock, by contrast, structured formats were an insult to the countercultural music’s founding principles.

AOR the format stifled rock the genre, shunning vital newer artists out of anxiety over the taste and clout of its public.

“It was rock, it wasn’t rock ’n’ roll.

underground radio had been created as the antithesis of the Top 40 approach that popularized rock and roll and spread into R&B, country, and middle of the road (MOR) varieties.

We should resist this romanticization. Rock radio was commercial from the beginning, only shifting in tone as the audience expanded from a version of class to a version of mass.

Advertisers sought in underground radio, as Michael Keith’s history captures, this boutique quality: rock musically connected components of the new buzzword “lifestyle” to epitomize a segmented consumerism beyond simple demographics.

The revolution was over, and rock radio had barely begun. The issue wasn’t selling out but who was buying in.

After Malrite Communications bought WMMS in 1973, Bass resigned, and a new program director, John Gorman, placed an exaggerated blue-collar populism ahead of arty progressivism.

WMMS had to break new music outside the elites; it had to deploy Top 40 devices, from DJ banter to station IDs, but with a sardonic and knowing belligerence. There would be room for “peripheral styles,” from reggae to Abba, so long as there was no question about the station’s unifying commitment to a white, guitar-driven, rock attitude. The “hotly produced,” hyperbolically maintained sound was the thread now, where previously, as Sanders has said, countercultural allegiances connected much more varied programming.

the need for AOR stations to offer a “total environment” where “attitude is the key,”

WMMS competitor emerged in 1975. WWWM, or M105, played from a constrained list of arena-rock anthems and fit a broader pattern:

stations that had professionalized freeform now found themselves pushed by stations that went further,

Gorman competed with the tightened playlists of Superstars rock by making the fabled station itself, and its nuclear fan base, the superstar to identity with—the by now ubiquitous Buzzard, visible on T-shirts, in ads, and on hundreds of thousands of printed bumper stickers.

“In a market with no competition, an AOR station can afford to be progressive. In a competitive market you have to be more familiar, or you lose your entire upper demographic.

WMMS was rare in AOR for stressing working-class affiliations.

Virtually every AOR behemoth concealed a sleek Top 40 song within. As Radio & Records pointed out, 70 percent were ultimately singles, edited down after the longer version proved itself on rock radio.

The artist who cemented the ritual, and WMMS and AOR’s lifestyle claims, was Bruce Springsteen.

for rock radio Springsteen was

the distillation of a collective sensibility.

The sound of WMMS in 1972 was David Bowie, and in 1978 Bruce Springsteen. Could the sound of WMMS by 1984 be Michael Jackson? The story of WMMS and AOR in the decade following its triumphant first ten years reflected many such unlikely choices, as the unities sustaining AOR broke down. Some in rock radio experimented with new wave and Top 40, others classic rock; all felt pressure to reach older and more affluent listeners.

buyers, all agreed, preferred well-to-do 25- to 54-year-old listeners, making older listeners to AC a cash cow for station owners but of less use to labels.

as boomers aged and lucrative AC-type ads became winnable, there was pressure to be “classic rock”: AOR for older men. Blue-collar rock populism faced potent competing format/audience paradigms in the 1980s, as its original audience aged, replaced by a shrinking post-boomer demographic.

WMMS and AOR’s high-water moment had come at a low point for working-class politics and cultural status.

Lee Abrams, the most influential programmer in AOR, instilled a “modal” rock radio with no room for acoustic types or other non-rock genre luxuries, writing later, “Never again was Carly Simon, James Taylor, or Carol King heard on AOR. It was now Heart, Journey, Foreigner, and Ted Nugent.

Instead of a tightly formatted AOR station like M105, the main competitor was now WGCL, a CHR, which meant repositioning WMMS as less traditionally AOR, not more so.

For Gorman, playing black music meant WMMS could compete with hits on WGCL.

If earlier Gorman tightened playlists in response to “the right,” superstars AOR, he would now loosen format restrictions. He also engaged artier, less guitar-driven rock,

“The ‘heavy metal’ fringe is actively writing letters, accusing WMMS of ‘selling out’ to Blacks and ‘New Wavers.’ We expected this response.”

Working-class male listeners were less valuable.

“AOR is no longer a salable format.

The big-buck ad agencies are going to A/C and CHR.”

The change to a much more hard rock/modal approach did provide short term gains in terms of 12+ numbers, but in the long run, it appears to have done major damage to our overall regard on a business level.

rock fans didn’t like each other’s record collections.

the issue “wasn’t conservative playlists. It was fragmenting audiences.” The true culprit was “white males mostly, under 25, who don’t want a broad spectrum of music, who still want a radio format that plays Quiet Riot and Black Sabbath.”

The shift from AOR to CHR was an undeniable ratings success, WMMS winning a 14.5 share by 1986, but many in Cleveland felt betrayed.

The new WMMS confused listeners, advertisers, and even some on staff.

Was it politically progressive, given rock’s legacy of racism and sexism, or regressive, given the anti-working-class sales goals, for WMMS to play Michael Jackson? The results could not be untangled.