Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music

by Eric Weisbard

Rock radio had become yuppie obsessed.

In truth, as Gerry Boehme, vice president of radio research for Katz, finally pointed out in 1987, “If you look at the figures on how many yuppies there actually are, compared to the amount of attention everybody spends trying to get them, it seems like a case of overkill.”

classic rock. Consultant Fred Jacobs’s innovation, overtly aimed at an older demographic now viable as some boomers approached forty, took hold by 1986 and proved enduring: nearly five hundred such stations broadcast today.

Heavy metal was not the only contemporary rock shut down.

“The funnel for new music is being squeezed tighter and tighter every day.”

WMMS fell apart under the strain of its identity conflicts by the late 1980s.

As the 1980s ended, WMMS again reported as an AOR targeting 18 to 34.

“Stations are focusing on smaller audience segments and finding success through that, and WMMS really needed to pick a niche and serve it.”

WMMS’s retrenchment was duplicated throughout AOR.

AOR offered a “diversity” of sound that allegorically affirmed rock’s conquest, eighties AOR built what scope it still possessed on filtering the present to attest the primacy of rock’s golden

heartland seventies rock more than punk or new wave.

heavy metal, the decade’s most popular rock genre but too “earthdog” for AOR.

The format that led 1970s radio limped, however profitably, through the 1980s, unsure which sound should govern the others.

Grunge, as it broke big, became hugely attractive to AOR: culturally important and distinct

the format was playing more new music than it had in years.

The first onset of corporate consolidation also helped embolden rock radio. Local marketing agreements (LMAs) allowed two stations, a “duopoly,” to market together to advertisers, offering combined demographic coverage.

Flipping to alternative was now compelling.

With Gorman returning as program director, WMMS flipped to alternative in 1994, using the Star Trek slogan “WMMS: The Next Generation”

Class bias permeated the shift to alternative.

Even in a period of niche formats, could elites from the less attractive and demographically smaller 18–34 set be enough?

Howard Stern, whose syndicated morning show appealed to exactly the white male demographic, blurred between working-class and collegiate, that AOR had pioneered.

hot AC, aimed at women just older than CHR, kept fervency:

Hot AC flourished, active ate up new rock, and radio lost faith in alternative.

WMMS fired Gorman and ended three years of alternative,

Looking at the grunge and alternative era from radio’s perspective, a story about indie versus major labels, creativity versus commerce, becomes something else: a case study in the construction not of art but of audiences for that

alternative ultimately returned to what it had been before Nirvana: a minor format. It persists alongside active rock, mainstream rock, triple A, and hot AC as a feeder channel of certain kinds of sounds and attitudes, though arguably exceeded by noncommercial music radio channels; synchs in the soundtracks for television, movies, and ads; or editorial coverage on NPR.

most of the biggest remaining rock stations are classic rock stations—now they often include a chunk of 1990s memories.

Rock failed not because Kurt Cobain was on a major label but because programmers resisted a vision like KROQ’s in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s or WMMS’s in the 1970s and 1980s, fusing not only rock and Top 40 sensibilities but a young demographic across class lines. That’s what, ultimately, was needed to sell like 18–34 spirit.

Clear Channel

it was only under their corporate consolidation that a secure answer was found to the “AOR, blue collar, dirtbag” stereotype that had for so long hampered sales.

For more than forty years, through shrewd programmers and bad ones, WMMS and the 18–34 male demographic it has principally served have illustrated the frustrating intersectionalities of the cultural world that radio formatting left us with. Was the best version of WMMS the freeform station that Billy Bass created, with its room for female, African American, and gay DJs and near-complete programming freedom? You can believe so, but then you are endorsing self-conscious hipster elitism. What about the WMMS of “Born to Run” and Murray Saul’s Get Downs? That station reconciled collegiate rockers and blue-collar ones within a kick-ass mix. Yet it also marginalized music by blacks and women. The WMMS of Michael Jackson and new wave alongside “Dancing in the Dark” was the highest-rated Buzzard ever. So why, as the station reached out to women, did so many people feel betrayed? Were they sexist, racist, and rockist? Or were these “earthdogs” right to notice that WMMS’s fortunes no longer hinged upon a rallying cry of sheeeeeaaauught? Was Howard Stern, in this context, a plague or a deliverance? Did reconstituting radio into a small number of mega-chains end the format altogether? Or did it mark the moment, finally, when advertisers learned to make an “active rock” approach profitable?

formats, for all their shifts and subdivisions, have proven enduring institutions: the plate tectonics of sonic capitalism.

But to focus on commodification alone ignores an issue this book has turned on—the rockist rejection of established format categories accrued resale value because its putative anti-materialism asserted privilege. Musicians who lacked hit records and blamed tight radio playlists earned substantial licensing revenues when advertisers paid for their aura of exclusivity:

Radio was archaic; even radio companies no longer called themselves that. But formatting lived on.

What had been a single R&B format, aimed at many kinds of black listeners, now broke into youth and adult subcategories, anchored by hip-hop and R&B sounds and prominent morning hosts.

Increasingly, from Usher and the Black Eyed Peas to Clarkson and Katy Perry, the rhythmic underpinning of Top 40 shifted to a global dance beat reminiscent of disco, leaving R&B less able to launch crossover hits.

As country questioned its image once more, women continued to personify the temptation to cross into middle-class pop, particularly adult contemporary (AC) pop.

Men flirting with rock were making acceptable genre moves; women flirting with pop continued to make the country format nervous.

Rock radio had narrowcast itself into a frustrated howl.

The precarity of rock as a format, especially stations that played new releases,

As had long been the case, much perfectly commercial music eluded the format, due to the reluctance of musicians and listeners to accept rock as a diverse pop category.

outside of the smaller adult album alternative (triple A) format, rock radio had abandoned singer-songwriters.

such efforts were equally biased, against the bulk of rock radio listeners.

Fighting for a smaller piece of pie, instead of competing in the pop universe, diminished rock. It was forbidding to make pop-friendly music with rock-friendly attitude.

“Their credibility as a rock band comes into question as soon as the top 40 station plays the record.

Female rockers like Avril Lavigne and Pink were left to court hot AC.

If rock anger found multiple avenues, other bands and listeners pursued a different politics—removal from major record labels and distaste for radio hits of any kind.

This rock adhered to the growing category of the indie hipster,

indie acts exiled from mainstream rock radio were now preferred by ad buyers proud of their edgy taste.

Much as had happened with country music, regional Mexican was viewed as the antithesis of bigger but ephemeral sounds.