Top 40 Radio

When I was a kid in the early and mid 70s, we would listen to Top 40 radio, usually WABC when we drove around in the car. It was great. Not every song would be great, and some were really terrible. (Billy, Don't Be a Hero; My Name is Michael, I've Got a Nickel are two songs painfully branded into my brain, a trauma I will never forget.) But Top 40 Radio, as a radio format was great. Basically, any song that reached the Top 40 could be played. So you'd get rock, country, soul, pop, r and b, all on the same station. You'd hear Eric Clapton, the Osmonds, and Helen Reddy on the same station, maybe in the same set. Melanie's Brand New Key would never be played anywhere but Top 40, and it's a great song. Novelty pieces like Mr. Jaws were a staple of Top 40 as well.

Sure, there were restrictions--songs were singles, and generally under 4 minutes. But unlike the abominable format "Album Oriented Rock" or AOR, you didn't have to be white to get airplay. And the decline in the importance of rock music as part of youth culture can be traced to the decline of Top 40. The point of AOR seemed to be to erase African Americans from the history of rock and and roll. The end of Top 40, sometime in the late seventies as it was overrun by disco and cheesy pop.

The FM answer to Top 40 wasn't AOR or even worse, the Classic Rock format--those formats were more like easy listening format in that they assured their listeners they would hear the same songs over and over again. No, the FM response to Top 40 was free-form, a format where DJs selected the records. In the late 60s and early 70s, that's where you'd hear Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, Tito Puente, and maybe even Glenn Gould. The format could be a bit demanding on listeners--you had to be ready to embrace the unfamiliar, and you had to trust the DJ.

For a brief while, MTV in the early 80s was sort of like Top 40. Thomas Dolby and Michael Jackson along with Bon Jovi. MTV played new wave acts who weren't played much at all on the radio. But the demographic for MTV was too narrow to really have the same kind of impact.

It might seem odd to the average hipster to equate Top 40 and free from radio, but they share the idea that music is not about genre. It's about good music. The thing the hipster misses is the artfulness of a well crafted pop song. The slicing and dicing of music into razor thin genres (emocore?) means you're going to miss a lot of great music unless you really make a major effort to seek it out.