Classic rock radio finally gets older
For all its predictability, though, the classic rock formula has recently started to age a bit along with its fan base.
For all the ways my life has changed over the decades, there's something that's been oddly constant. Even as tastes change and styles come and go, the chances of turning on my radio and hearing the same handful of classic rock hits I would have heard in, say, 1993 has remained almost exactly the same.
The appetite for Steve Miller Band and Heart remains just as strong as it was 30 years ago.
What can explain this? It's true people get stuck in their ways, and tastes are solidified in a short period of young adulthood. By of all the music released in the past halfcentury, why the continued provenance of this one subset? How does Blue Oyster Cult survive while so many others fall by the wayside?
It's fun to mock classic rock radio, but there's something comforting in the format. There are few surprises. You'll rarely hear something you don't know. Give it enough time and Bob Seger will make an appearance. There's something stress-relieving about that.
For all its predictability, though, the classic rock formula has recently started to age a bit along with its fan base. The '80s are very much are part of the mix these days, with some '90s and even 2000s songs. Somewhere in the recent past classic rock absorbed the very '80s hair metal subgenre as part of its oeuvre. It started with “Livin' on a Prayer,” but that was just an entrée for a wider array of new additions to what classic rock radio deems acceptable.
It's come at the expense, as it must, of some of the older hits. Everyone's getting on in years, and people who remember the '60s are apparently less likely to listen to the radio in 2023. The result has been a gradual evolution in the most staid of radio formats, with the tradeoff being less Rolling Stones and more Poison. Someone thought that was a good idea.
As classic rock has slowly moved ahead through the decades, it sometimes comes head to head with its wouldbe competitor, the modern rock format. Modern rock is a purely aspirational label, as the genre peaked about the time I was in high school. Rock simply doesn't move the pop culture needle anymore, which doesn't mean there aren't still bands making new music, just that very few of them are recognizable enough to be played on the radio.
Occasionally you get a rock-genre transposition. I'll hear a modern-rock station playing something from the '90s grunge era, and then a few minutes later the classic rock station will play something from the 2000s, such as Green Day or the White Stripes.
How can this be? Is modern rock older than classic rock? Do meaningless subgenres suddenly have no meaning? The '90s is the battleground, as both formats have now staked a claim to music of that era. Soon it will be one big rock mishmash.
Most of the rest of the non-rock dial is taken up with pop stations, which are fine but apparently designed for people who would burst into flames if they didn't hear Ed Sheeran or The Weeknd every 10 minutes. There's a lot of repetition, but they're only serving the customer.
Pop music has gone through its own strange iterations over the years, all of which could be heard as it played out on the radio. For instance, my formative years in the 1990s featured a peak of the Swedish influence on American music, which meant big things for lyrical content. Mostly it meant nonsense.
As detailed by the invaluable podcast Hit Parade, the Scandinavians responsible for so many pop lyrics in that era only sort of spoke English. They didn't really get idioms. They'd write songs based on what the words sounded like, so you'd end up with stadiums full of people singing “I never wanna hear you say / I want it that way.”
What way? It's never specified. They're just words.
No one's asking for depth in the boy-band lyrics, but coherence doesn't seem a high bar.
This could have darker implications. One of the biggest hits of the era had a high school-aged girl asking someone to, in effect, contact her in the future by using a variation of the term “Hit me up.” But that's not what the lyrics said. Instead, she says, “Hit me, baby,” which isn't really something you want young people to mindlessly sing along to, so much so that the title of the song had to mysteriously include ellipses to make it seem inoffensive.
My favorite example is the Swedish pop group Ace of Base, which crossed over to the English-speaking charts with a woman singing that she is in search of a new partner, someone who might, the lyricist was no doubt thinking, refer to her as “baby.” This came through in practice as the woman singing that she wants “another baby,” and listeners could be forgiven for thinking the song was about procreation.
Anyway, it was a confusing time.
With so much available on satellite and streaming services, what we hear on free radio is somewhat moot. If someone wants to hear Bad Company, they don't need to wait for a radio station to play it. (Though, really, give it a few minutes on your classic rock station; it's coming.)
But there's something unique about what the radio offers, even if all the playlists come from the same algorithm. Not knowing exactly what's coming next still has some value. Even if it means more Journey than you'd like.