The Tyranny of the Radio Hit
Music is one of the most personal experiences we can have. So why does groupthink manage to intrude on a space that's supposed to be just for you and your own sensations?
The subject of deep cuts and setlists came up during my recent interview with longtime Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman, host of the syndicated classic-rock radio show Steve Gorman Rocks! Gorman, an albums enthusiast who told me he loves practically all the songs off early records by R.E.M. and U2, describes Steve Gorman Rocks! as “a show about the classic songs I never have to hear again.”
The interview is posting soon, but for now you can read my Holler Country piece (and accompanying Substack post) on the 30th anniversary of The Black Crowes’ 1992 album The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion.
I also felt inspired to create this playlist after talking with Gorman:
I wanted to call it “I’ll have an order of classic rock — without the classics” except those songs are classics… to me. I could easily make ten more such playlists in the classic-rock domain alone: songs that actually are classics but haven’t necessarily gone down in history as such. I like to imagine a kind of alternate Richard Linklater-style universe, where any of the songs on my list could’ve been hits. But more than that, I like to imagine a world where hits occupy a far less prominent place in our relationship with music.
Could we look at singles the way we look at sidewalk samples of finger food that get you to order from the complete menu? I mean, I think the world would legitimately be a better place if the entire radio ecosystem followed the college/independent radio model where DJs just play what they like. Imagine that! You’d think I was suggesting that cats get along with dogs. How strange that it’s somehow radical to think it would be possible for all of an artist’s output (or all the songs on a record) to be weighed equally, that we could listen free of having to even consider which songs rise to the level of mass awareness.
As always, I’m not just talking about classic rock here, but something hugely pervasive that I think not only applies to all styles of music but that also points to some serious issues in the individual’s response to the will of a larger group. Hit singles — and the way people talk with such consistency about music as if there were a larger crowd in their heads judging their choices — tell us so much about the importance of shared narrative, artificially manufactured consensus, peer pressure, control, how we subtly curtail our own autonomy, and social dynamics across the board.
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All art, as the saying goes, is subjective. But you wouldn’t know it from the way people talk about it. If you take a cursory glance at the voluminous body of music commentary that’s accumulated over the decades via music journalism, blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels and radio segments — hell, even if you listen to people chatting informally about music at a social gathering — you get the overwhelming impression that humans are wired to constantly reference-check their own individual musical sensations and opinions against a vague, poorly-defined sense of universal concrete truth.
And who determines this truth? A faceless blob populated by strawpeople who stand-in for our sense of The Mass or “everybody else.” It’s this “everybody else” who issue a kind of ultimate verdict on whether art is “good” or not.
I’ve never for the life of me understood this, and I’m completely baffled as to why it still holds so much power, especially now that terrestrial radio isn’t the dominant driver of culture. And, while it’s true that the music industry started out as a singles medium, the majority of artists have focused primarily on making full-length albums for over half a century at this point. Even today, with physical media at the brink of extinction, streaming services still place a heavy emphasis on albums.
Spotify, for example, still orients much of its interface around the album. Sure, the five most-streamed songs by a given artist come up at the top of that artist’s page, but Spotify’s display guides you from there to the the artist’s catalog of full-lengths. Likewise, though listening to music on YouTube is by definition a one-song-at-a-time experience, YouTube is structured so that one can listen to entire-album playlists — and lots of labels and artists have made it a point to feature them on their channels.
All of this tells me that albums are still a popular format. If they weren’t, massive platforms like Spotify and YouTube would’ve ditched them by now. In fact, the album is still arguably the default format, even at a time when it doesn’t even necessarily make sense that that would be the case.
Which brings me back to my point: If albums are still made and marketed in the first place, then both artists and the music industry/media machinery around them still expect that a sizable-enough chunk of the audience is going to sit down with an album and at least try to work their way through it. Call me crazy, but I always assumed that when listeners listened to albums, their own responses would determine which songs were their favorites.
Singles, I’d always thought, are supposed to function kind of like butterfly nets — their whole purpose is to entice you and whet your appetite so that you want to check out the entire album. That makes perfect sense, and is still more or less as true today as it was during the height of radio and MTV. And speaking of Steve Gorman and 1992, two singles from that year perfectly served their intended purpose for me: “Remedy” by The Black Crowes and Faith No More’s “Midlife Crisis.” Both songs were first offerings from bands following-up blockbuster albums that I happened to strongly dislike.
Both songs hooked me like a fish and got me to buy the follow-up albums, both of which I adore to this day. Neither of those songs — and so many others I could name off the top of my head — have ever lost an ounce of their appeal for me on account of them being overplayed. So bravo to radio, MTV and to the record labels for picking those songs out as singles. I say that without an ounce of sarcasm. But, as wonderful as it might be for me to hear them pop up at random, they work especially well for me within the flow of the albums they’re on.
Songs that become hits (or, today, go viral) were never supposed to overshadow the rest of the songs on the album. They were never meant — certainly not by the artists themselves — to be etched into the stone edifice of public memory as the most “important” or even the “best” songs those artists ever made. And yet, strangely, that’s exactly how those songs come to be viewed. It’s as if there’s a passive assumption that “the people have spoken” and voted on those particular tunes, even though that’s not how it actually works.
It’s not like albums are released first, allowing the public to cast votes for their favorite tracks and then radio tallies those votes. And even if that were the case, it still shouldn’t sway either the listener or the artist as far as what their own personal favorites are. And yet, if you go see any artist with a sizable enough catalog in concert, you can predict a good half of what their setlist is going to be because those artists feel like they’re obliged to play those particular songs.
I get it — I mean the fact is, those are the songs that are most widely heard. I understand that business (and even basic manners) dictate that the artist should throw some bones to people who show up at the venue wanting to hear the songs they know. But there’s a difference between throwing bones and orienting your entire existence as a musician around the songs that just happened to take off on radio or elsewhere.
I’m not even averse to the idea that certain works of art are kind of built for mass appeal in a way that’s both undeniable and wonderful. I think certain albums over the years have had that quality in a way that doesn’t detract from their substance at all. Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue comes to mind, as do a bunch of others. But what about the fans out there who prefer other titles? I’m talking about the Miles Davis fan who prefers In A Silent Way, or the Fleetwood Mac fan who prefers Tusk, etc. Those fans’ responses to the music exist — and they don’t exist any less simply because more people lean toward other work by those artists.
This, to me, should be so self-evident that it shouldn’t even warrant having to be said at all. Individual preference should be the fundamental law of art like gravity is a fundamental law of physics. Our understanding that art means something different to every individual should come as automatically as breathing, without anyone having to point it out or campaign for it. And yet we’ve built an entire armature around music that’s designed to steer the individual into an ever-present awareness of where “everyone else” stands.
So much of everything that’s ever been written or broadcast about music perpetuates this idea that there’s some sort of ordinance, a stone tablet we can consult to find concrete truth. Why is this necessary in the realm of art? There’s a real scent of peer pressure in all of this that I find profoundly disturbing — as if one is expected to experience one of the most private, personal, intimate and internal sensations we can experience as human beings (I mean, music) while feeling like there’s some sort of omniscient eye peering over our shoulder.
There’s an expectation that the individual should somehow submit — The People Have Spoken, The Will Of The Mass Hath Been Decided: who the fuck are you to have your own experience between your own ears? Heh?! And it’s not like this submission is exactly forced on us. In my experience, people are all too willing to defer to a poorly-defined sense of mass consensus that, aside from concrete sales figures and radio play, doesn’t actually exist. But it’s as if music fans have been conditioned to approach music as if there were an army of strawpeople in their heads.
How many times have you been talking to someone and they qualify it when they tell you that they like some band — as if they’ve been electro-shocked into being embarrassed about it, so it’s become reflexive kind of apologize. They assume that you’re judging them as a proxy for this imaginary group in their head. How strange to hear adults talk this way, so uncertain and tentative and browbeaten when it comes to a sensation that as involuntary as liking spinach or not. Whenever this happens, I often ask the person: “Who is it who’s judging you?” And then I’ll say something like, “I mean, there’s no one actually here who’s criticizing what you like. There’s no table of cool kids nearby. There’s no one like that in your life.”
My fellow music scribes all too often put their energy into being the ones who determine what the mass consensus is. And yet they also seem to live in a world where they’re constantly deferring to that consensus, as if they’re beholden to the same judgmental, peer-pressuring force that they’d impose on their audience. So much of the time, they write and offer commentary as if they’re searching for validation for their opinion from an omniscient third-party observer who issues decrees on Ultimate Truth about the value of music.
This boggles my mind to no end. And you can hear it personified most vividly in this 2016 episode of music writer Steven Hyden’s radio show Celebration Rock that features a guest appearance by the popular culture critic Chuck Klosterman. (Hyden happens to be the co-author of Steve Gorman’s autobiography Hard to Handle: The Life and Death of the Black Crowes—A Memoir, a book I enjoyed immensely btw.) “It is absolutely clear,” declares Klosterman, “that musically, Pinkerton is the apex of Weezer’s achievements.” I’m not sure why people feel emboldened to make such hard and fast statements, as if they had the confidence of irrefutable truth behind them. More importantly, I’m not sure why anyone has any interest in making statements like that.
If you want some kind of empirical truth, here’s one that I’m quite confident can be supported by both hard numbers and neuroscience: Different people respond to music differently. On that premise, then, we can’t begin to speak about music as if it elicits the a uniform response from everyone’s brain. And even if we could measure/prove that there’s something inherently universal about the human brain’s response to, say, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or Pearl Jam’s Ten, there would still be enough deviation from the average that statements like Klosterman’s — indeed, statements made in just about everything ever written about music — fall flat. They only apply to the people who feel the same way.
I’m not sure why we engage in this preposterous charade — and why we do it so aggressively, as if our own sensations with music would be like the proverbial tree in the forest if there was no one else to corroborate them. This is an unnecessary prison sentence — a cognitive glitch, an extra layer of self-doubt almost like a tic or an OCD — to impose on one of the most wonderful things that life has to offer.
I’ve been rather militant in my stance on this since the age of 12, when I first encountered the glory that was the Auto-Reverse Walkman. I’ve always had an inherent aversion to pack-minded conformity — although, like all human beings, it would be delusional of me to claim that I’m impervious to pressure from other people, or that I don’t need the approval of others just as badly as everyone else who’s ever lived. I’m just blessed, I guess, with a sense of immediate discomfort when I feel like I’m being bent in a way that feels unnatural.
In 2021, though, I had an experience that made me question my position. I was at a local bar and two of my dear friends, a married couple named Suzi Willpower and Don Anonymous (who perform under the name Anonymous Willpower), played one of their first shows after covid restrictions had started to relax a bit. Towards the end, they played a two-fer of covers: “Lawyers, Guns and Money” by Warren Zevon and Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets.” I’m not even especially attached to the Zevon tune, but being in a room full of people and just knowing that we all had the song in common was really moving.
When they broke into “Benny and the Jets,” I was moved to tears as the whole room started to sing along. I mean, I was nicely liquored up, and we’re talking about my first time out after months of being isolated from people. It could’ve also been partly due to the fact that I saw the Beastie Boys play Benny and the Jets with Biz Markie on vocals back in ‘98. Markie’s rendition was funny — it was played for laughs — but it was also quite touching. Not to mention the fact that I be there are at least 15-20 other Elton John songs I’d like just as much.
Regardless, I suddenly saw the value of a shared body of songs. I know that, for jazz musicians, the idea of a “songbook” is pretty foundational to their view on music. Then again, jazz musicians take a ton of liberties with popular songs. Even in the very idea of a jazz group doing an instrumental version of a pop tune, there’s an implication that the song is going to be stretched and altered at the genetic level. So it’s not like jazz groups are playing to people’s populist instincts.
I think there’s a balance that can be struck here. I mentioned Richard Linklater earlier. His 1993 film Dazed and Confused plays from start to finish like a mix tape, with practically all of the action underscored by canonical ‘70s hits. The film opens to the familiar bass-guitar strains of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” and it closes as Foghat’s “Slow Ride” swooshes its way into the scene. We can only imagine how magnificent and warm those songs must’ve sounded coming over the airwaves in the 1970s. Hell, they still sound amazing on the airwaves — or in a bar or, really, any public space. So there’s certainly an argument to be made that, much like an advertising jingle for a product, there’s an artform to writing and constructing a song so that it lives forever on the radio.
Both scenes give me goosebumps. I think they’re both wonderful examples of how song and film can work together to create a transcendent experience that goes beyond the effect that either would have on their own. On the other hand, Martin Scorcese’s placement of The Rolling Stones’ (relative) deep cut “Monkey Man” in 1991’s GoodFellas moves me just as much — and serves as the perfect reminder that you can dig a little deeper to make a profound impression on your audience. The soundtracks, for example, to the 1981 animated film Heavy Metal and ‘90s films like Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary didn’t focus so much on iconic songs. A Life Less Ordinary mostly consists of castaway b-sides that, in my opinion, work beautifully within the mood and tone of the film.
Not incidentally, the Sammy Hagar song (titled “Heavy Metal”) that kicks off the soundtrack is the song that, on Christmas morning 1982, instantly made me realize that my love of power chords was somehow in my blood. Years later, I would hear a recovering alcoholic describe his response to his first taste of beer as “something that had always been in me that I just didn’t know was there.” This was like that — and the song is nothing close to hit.
Likewise, talk to any Van Halen fan about the endless treasures that await the intrepid listener willing to go off the beaten path and explore the non-commercial underbelly of albums like Women and Children First and Fair Warning. In fact, talk to a fan of any artist and you can get the same type of accounting of songs that mean the world… to them. Songs that these fans have lived by, that they would tell you in a heartbeat they prefer over the hits.
In that domain, where the rubber meets the road with music, I don’t think the taste of the masses has any place — whether it’s arbitrary, or whether we can, in fact, determine that popular songs have something essential about them that causes them to appeal to a broad range of people. It works in the other direction too: as I mentioned, there are many, many iconic songs I can think of that haven’t lost any of their appeal for me no matter how overplayed they get. And that, alas, is the perfect inspiration for another playlist...
Stay tuned!
<3 SRK