Does an 80s rap song belong on an 80s/90s Classic Hits station? I heard "Bust a Move" by Young MC on an 80s/90s Classic Hits station. Granted this was during a specialty syndicated show they air (Retro Mix with Joe Vinyl and Christian Wheel) it still seemed odd to hear a rap song on a Classic Hits radio station.
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80s rap song on an 80s/90s Classic Hits station?
- Thread starter MarcB
- Start date
I can see rap becoming part of classic hits on stations that have eliminated all of the '70s and much of the first half of the '80s, focusing primarily on 1987-99, when rap went mainstream and became a big part of many CHR playlists. But the listeners who love the sounds of MTV's heyday are still in the Sacred Sales Demo, so I don't see many stations making that shift for another few years.
Certainly Run-DMC's version of "Walk This Way" deserves attention on a classic hits station. The video was in heavy airplay on MTV when it was released in 1986, and the song really was instrumental in attracting young white fans to rap, and really changed the music scene in the early 90s as much as Motown did in the late 60s. This version also revives a song that might be too old or too rock to play in this format. But the rap duet really fits with this audience.
Yes.
Classic Hits, at its inception, seemed to mean those songs which were popular following the traditional Oldies period. If it is to mean just the most popular songs moving forward in time then not only rap but Adele and perhaps Kenny G should also be considered. Oldies was a genre and a time period so a song from the 90's would never become an Oldie no matter how many years pass. Classic Hits OTOH is only a time period - one that continually drops older songs and picks up newer ones. Elvis would never be played on a real CH station. If CH is to become a genre then it deserves a more descriptive title.
Do people who listen to these '80s-'90s classic hits stations even know the format by that name? Throwbacks, maybe? Old school? Or maybe oldies, just as we boomers do for '50s/'60s/pre-disco '70s stations?
Our Classic Hits station is called that.
But what about stations that play the songs but don't use the branding. Hartford's WHCN goes '70s through '90s (holding on to some late '60s, primarily Beatles) but identifies as "The River." The median year seems to be 1985. I have a co-worker, also a 60-something, who listens to it and calls it an oldies station.
A song from the '90s will be an oldie if that's what people call it. It will be a classic hit if that's what people call it. It will be a throwback if that's what people call it.
Oldies wasn't a musical genre unto itself--it encompassed many genres, and genre-bending songs, from surf to soul, and pretty much everything in between, so to speak. It's a time period, just like classic hits.
Absolutely. If I knew in 1966 that what I was listening to on the local top 40 station was something called "oldies," I'd quickly find some music that other people my age (11) must have been listening to!
What would you call any Frank Sinatra hit? If you said Oldie you are mistaken. Virtually everyone I know, in and out of the business, would call Frankie's stuff "Standards" because in addition to the time period of most of his hits they also reflected a specific style.
My definition of an Oldie is a pop song that hit the charts beginning in the mid-50's and ending in the mid-80's. There are many styles included in that 30-year period but they are also a reflection of their time (kind of similar to Standards which reflect the years surrounding WWII).
We agree that Oldies encompassed a number of sub-genres but I would disagree that same measurement applies to CH. CH seems to be whatever anyone wants it to be which means it has multiple definitions.......or none at all.
There was no Oldies definition in the 60's. It was just called pop or RnR or T-40.
Many stations were playing oldies in the mid '80s. At that time, The Power of Love or Money for Nothing were pop hits. So oldies is subjective--they didn't become oldies until far later. And even then, people will object, some strenuously, that neither of those songs (to cite just two mid-decade examples) belong alongside Elvis, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, et al. By the time many of those mid '80s gems were of the same age the songs labeled as oldies were in 1985, classic hits had spring up as a new name for the same basic concept--songs of a certain age, figuratively speaking. Whether Gen X was just overly sensitive about the oldies label is a fun conversation, but its fundamentally the same--the songs that largely defined the youth of Boomers (more or less) get lumped into the oldies bin, those that defined the youth of Gen X (also more or less) are lumped into the classic hits bin. Yes, either can be what a station wants it to be--heavy on the rock, heavy on the bubblegum pop, heavy on the R&B...but that's been true for some time in a cross-section of genres.
As to what I would call a Sinatra hit? No, I wouldn't call it an oldie the way it's broadly defined. Just as "standards" gave way to a new generation of older songs, oldies, oldies are giving (or have given) way to classic hits. I don't know how far that definition will ultimately stretch. We'll see in time.
As to what I would call a Sinatra hit? No, I wouldn't call it an oldie the way it's broadly defined. Just as "standards" gave way to a new generation of older songs, oldies, oldies are giving (or have given) way to classic hits. I don't know how far that definition will ultimately stretch. We'll see in time.
Sure there was. Oldies were all those songs from the '50s and very early '60s that top 40 stations would drag out of storage for their "Million Dollar Weekends" or whatever your local station's tag for it was. (Million Dollar Weekend was on WRKO Boston -- and, I assume, the rest of the RKO group.)
And the term existed even before 1966. Remember Little Caesar and the Romans' "Those Oldies But Goodies" from 1961. Those old songs that reminded them of past girlfriends weren't big band 78s from the '30s and '40s but, rather, hits of four or five years ago, but still, they were oldies. And to an 11-year-old (or even a teenager) wanting to hear "Summer in the City" or "Reach Out I'll Be There" in the summer of '66, those songs were an instant station-switcher!
I knew someone would pull out "Oldies but Goodies" but with that single exception I do not recall hearing the term Oldies used to describe a music genre until at least the late 70's (probably following the huge Disco backlash on pop music stations). I don't think KOOL-FM, the pre-eminent oldies outlet in Phoenix used the term in it's advertising until into the 80's. Someone more familiar might know when they started using Oldies as a brand.
Art Laboe started using the "Oldies but Goodies" for both his record label and radio and stage shows in the earliest years of the 60's. I recall when what was the first or very one of the first "oldies" stations hit the air... WMOD in Washington, DC... in 1968, it was self-described as "oldies" since "oldies but goodies" was service marked.
At WERC-FM in Birmingham, they were using "oldies" as a station positioner in 1972; I changed the format to Top 40 and remember the prior format well.
Later, when I interviewed for a part-time job at KOOL-FM around 1973, they were identifying on their business cards as "oldies".
Top 40 stations tended to dislike the "old" in "oldies" so they would often use terms like "gold" or "golden" or "flashback" rather than "oldies" when they played a non-current song. And things like "million dollar weekends" were used to disguise a special based on, well, old music.
The term, "Oldies" was used by Top 40 stations to refer to non currents since probably 1956 or so but discontinued before 1970, so anyone who remembers that might have fond memories of the word. This explains why it was used extensively to describe the Oldies format. People who don't remember anything before 1970 can make no such connection and the term is not only lost on them, it may actually be a turnoff!
As I said earlier, between 1950 and 1969 I lived in Arizona, the S.F. Bay Area and Long Beach/L.A./San Diego Ca. I listened almost exclusively to T-40 music stations (KTKT, KRLA, KFWB, KAIR, KOGO, KEWB, KYA and KOMA) and none of those were using the term "oldies" on-air. They mostly used regional geographic references such as "KYA Golden Gate Greats" and "KTKT Radio Free Tucson or Color Radio 99". Various terms were used to identify with early RnR songs but oldies wasn't one of them - at least not as a brand (and of the stations I mentioned). I obviously cannot speak for any stations which did not come in to my area so perhaps the term did exist somewhere back east but it took a decade, or most of one, to make its way west it seems. When I returned to S.F. from Vietnam in 1966 neither KWEB nor KYA identified as an oldies outlet and the automated KGO had no branding at all for 12-18 months. When I got to NYC in 1969 WABC was not branding as an oldies outlet either. Nor was WOR-FM.
The term Oldies today implies a fondness for song of a certain period and style. For my age group it was high school through college and the Vietnam war years. For others younger than myself it means either the beach scene or automobile references. Every single car show I have attended since I returned from Vietnam has always had what we now call Oldies as background music (or live performances up until a few years ago). Hot August Nights in Reno, one of the largest summertime car get togethers in the country attracts oldies in person and in the music. Although the people who lived through this era are aging out now the music still appears to be popular - if not on commercial radio then whenever people gather for a nostalgic good time. We have a weekly car show gathering almost every Saturday evening during the summer here in Scottsdale. McDonalds puts several large speakers on their roof of the parking lot and plays.....Doo Wop and Oldies. Impromptu dancing has, on occasion, been known to break out when the music begins. There are plenty of young adults and kids who have been exposed to that music and likely carry it home with them. Little Caesar was correct....the Oldies are the Goodies.
Naturally. None of those stations were "oldies" stations... they were Top 40 and did not want to use any term that said "old" instead of "hits". "Oldies" was used on stations that did not play current hits and you were listening to stations that played currents.
As an aside, in case it was not a typo, it was KEWB, not KWEB. KEWB in San Francisco, KFWB in LA and KDWB in Minneapolis were Crowell-Collier sister stations.
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