Wolfgang Van Halen was exactly correct when Twitter erupted about Billie Eilish and the 17-year-old artist’s admission that she didn’t know Van Halen, the band. Both acts were cool, he said, and, besides, “Music is supposed to bring us together, not divide us. Listen to what you want and don’t shame others for not knowing what you like.” Some news stories described Van Halen’s tweet as “shutting down” the controversy, but it remained an easy, fun vehicle for many to do Twitter shtick for a few days.
Besides, I’ve always been interested in listeners’ frame of reference. Not surprisingly, a number of “Ross on Radio” readers and Twitter followers were happy to do the math on Eilish’s behalf, when it came to what constituted a reasonable musical education for a 17-year-old. “I didn’t know who Anita O’Day was when I was 17. Why would she know who Van Halen is?” wrote Jayson Tanner. “Isn’t that expecting 17-year-old Van Halen fans in 1984 to be familiar with Frankie Laine?” added Matt Bailey.
Other readers pointed out that their own kids were in no way ignorant of Classic Rock. “My kids are 10 and 12 and their favorite artists are Queen, AC/DC, and Elton John,” wrote Classic Hits CFXL (XL103) Calgary, Alberta, morning man Buzz Bishop. “They dial up soundtracks like Guardians of the Galaxy for their personal playlists.”
Listeners who are wise beyond their years have gotten a lot of attention in recent years. Seventeen-year-olds were indeed delving into Classic Rock. When they did, they often went back to the ‘60s and ‘70s because the whole canon was available to choose from, and, besides, it was all before their time. Mothers and daughters could share “Call Me Maybe” and “I Gotta Feeling,” affecting the music preference landscape to the point where even Adult Contemporary stations had to adjust their music.
This “everybody likes everything” era was never really quantified, except in the radio ratings that suddenly showed CHR, Classic Rock, Classic Hits, and even Country doing surprisingly well outside their traditional target. But because those numbers were outside the target, there was never any incentive for a Classic Rock station to test teens in music research, or for a Mainstream CHR to target from age 16 to 54. When the mother/daughter coalition slipped away, few stations had the wide-angle lens to see it. Besides, those teens who left broadcast radio and took the consensus with them were no longer part of the research target anyway.
And from the music research I’ve seen over the last 15 years, true all-ages songs are still the exception that proves the rule. However much longer “Don’t Stop Believin’” may have as a unifier, other rock from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s is starting to disappear, especially now that most of those in the Classic Rock and Classic Hits targets are kids of the late ‘80s and ‘90s. People might be choosing a wider swath of songs, but that doesn’t mean they have an unlimited capacity for more favorites.
Van Halen, in particular, has been particularly inconsistent in recent years. In Classic Rock, you might get back seven playable songs. Or two. In Adult Contemporary and Classic Hits, you might get back “Jump.” Or not. Even as Active Rock starts to rely more heavily on music from Classic Rock, Van Halen is typically left on the older side of the dividing line. They’re not quite regarded as essential listening now, particularly if you didn’t grow up loving them.
Besides, if 17-year-olds who know and like Classic Rock are a bonus, it’s much more concerning when 32- or 62-year-old programmers who target younger listeners don’t know what teens like, something radio has clearly struggled with in recent years. The Van Halen contretemps rightly brought out those programmers like Guy Zapoleon, who wrote, “It is hard to deny that Billie Eilish is a phenomenon and something different to break up the pop/rhythmic monotony that is happening on the charts.” But he also said, “I personally love her, but many don’t.”
The older listeners who “don’t get” Eilish were out in force, too. So were a few who said they had never heard Eilish, until now. It’s surprising to me that more older listeners don’t find traces of their own teenage-angst music in Eilish, whether it’s Joni Mitchell or Alanis Morissette, who had her own Internet moment on Monday with a tour announcement, a new single, and the pending opening of a musical.
But if you’d rather view Eilish as the onset of a whole new thing — the hit breakthrough of the new indie pop now encompassing Shaed, Tones And I, and a few other Alternative crossovers that CHR might get around to at some point — that’s a positive, too. The Jonas Brothers and Shaun Mendes can’t single-handedly pull off a CHR resurgence. Music needs its whole new things. When they come along, the interest of 17-year-olds in older music often dissipates for a few years, and new music becomes the unifier. That clearly hasn’t happened yet, but a lot of radio formats would be healthier if it did.
My musical tastes were forged at a time in the mid-‘70s when, led by the American Graffiti soundtrack, a lot of 12-year-olds were discovering older music. The surprise was that I kept going, and that my areas of interest were so wide. Having broad tastes led me to a number of my professional opportunities. Friendships, too. A few of them were forged many years ago over a shared appreciation of “I Live the Life I Love” by Little Willie Parker, an ‘60s Chicago soul rarity that is charming to some, off-putting to others, unknown to most, and even more lost to time than when it suddenly played in a room full of record collectors who were at least a little impressed that I already knew it.
Technically, I should be friends with anybody who likes “I Live the Life I Love” and displays at least a modicum of human decency. But enough experience with record store owners and collectors over the years has taught me that every collector has at least a hundred treasured songs that nobody knows. Some use those songs as an opportunity to share and make friends, others as a cudgel against those with inferior taste. There are undoubtedly many collectors who regard “I Live the Life I Love” as no more exotic than “Every Breath You Take” and me as a piker for thinking it’s in any way interesting. Sometimes the people who most need music to make friends are those who least recognize it.
So if different groups of radio listeners are generally happy when there’s a mutual appreciation for each other’s music, there’s a competing dynamic at work as well. A colleague of mine, in explaining why certain songs seem to endure, often characterizes the notion that every generation must reject the previous generation and their music as boomer solipsism. Listeners of a certain age expect their kids to reject their music as a growing ritual, but really as a validation of their own teenage rebellion.
By that scenario one would expect older listeners to view Billie Eilish and whatever she portends for music to be viewed as a positive. If boomers really supported rebellion through music, the correct responses would be “I don’t get it, but that’s good; my daughter is her own person,” or “I listened, and, you know, it’s really complex musically” — the sort of thing your dad said after grudgingly listening to your Steely Dan albums. “I don’t get it, and, besides, she doesn’t know Van Halen” is a cudgel of its own.
If that’s the response, then what some adults really want is for their kids to choose music they can reject and feel smug about. Music is indeed supposed to bring us together and not divide us; now it’s becoming just one more thing for people to argue about.
Very timely column this week, Sean, and one that hits particularly close to home for me. Since I host a specialty show that plays older pop music, I have to be very conscious of what my listeners may or may not know, musically speaking.
I started hosting “Crap From The Past” when I was 23. Initially, I played music that was between about 5 years old and 15 years old at the time. My target audience (if I thought about it at all back then) would have been people my own age. Easy.
Over the course of the nearly 28 years that I’ve hosted the show, I’ve been very mindful of my audience’s age, and the body of musical knowledge that goes along with age. Over the years, I’ve watched as my average listener delighted in the joy of “Secret Separation,” then knew only “One Thing Leads To Another,” then had never even heard of The Fixx. While my mortal off-air self questions how I got so old, my on-air self has figured out how to deal with being significantly older than my audience.
Familiarity is still important (listeners like what they already know), but as time progresses, the musical touchstones are drying up. It’s been a full generation since I’ve been able to explain Steve Carlisle’s “WKRP In Cincinnati” as being produced by the same guys who would later bring you “Pac-Man Fever.”
If you no longer relate an unfamiliar song to something the audience can identify, you have to fall back on the recipe that should be at the heart of every specialty show on the dial: Play songs that are interesting, and tell the listeners why they should care about them.
Sell “Rosanna” as having the most difficult drum pattern ever to hit the pop charts. (We miss you, Jeff Porcaro.) Sell “Le Freak” as the first 45 I ever bought with my own money. Sell “I Touch Myself” as having the worst guitar solo in all of recorded history. (It starts at 1:35. Go ahead and check. I’ll wait.)
The “hits” are no longer hits (read: “familiar”) in the specialty-show universe. They have to stand on their musical merit. And *that* has been liberating.
Once you’ve abandoned hope of tying a song back to something a listener knows, and have just accepted that it’s unfamiliar and we’re going to experience it together on the air, you can do wonders!
We can play songs that were hits elsewhere (Nena’s epic “Irgendwie Irgendwo Irgendwann,” which was the biggest hit of 1984 in Germany; “Four Seasons In One Day” by Crowded House; all of the Level 42 singles that weren’t “Something About You” or “Lessons In Love”), songs that sounded like hits (“Female Intuition” by Mai Tai; “The Grooviest Girl In The World” by Fun And Games; Wang Chung’s album track “The Flat Horizon”), or musical gems that stand on their own tuneful merit (“King Of The World” by Steely Dan; “Whenever You’re On My Mind” by Marshall Crenshaw; “Last Plane Out” or virtually anything off the lone Toy Matinee album).
And, delightfully, we no longer have to play “Living On A Prayer,” “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” or “Jack And Diane.” Those tired warhorses are completely irrelevant to young listeners, and are burnt to a crisp for older listeners, so why play them at all?
My world is pop, but the same can be said for anyone programming older music. You want younger listeners to listen to older music? Then explain on-air why we should care about every song you play. It requires more homework than just a Whitburn reference book (of which I own over 40) and a hard drive full of mp3s, but it pays off over time.
Keep up the good work, Sean!
Ron Gerber
host of “Crap From The Past”
KFAI-FM/Minneapolis
http://www.crapfromthepast.com
Not having heard it in decades (WMMS Cleveland played it a lot), I went back to “I Touch Myself” and have to say the guitar solo might properly be rather minimalist, it seems appropriate — which isn’t quite the same thing as the worst.
The stakes he set were higher, which might be why I would give the “worst guitar solo” prize, now as always, to Wiesław Bernolak of the Polish band Czerwono-Czarni, on Toni Keczer’s rendition of “Hello Mary Lou” (as “Mary Lou”). Hear it here:
Great article and great perspectives Sean. Love your comparison of Billie Eilish music to other women who produced “quirky and cool music”, that may have inspired Billie and her music like Joni Mitchell and Alanis Morissette. To follow up on my comment above on Billie Eilish as I mentioned SADLY many people (and programmers) love her or hate her. I think she’s one of the todays most “important” and unique artists and the kind of artists that bring about positive change to music and the Music Cycle. Many programmers aren’t giving her music a chance to develop, songs get dropped or reduced in spins causing big negative moves on the chart and then the label is forced to move on. Case in point is what happened with Billie’s second release from “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? “When The Party’s Over” which became a HUGE research song across Top 40/CHR but faltered on the charts and the label switched to next single which for CHR was Bad Guy(a #1 song) but sadly based on its radio research(as well as Billie’s sales and streams) When the Party’s Over should have become a top 3 hit and not peaked at #17 at Billboard and #14 on Mediabase. We know labels are releasing multiple tracks from an album at once to satisfy Streaming(as well as for Alternative radio for Billie) and often an artist isn’t massive enough and the songs aren’t popular enough for Top40/CHR to support more than 1 track. However thats not the case with Superstars where radio often does support multiple tracks (Ed Sheeran, Selena Gomez), where Radio should be able to support at least more than 1 track from a great artist, and certainly Billie should be considered one of them at this point.
Similar points likely can be made about any medium–including TV and movies. It’s becoming more obvious that there isn’t a single, unified “popular culture”–and that’s a big reason why I wouldn’t expect Ms. Eilish to know about Van Halen. Even though I grew up in the ’80s, the first things that I probably think about today concerning the band are them having a music video that was remade as a commercial for the infamous Crystal Pepsi (“Right Now”, of course), and them having a logo that was appropriated by Weezer.
Likewise, “Classic Rock” can have a pretty-elastic definition, especially outside the U.S. I’ve been looking a lot recently at the playlist for the “Classic Rock” online brand extension of Mexico City’s “Universal”–and in between a lot of the expected artists (including, yes, Van Halen), there are Siouxsie & The Banshees, Radiohead, Donovan, White Zombie, and The Call. (Just in case, on TuneGenie, it’s listed under the calls XHNZ; however, I think that it’s officially online-only.)
Billie is a revelation. I will say that I watched my daughter go through the standard music maturation process of loving my library until she was 10, and then cherry-picking at it until 13 or 14 and then abandoning it almost completely at 16. She, of course, held on to her own unpredictable favorites -Decemberists, DCFC, Shins, and Adrian Belew (go figure). I remember she caught on to Taylor Swift before anyone I knew heard it (“Teardrops On My Guitar” before it ever charted) as well as Hozier, Eilish, and a host of Trap music including Migos. While loving those first two artists, for me, Trap music became the horror I always knew was coming. I was able to listen to enough if it to understand that the Roland 808 high hat had become the modern equivalent of the Marshal stack of my youth- the sonic tell that this music was not for olds. The truth is, music carries a different social weight than it did before the advent of the mobile device and social media. Millennials and Generation Z have all sorts of means to rebel and less interest in rebelling than almost any generation before them. When I do focus groups with 21-30-year-olds I am amazed at their familiarity and love of classic rock and crossover music from the ’70s and ’80s. I would love to believe this had something to do with quality, but suspect it has more to do with familiarity and alternatives for cultural badging. I hear fantastic new music all the time, but it seems so narrowly targeted the idea of it crossing over seems remote. The flood of talented artists is overwhelming. Yet, very few seem unencumbered by the genre police. They are out there though. Brittney Howard, Yola, Raphael Saadiq, Labrinth even Post Malone all seem poised to potentially bring us something to sing together in the car-if we could get the earbuds out and share something together.