It’s easy to rattle off a list of strong, enduring megahits from 1980: “Upside Down,” “Call Me,” “Another Brick in the Wall,” “Funkytown,” “I’m Coming Out,” “Rock With You,” “Brass in Pocket (I’m Special),” “Any Way You Want It,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Refugee,” “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.” Even the hits that have settled into the second tier included “Stomp!” “Tired of Toein’ The Line,” “I’m Alright,” “Cars,” “Give Me the Night,” “Let My Love Open the Door,” “All Night Long,” and “Fame.” It should have been an exciting year on the radio.
And yet, 1980 was the year that Top 40 descended into doldrums in the U.S. It’s the year of Air Supply, Robbie Dupree, and a slew of other Michael McDonald soundalikes or side projects, including a disappointing follow-up from the Doobie Brothers themselves in “Real Love.” It’s also the Urban Cowboy year of “Looking for Love,” Kenny Rogers’ “Love the World Away,” and other AC-ish Country music that gave the format a showcase, but also began its own doldrums.
If 1984 showed that the strength of a format is in the radio stiffs that keep things sounding great between the hits, the bottom half of any week’s American Top 40 in 1980 is mired in such MOR/soft pop as “Gee Whiz” by Bernadette Peters or “If You Should Sail” by Nielsen Pearson. That is most frustrating because Top 40 didn’t have to go that far afield to play better songs. CHR could have been better if R&B hits like “Take Your Time (Do It Right)” or “Let’s Get Serious” had gotten airplay commensurate to their sales-driven Billboard chart positions. If Top 40 had been just a little less scared of “You Shook Me All Night Long.” If “What I Like About You” or Split Enz, “I Got You,” hadn’t stalled outside the top 40.
In Canada, things were better. “I Got You” was a big hit. So were XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel,” B-52s’ “Rock Lobster,” the Police’s “Message in a Bottle,” and “Echo Beach” by Martha & the Muffins, homegrown but ratified by the UK as well. Toronto had one of the first successful New Wave stations in CFNY, but the mainstream AOR stations CHUM-FM and Q107 were also more open-minded in a way that impacted CHR. Other markets were friendlier to new wave too, including Montreal, which usually had its own set of equally cool hits. Canada had a long tradition of paying more attention to UK and other European hits than the U.S. did. (The prime 1980 example was the Monks’ “Drugs in My Pocket,” a Canadian smash, but not a hit at home.)
In the U.S., there were four songs that could be called New Wave that made the year-end top 100. In Canada, there were 13. I wrote about my experiences with Canadian music and radio recently, which was centered on the Top 40 stations I could hear in the Northeast at night and following their playlists in the trades. A few Facebook commenters asked how I could not mention CFNY, or why I would filter anything through Top 40 to begin with. Reader Adam Sobolak made the intriguing argument that CHR was a niche format in 1980-82: interesting maybe as a window to popular taste, but not the cultural arbiter that CFNY was.
Forty years later, it’s certainly easy to look at our recent “Lost Factor” calculations for 1980 — songs played by radio then, but not now — and find a lot of pop/AC hits of the time that are now “like they never happened.” And those are the songs that made the year-end top 100. AT40 obscurities such as“ Do Right” by Paul Davis or “Let Me Be” by Korona (aka Starbuck) really are forgotten. (But check out the Korona song, and then think about how many doo-wop inspired hits with a similar pulse we’ve had in the last four years or so.)
The pop of that era is not without its echoes. The “yacht rock” fascination with those Michael McDonald spinoffs has endured well past the novelty phase. “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John is largely gone from the radio, but “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes endures. In comments about the “Lost Factor” articles, numerous songs that seem as if they’re lost for cause have prompted the “that was my song” comment from somebody.
But the discussion did make me curious about at the footprint of New Wave 40 years on. Besides 1980, I calculated the percentage of the year’s Top 100 Billboard titles that New Wave comprised during its MTV-era boom in 1983-84 here, and in Canada. Then I looked at the percentage of New Wave in the hundred most-played titles for the Classic Hits format and for the Bob-/Jack-FM-type stations of the Adult Hits format in the U.S. and Canada.
Deciding what counts as “new wave” is as confounding as it was when I sat in Alternative radio music meetings more than 30 years ago. I tried to go by artist-image-at-the-time, even though many acts achieved enough Cars-like mainstream status to be reclassified with time. Even with a number of likely controversial judgment calls, there were still consistent patterns that emerged from year to year, from the ‘80s to today, and between the U.S. and Canada.
What you see is that the cultural hegemony belonged in 1980 and again in 2020 belongs to Mainstream Album Rock. At the moment, that classification covers 51% of the top 100 most-played Classic Hits songs and 49% of the most-played Adult Hits titles. In the Canadian Adult Hits format, that number is actually 58%.
By comparison, artists considered Alternative at the time of their hits comprise 27% of Classic Hits, 39% of Adult Hits, and 30% of Canadian Adult Hits today. That’s certainly more radio attention than new wave was getting in 1980. It’s slightly less than the breakthrough year of 1983 (32% of the U.S. top 100 and 49% of the Canadian chart) but more than 1984 (22% of the U.S., 32% of Canada). It’s also more than the 12% pop and 10% R&B titles heard at Classic Hits now, although some ‘80s pop (e.g., “Hungry Eyes”) lives today at AC radio and especially the new Soft ACs that cheerfully play Air Supply, Christopher Cross, and other early ‘80s soft pop.
A lot of radio now is explained by radio then. The late ‘70s/early ‘80s were rock radio’s time to set the cultural agenda. From 1983-85, CHR was the driver and AOR was suddenly following its lead, until Classic Rock created a new problem on its other flank. Few markets had commercial Alternative FMs in the ‘80s — CFNY; KROQ Los Angeles; WLIR Long Island, N.Y.; and XETRA-FM (91X) San Diego were among the few that covered most of the decade. A brief building boom took place in 1982-83 as KROQ exploded, then most markets were happy with the new wave that CHR and MTV could agree on among themselves. (Or, sometimes, “near wave,” like “Sunglasses at Night” by Corey Hart, that had a similar feel but not the alt cred.)
For the most part, the post-1982 crossovers are the new-wave titles that endure now on a large scale. Among the top 100 most-played Classic Hits and Adult Hits titles, there are two songs that should have been early ‘80s hits, and whose place in the firmament was fixed retroactively. One is Billy Idol’s “Mony Mony,” which by 1987 was a chart hit anyway. The other is Modern English’s “I Melt With You,” which resurfaced during the CHR “bring-back” phenomenon of the late ‘80s.
There are a half-dozen other songs elevated by time if you go through the top 300 for both formats — at Classic Hits, it’s UB40’s “Red Red Wine” (again there because of a CHR-led revival); “What I Like About You” (started to get widely played around the same time as “I Melt With You”); and Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” (which probably first resurfaced in the mid-‘80s when he became a consistent hitmaker). At Adult Hits, you can add Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” and the Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” a pop hit, just not when Alternative first played it in 1988.
A handful of early ‘80s titles have found a home at Triple-A radio, particularly as Alternative became an increased part of that format’s gold library over the last decade. “Personal Jesus” is now the No. 20 gold title at that format, followed by Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” and Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” in the top 40. Songs such as “Once in a Lifetime” and “Message in a Bottle” have also become reliable second-tier Classic Rock titles.
Beyond that, there’s yet another tier of Alternative-only hits that have a greater footprint than they did at the time, but aren’t quite consensus radio records now: New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “Blue Monday”; the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated”; Alphaville’s “Forever Young.” They are songs that would test for Classic Hits, Adult Hits, or AC audiences in some places, but not every market. Typically, those songs have had some combination of late ‘80s or mid-‘90s bring-back airplay, MTV exposure, and movie/TV/commercial exposure in recent years. Both New Order hits benefited from remakes (by Frenté and Orgy respectively) as well.
There are a few examples of Alternative-only hits that endured in a particular market. “Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo Boingo went from KROQ to Adult Hits KCBS-FM (Jack-FM) to Classic Hits KRTH (K-Earth 101), although it isn’t playing it at the moment. Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough” became a playable Hot AC and Classic Hits song in San Diego, although it has since spread. Toronto’s Blue Peter was one of CHBM (Boom 97.3) Toronto’s signature acts when that station launched a decade ago; its three hits still get a handful of Boom spins now. But KROQ also played lots of songs that didn’t make it to Jack, much less K-Earth.
The number of new wave titles, particularly pre-MTV, on which radio has corrected the historical record is still relatively small, and that includes many of the anthems of the first generation. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is still the secret handshake among still-fervent Smiths fans, but it wouldn’t test now even for a gold-based Alternative station, and even “How Soon Is Now” might barely make the cut. There are also songs such as “Crash” by the Primitives or “Dancing in Heaven (Orbital Be-Bop)” by Q-Feel that got reissues and couldn’t get traction the second time either.
As is the case with our Lost Factor calculations, this applies less if you’re a SiriusXM subscriber and listener to the 1st Wave channel, in which case you may feel like you hear “How Soon Is Now” plenty. With 1st Wave, new wave fans have the consistent radio access to the music that not everybody had in 1980. Some are probably glad that some of their choices have been ratified by the rest of the world; for other listeners, for whom listening to the “other” was the main attraction in 1980, it may not even be a positive.
Sirius XM listeners can also hear all the “Uptown Funk”-era R&B that should have crossed over to Top 40 on the Groove. Even if it’s a handful of new-wave titles that have become retroactive pop hits, only Rick James’ “Super Freak” has really gotten the same sort of boost among R&B classics of the era. Top 40 in 1980 would have been a lot better if “More Bounce to the Ounce” by Zapp or “Burn Rubber (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)” by the Gap Band had been pop hits, too, and not victims of the “disco backlash” (which somehow didn’t stop “Funkytown”).
Canada didn’t fix the R&B crossover issue either, with one prominent exception. “Rapper’s Delight” became the Canadian pop hit that it wasn’t in the U.S., in part because there was no R&B radio to play it. One market where deeper R&B and New Wave both crossed was probably Los Angeles. Top 40 in 1980-82 was diffused over a half-dozen stations, none of them market-leading, but all interesting. In 1980, L.A. Top 40 played “Danger” by the Motels and “I Like (What You’re Doing to Me)” by Young & Company. If you average Los Angeles, Montreal, Toronto, and the U.K., you have the 1980 I would have liked to have heard, as heard on this Spotify playlist.
A couple of NYC-centric observations: in 1980, WNEW-FM was still somewhat influential; they were on a New Wave “Flavor of the Month” kick that went on for quite some time, with acts like the Jags, the A’s, the Vapors, D.L. Byron and (yes) Martha & the Muffins each getting airplay for their one hit as well as the “Live from the Bottom Line” treatment. (WLIR did not go “Rock of the ’80s” until the spring of ’82). None of the aforementioned crossed over (‘tho the Vapors came closest), but they were part of the collective rock consciousness in NYC at the time. I’ll also note that the Gap Band’s “Burn Rubber” and “You Dropped a Bomb” were both “spice” records on Z-100 when they first signed on in ’83. And thank you for putting Odyssey’s “Use it Up/Wear it Out” on your playlist; it’s a gem that I didn’t discover until 20+ years later via UK Oldies stations on the internet.
Supposedly, as 1980 began, WPIX-FM was still in its New Wave/Punk-focused “From Elvis to Elvis” format; however, that quickly gave way to what might’ve been a return to Rock-based Top 40. Along those lines, I just stumbled across this Village Voice article from a few years ago that contrasts ‘PIX and ‘NEW in late 1979–by way of the then-just-released Damn the Torpedoes…
https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/10/03/radio-refugee-tom-petty-new-york-city-and-1979
And, just in case, here’s a bit more about ‘PIX during that era–including a playlist from a bit earlier in ’79…
https://stealingalltransmissions.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/potpourri-for-punks-and-mothers-pix-stagger-lee-etc
I couldn’t pursue it earlier, but here’s still more from that era: first, an archived Columbia (University) Spectator profile of Dan Neer, who was working at ‘PIX then…
http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/columbia?a=d&d=cs19790420-01.2.12
And, a Billboard profile from just a few months before the format was dropped; if the link is bad, it’s from the Nov. 3rd, ’79, issue (Vol. 91, No. 44)…
https://books.google.com/books?id=zCQEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT25&lpg=PT25&dq=“meg+griffin”+wpix&source=bl&ots=Vnw0Cp-VYJ&sig=ACfU3U3FAYFlKMAhjp3z_haFuUaWljSAtw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiK96_K-J3rAhUKrFkKHTLtAwcQ6AEwEHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=”meg%20griffin”%20wpix&f=false
Good point about WNEW. I think of them more for DL Byron (and Elvis Costello and Graham Parker and that aspect of new wave) than for Vapors/Martha & the Muffins, etc. Also interesting that Squeeze became a WPLJ band during that era to the point, such that you can still hear “Pulling Mussels From The Shell” on Q104 today and not just Tempted.
Indeed, ‘PIX-FM was a glorious (and short-lived) anomaly. One of their jocks, Meg Griffin, ended up at ‘NEW-FM and helped Vin Scelsa and a few others there drag that station into the ’80s.
New Wave? … totally absent from middle America in 1980. From my location between Kansas City and St. Louis, even Top 40/CHR was hard to come by. Not that I was much of a Top 40 listener anywhere, but I did tune around, using an outdoor FM antenna with a rotor to escape the poor quality of local FM offerings. Album rock dominated. Our local CHR, freshly moved to FM in 1978, went in an adult-contemporary direction and even made a run at the local heritage full-service AM station (where I worked). In Kansas City, this was the year KBEQ practically turned into an album-rock station as “FM-104”, but with Top 40 audio processing. Imagine what that did to Traffic’s “Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys”. Actually, you didn’t have to, because they played it. On the other side of the state, KSLQ was still in St. Louis but I couldn’t receive it due to nearby local station; earlier in the 70s they seemed to flirt with album cuts, too. On AM, the Storz stations, WHB and KXOK, were leaning heavily toward oldies at that point. Even our local college radio stations had an album-rock lean, though that wouldn’t last much longer. It all really amounted to drowning in syrup for the n-teenth time. New Wave would have been a breath of fresh air but that was some time off. It was not a particularly memorable time.
I’m reminded of a story that ran in Billboard in 1980: a Midwestern PD was quoted, saying that Gary Numan’s “Cars” — as NewWavey a Top ten hit as there was in that year — was one of his stations most-requested songs for weeks. Then Numan was the musical guest on SNL, and the reaction of those same listeners reversed overnite. “Ewww, he’s creepy-looking!” they said and suddenly they didn’t want to hear the song anymore. Sad.
Detroit radio was better–the bands that later became part of the Classic Rock canon anyway were accepted right away: Clash, Talking Heads, Police, Split Enz, etc., plus the Romantics as local heroes. Can’t remember if I heard Gary Numan on AOR, but Alice Cooper’s “Clones” was there, of course, and almost a Gary Numan song.
I left my midwestern roots briefly to attend REI (Radio Engineering, Inc.), a First Phone Wonder School in Sarasota, FL. I had the pleasure of hearing the Sarasota and Tampa markets from there, including the battle between Y-95 (then still CHR) and Q105. WLCY was still cranking on AM, and there was a station I ended up giving a lot of quarter-hours to, Supermix 96 (having just backed off it’s 96 Fever all-disco identity, becoming a mix of R&B, Disco and top 40. With those CKLW-inspired R&B roots it was perfect in early 1980. Here’s the Spotify tribute playlist that I made. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0771NyXqflmzeTsBTgkUcy?si=LCYPPbrhQKa1b9MW3enl5g.. I can definitely remember the female counterpart to the Sugarhill Gang, the Sequence because they played “Funk You Up” a lot. Also, “And The Beat Goes On”, “Stomp”, “”Special Lady”, “Funkytown” and even “Let Me Be the Clock” by Smokey Robinson, which stiffed at #31 nationally, but it’s one of “my songs”.
I concur with your 1980 playlist (though I’d have added Kim Carnes’ “More Love” because reasons :). I can remember 1980-82 being a period where there were some big markets without actual CHR stations.