January 1, 2000
- Santana f/Rob Thomas, “Smooth”
- Savage Garden, “I Knew I Loved You”
- Brian McKnight, “Back at One”
- Christina Aguilera, “What a Girl Wants”
- Marc Anthony, “I Need to Know”
We’ve been looking at the first chart of each decade and whether it signifies a downturn in the format’s fortunes, as often held. So far successive Januaries have shown:
- 1960 under the sway of teen idols who were increasingly MOR’ish, or at best up-tempo but lightweight, as pop music struggles through a payola scandal;
- 1970 seeing bubblegum give way to Bread-type soft pop, but with an occasional “Whole Lotta Love” to confuse things;
- 1980 as the epicenter of yacht rock, as stations soften to AC or harden to Album Rock;
- 1990 beginning with promise after a year of excitement in music and radio, but with CHR on its way to a near-death experience, partially because of the aggressively produced “Power Pig” wannabes that made the format wearisome, especially when the music got worse.
You might look at the top of our first 2000 chart and think the doldrums had started, but despite the AC-friendly top five, the CHR format was actually still on its victory lap. Teen pop had driven the resurgence; now ‘N Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye” was 10 days away from giving the genre its peak moment.
Below the top five, there was a strong variety of reactive hits — Smash Mouth, “When the Morning Comes”; Jennifer Lopez, “Waiting for Tonight”; Eiffel 65, “Blue (Ba Da Dee)”; Len, “Steal My Sunshine”; Blaque, “Bring It All to Me.” When people recall the “Top 40 that played everything,” it’s often typified by Country and R&B together. Shania, Faith, and LeAnn had just ended a five-year Country blockade.
The top 40 stations that played those songs had exceeded expectations. Declared dead in 1994, Top 40 was considered after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to be a niche format that could exist in every market because Congress had given broadcasters the relief they needed to support youth formats via duopoly. But by 1998, the mother/daughter coalition had formed and Top 40 was no niche format.
The variety of hits reflected, to some extent, the variety of Top 40 stations at the time. The first ‘90s success story was KHKS (Kiss 106.1) Dallas, whose rhythmic-leaning mix became a template for many major-market Top 40s. Other early stations had segued to the format (or returned) from Hot AC and were often close to Modern AC, reborn to play Sheryl Crow and Hootie & the Blowfish. There were “all-the-hits” CHRs like WHTZ (Z100) New York, but also many stations reluctant to play R&B and Hip-Hop. It took until 1999 for TLC’s “No Scrubs” to return R&B to the top of the Mainstream CHR airplay chart.
In late 1998, Clear Channel — the company now known as iHeart Media — launched WKFS (Kiss 107.1) Cincinnati, playing a lot more R&B and Hip-Hop and promising “all the hits, not just some of them.” Kiss was never meant to beat WKRQ (Q102). When it did, Clear Channel rapidly deployed its version of the format nationwide, but especially in medium and small markets in the Midwest and South.
The new stations were devastatingly effective. Rather than play “Back That Thing Up” by Juvenile or “Peaches and Cream” by 112, a number of incumbents quickly retreated to Hot AC again. Meanwhile, with their high spin counts, the new Kiss FMs rapidly impacted the Mainstream CHR chart. It’s a common practice now, but playing powers 104x a week was a bold statement in 1999-2000. Even “B”s got enough spins that a new tier of secondary rhythmic pop titles would populate the No. 8-No. 15 range of the Mainstream Top 40 chart.
The merger between Clear Channel, Jacor, and AM/FM had already brought plenty of CHR muscle to the combined group — the first sign of the combined entity as behemoth. It was also the first inkling of Clear Channel’s determination to create national brands, especially as it pushed other stations to surrender the “Kiss-FM” name. (There was also a deployment of new Hot AC “Mix” outlets around the same time.)
There was no reason for CHR not to follow the Kiss stations’ lead in 2000. Those stations were winning and well-done. Hip-Hop and R&B had been egregiously underrepresented at the format. Over the next 18 months, however, there was the third wave of more generic records that every hot genre unleashes — Destiny’s Child gave way to Dream, TLC to 3LW. And there was less balance with time.
As for teen pop, it peaked shortly after “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me.” In general, CHR programmers, fearing a repeat of the New Kids on the Block boom/bust, drew a line in the sandbox, letting only an occasional O-Town or LFO through. When the big acts came back — Backstreet with “Shape of My Heart,” ‘N Sync with “Pop” — it sounded tame. ‘N Sync’s R&B-flavored “Girlfriend” was slightly more successful and provided Justin Timberlake with future career guidance. Christina Aguilera came back “Dirrty,” a smash on the Kiss-FM stations, even as other CHRs quickly sought out the more mainstream “Beautiful.” From then on, a concerning pattern emerged where female teen idols needed to be provocative to prove themselves as adult artists. Timberlake only had to be a little flirrty.
The other thing that made pop music sound tame in 2000 was the rise of Eminem. Today, “Lose Yourself” and “Love the Way You Lie” are beloved adult records. In 2000-01, he scared radio. KZQZ (Z95.7), San Francisco’s first attempt at Mainstream Top 40 in a decade, was owned by conservative Bonneville. At the height of Eminem’s Rolling Stones-like superstardom, Z95.7 tried to resist playing him, and soon it was out of the format. The Bay Area had to wait nearly a decade for Mainstream CHR again.
There were rock records that made it through at Mainstream Top 40. Alternative was increasingly a format of “extreme rock.” CHR resisted Limp Bizkit, but played a few songs Linkin Park — the most accessible distillation of nu-metal. Then there was pop/punk, beginning with Blink-182’s “All the Small Things,” ascending the charts in January 2000. Blink-182 came from Alternative radio, but increasingly emo/teen-punk came from MySpace or otherwise found its young adult following before (or without) airplay. In the early 2000s, that was a phenomenon. Now, it’s a template. The rock that crossed over kept Top 40 from feeling claustrophobic, but it also highlighted the extremes of the CHR format.
I remember feeling excited again about CHR in the summer of 2003 because of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.” By then, Pink, one of the Kiss-FM rhythmic pop staples of 2001, had surprised listeners with “Get the Party Started” and a string of poppier hits. Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” had been followed by the uncharacteristically pop-rock “Fighter,” and there was a similar title, “Miss Independent,” from an American Idol winner who, after “A Moment Like This,” had finally given radio a single it could work with. But the true CHR comeback would have to wait for Kelly Clarkson’s next project.
In late 2000/early 2001, CHR radio (as well as a particularly down period for Country) made any radio road trip monotonous. But now with the ability to cherry-pick, there are certainly early 2000s songs that are making a comeback. Early 2000s Hip-Hop — not just 50 Cent but the “Tipsy”-type novelties that were such a big part of the Kiss FMs — is as prominent in the throwback Hip-Hop/R&B format as songs from the ‘90s are. Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me” was one of the first records that showed rap’s appeal to adult women, and endures today. Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Ooops!)” is a surprisingly strong record for a number of stations, and with 2000 a generation behind us, there will be more like it.
Then there’s Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. Lopez’s Ja Rule “remix” of “I’m Real” was the archetypical Kiss FM smash, but just one of several years’ worth of hits. Shakira’s “Whenever Wherever” was one of the records that CHR clung to during those years of pop scarcity. The Super Bowl halftime show reminded listeners of how good those songs were. It’s hard to imagine a few of them not resurfacing now.
It’s also worth noting the recently spotlighted Facebook group “Oh Damn . . . That Song,” whose rapidly growing membership has been posting favorite forgotten semi-hits, many of them from the early ‘00s. Those songs, increasingly generic to me in 2000-01, are definitely a galvanizing part of somebody’s life. I don’t feel any guilt about using Dream’s “He Loves U Not” as an example, but I’d enjoy hearing 3LW’s “No More (Baby I’m’a Do Right)” again. For you, it might be the exact opposite. We might both like hearing “Dance With Me” by Debelah Morgan. It was only the claustrophobia of CHR that became an issue. For a few years, a format that had seemed so healthy had only some of the hits, not all of them.
Next Week: From Y2K Through Today
jebsib 
All the excessive Rhythmic content (a staple during doldrums) was like a tsunami and overpowered me by 2004. I truly believed that the generational or demographic shift was so extreme by then that CHR would never have another Zapoleon-based Rebirth, so was stunned when r&b / Hip-Hop retreated a little in the late 2000s – and became downright inconspicuous during the Turbo-Pop years. I wonder: You have talked extensively about the extreme-doldrum cycle as it affects CHR … I assume the same system occurs in every genre format – When were the last few doldrums that specifically affected the R&B / Rhythmic formats – do they ever match up with the pop cycles?