Top Forty Democracy: The Consequences of Pop Music Formats

Sunday, January 10, 2010: 9:10 AM
Elizabeth Ballroom F (Hyatt)
Eric Weisbard , University of California, Berkeley
Top 40 Democracy: The Consequences of Pop Music Formats

In The Tyranny of the Majority, civil rights scholar Lani Guinier critiqued a Chicago prom where white students dominated voting on the song selection and blacks responded by staging a counterprom. Guinier suggests "cumulative voting" strategies, where "No one is locked into a minority identity. Nor is anyone necessarily isolated by the identity they choose."

Arguably, Guinier's goals were met on Chicago’s radio airwaves, where stations offering varied genres co-existed in a manner that allowed different majority perspectives to prevail, and for cross-racial hits as well. After the 1950s, when television assumed network programming, the Top 40 hits system remade radio as an institution that communications scholar Michelle Hilmes calls "the place where those culturally excluded from television's address could regroup and find a new identity."

Based upon archival research on performers, record labels and the trade press, this presentation outlines dominant US pop music formats of the 1960's and 70's: country, R&B, and rock - each also a musical genre - and the crossover formats of Top 40 and MOR/Adult Contemporary. I argue these formats reconcile genre demands, social identity, and market segmentation. Finally, the essay confronts disjunctures between the mid-1970s, when such formats exemplified the collective economic emergence of certain subaltern groups into consumer publics with their own dedicated cultural spheres, and more recent years marked by "Top 40 Democracy’s" erosion through widening inequality, celebrity culture, corporate consolidation, and further audience fragmentation.

As I hope to demonstrate, music formats, rooted as they are in the flow of ongoing cultural transmission, offer a much needed remapping of everyday life and civic identity.

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