This came to me the other day when Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” came on the radio and I remarked to my wife that Nirvana’s Nevermind (released 1991) is now significantly older to us than “Black Dog” (1971) was to us back when we were hearing it on “Classic Rock” radio when we were kids in the 80s. Now it also occurred to me that at least part of the reason for this was that “Classic Rock” was a new radio format in the early 80s, in response to the sea change happening in mainstream music at the time, and before then there was no need to differentiate it from other genres because it was previously known simply as “Rock.”
Anyways, the question is: Is “Classic Rock” a completed set, i.e. is “Classic Rock” rigidly defined as rock music from the 60s and 70s, possibly early 80s, to the exclusion of everything else, set in stone forever, or is it rather a constantly self-updating set that incorporates “new” music as it reaches a certain age (approximately 20-25 years or so)?
The term was well in use in the 70s and 80s. It referred to anything from twenty+ years prior, and I suspect it will continue to do so. “Complete set” would have to be tied into something tied to a specific era and sound. I think disco, Southern fried, New Wave and grunge are complete sets, even if some of the bands involved are still making new music. Not many rock bands are making precisely the same kind of music they were making 20 years prior (although hair metal bands may prove me wrong).
Over the past few years, one of the classic rock stations in Chicago (WDRV) has begun to add some artists from the later 1980s and 1990s into their rotation, such as Nirvana, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Collective Soul. Most of these acts don’t get played nearly as often as the station’s staple acts (i.e., The Who, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, etc.), but they’re a noticeable presence in the playlists.
I find it interesting is that a number of acts which are squarely in their format (e.g., U2, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Stones) continue to put out new music, but anything from after ~1995 by those artists doesn’t get played.
For me, the Classic Rock era began with the Beatles and ended in 1980 with the death of John Bonham and the break up of Led Zeppelin. A period of 15 years give or take.
The 80’s produced plenty of good music, some of which could be called Rock, but it was different from the music from the mid 60’s to 1980. It wasn’t Classic Rock.
“Classic Rock” really isn’t a genre, it’s a marketing format. The local classic rock station (Seattle) has started playing 90s Metallica, but otherwise it sticks to acts from 1965-90. When I go back to Eastern Washington and hear the classic rock stations, they stick to the same time frame. When exactly did the “classic rock” format become popular, and what timeframe of music did they stick to?
I expected the post to say that Nirvana had made it onto Classic Rock, which I think may be the truth or close to the truth.
So, I say “No”- as I’m not sure I’ve heard Nirvana, but I definitely have heard late 80s rock, even “hairband” era stuff, on Classic Rock stations. So, it definitely seems to creep forward in time, unless it stopped in the late 80s.
I heard U2’s “One” on a classic rock station about a month ago. That song came out in the '90s. And I consistently hear The Cars on the same station, even though I’ve always thought of them as new wave and not classic rock.
This is the station I listen to the local “classic hits” station during my commute, and for years they played music from the 1960s-1980s with I think the most recent song being Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” (released in late 1989, still in the charts in early 1990). But within the past couple of years they started adding more 1990s songs to the mix, such as Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and the big hits of the grunge era like “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “Jeremy”, and “Man in the Box”.
Just the other day I heard a Foo Fighters song on this station. I can’t remember which one, but since the Foo Fighters didn’t form until after Kurt Cobain’s death that brings this station’s playlist up to at least 1994-95.
I personally tend to think of classic rock as referring to rock music from roughly the British Invasion to the late 1970s/early 1980s, but as a radio format it does seem to cover rock music that’s 20+ years old…but rarely anything earlier than the mid-1960s.
In my experience over the past ten years, classic rock radio basically uses the Beatles as its starting point and cuts off somewhere around 1990, with “Hard to Handle” by the Black Crowes being the most recent song that ever ends up in heavy rotation.
I have, on very rare occasions, heard the local classic rock stations sneak in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Enter Sandman” or “Two Princes” or on one occasion “Semi-Charmed Life”, but it’s a once-in-a-blue-moon thing.
After a day of (in no particular order or any semblance of exclusivity) working, smoking the heathen devil weed, drinking the greater and the lesser of the devil’s offerings, playing guitar, listening to my favorite records, and wondering about the technical feasibility of strong AI; I have arrived at the conclusion:
No, even if you define it as a marketing category, “Classic Rock” won’t ever be an enumerated set. It’s a moving target, if the idea is to have any value. Partly because the concept came as a reaction to the bands that came after the sound was somewhat codified. Even though it kind of has a formula, it has people who create very definitive works in the form. I would think that a teenager in 2030 would have a hard time differentiating between The Black Keys, Led Zeppelin and (link hidden because it’s got tons of Gaybraham Lincoln )
All three rock equally hard, at least. I could make a strong argument for the Electric Six song being the rockingest. At some point, all of them pass from any long idea of contemporary into classic (and all may already have). When we have a machine that can tell me which is which, we’ll have strong AI with at least a modicum of the current taste.
“You’re older than you’ve ever been, and now you’re even older,
And now you’re even older.”
What band/song is it that will make you go :dubious: when they’re added to the “Classic Rock” play list at some point in the distant future when you’re a brain in a jar?
My short-order answer is: Devo! Why, because Mothersbaugh openly stated that he thought he was making something other than Rock.
I gave up on broadcast radio long ago. It was The Who that did me in. I never was real fond of them in the first place, but when it reached the point I couldn’t get through a day without hearing “Who Are You” or “Baba O’Reilly” or both I had to turn it off. And I was an over the road truck driver so I listened to “classic rock” stations from Boston to San Diago to Miami to Seattle. Also got fed up with hearing “Me And Bobby McGee” as the only thing Janis did. Or “Magic Carpet Ride” and “Born To Be Wild” as the only representation of Steppenwolf. And if you only had classic rock stations as a source you would never believe that Jethro Tull recorded 20 other albums not called “Aqualung”.
Even satellite radio, on the channels they called classic or any variation of it fell into the set play lists. At least for awhile there was a little difference on the deep cuts or alternative or the ones dedicated to each decade, but still the play list gets stale fairly quickly.
How bad does it get on some? I got out of the truck for six months in the mid 90s and worked as a mechanic in a motorcycle shop. I couldn’t see a clock from my work station, but I knew when it was break time or lunch time every day. How? One of three Lynyrd Skynyrd songs came on every day within five minutes before or after 10:00AM. Pearl Jam? Got to be within five minutes of 12 noon. Pink Floyd? 2:00PM. Led Zepplin? Quitting time coming up.
Yeah you can have broadcast radio, no matter what you want to call the format.
