The Curious Apparent Durability of 1970s / 1980s Pop

Cafe Society
1

A few days ago my wife & I were out to eat dinner at a casual hang-out kind of place. It wasn’t particularly a sports bar, but it did have some TVs tuned to sports. The menu was burgers, wings, ribs, cheap steak or fish, beer, cheap wine, and silly drinks with umbrellas. A live band was playing 70s and 80s pop music. We’re both in our mid-60s, so instantly recognized most of the tunes. She commented:

That music is now 40-50 years old. When it was new in the 1970s and we were in high school or in the 80s in college, nobody was playing then-40-50 yo music from the 1920s & 1930s in bars, restaurants, or as Muzak. What gives?

The crowd in this joint included 20-somethings, young couples with toddlers to teens, middle-aged folks, near-retirement aged folks like us, and a few real oldsters. So far, so typical in SoFL.

I’ve noticed similar things about the modern equivalent of Muzak, namely having SiriusXM playing in the background at malls, restaurants, small shops, etc. Regardless of the customer demographic it seems like 70s/80s pop rules the day.

My recollection when I was a kid in the 60s or a teen in the 70s, most Muzak was “elevator music”, a calmed-down version of pop from the last 3-10 years. It wasn’t early 50s jazz or rock, and it sure wasn’t Tommy Dorsey & his Band blowing swing. Much less whatever the heck constituted “pop music” in the 1920s/1930s. Instead it was last year’s Burt Bacharach hit played a bit more slowly and mellowly. Or a remake of a rock tune from the early 1960s. If a bar or restuarant had live music, it was a cover band playing stuff from at most 10 years ago, or a pianist or organist playing hits, show tunes, etc., but from no older than ~10 years prior.

Obviously today the volume, storage and distribution of music of every era is vastly greater. It might have been hard to put out Muzak based on 1920s hits in 1970 just for lack of good recordings, whereas it’s not hard today to put out 1970s pop as background sound via streaming.

But if there’s plenty of 1970s tunes available to stream now, or for cover bands to play now, there’s certainly even more and better recordings of 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s music.

So why do we just not hear as much of that newer music out in public? My wife has always been aggressive about keeping her musical tastes up to date. She listens to current top-40 in the car and can tell you all about various performers and bands I can’t. My tastes are more varied than top-40, but are also not quite as up-to-date. But I too have deliberately tried not to let my tastes stagnate. So it’s probably not just selective perception on our part. That could be an element, but IMO it’s far short of the whole story.

So, commercial music experts and gigging performers of all genres:

  1. Is this just the selective perception of a couple of geezers?

  2. Is this just a matter that despite how much I protest that I hang out at least sometimes where younger folks also do, I’m just trapped in a Geezerville bubble and the real younger folks of later decades, from age ~55 down to ~15, are elsewhere encountering background music and live entertainment I’m not?

  3. Is there something about post-80s music that makes it less available for commercial reuse? Some licensing or copyright difference?

  4. Is there something about post-80s music that makes it less suitable for commercial reuse? Is it too diverse, too “ethnic”, too harsh, too whatever?

  5. Is there something about post-80s music that makes it less recognizable for commercial reuse? Are there too many one-hit wonders or disposable made-up bands? As to cover bands, is the issue the music is too complicated for a 4-person group to play live?

  6. Are the various eras of more modern music just not as obvious, or at least not as obvious to a geezer like me? IOW am I hearing something from 3 years ago and mistakenly placing it in 1990 or 1985?

  7. etc.

Thanks in advance for any insight anyone can provide. Including telling me I’m just a clueless old fart living in an audio Geezerville.

2

I grew up listening to the Beatles first hits on moms AM radio in the kitchen and from then on it was like normal to have a several classic songs come out each week. By the time I was a teen I was convinced that we were growing up in a musical renaissance. History has proven this to be correct as far as I can tell, the popularity of vinyl album sales is further evidence of this.

Our music was and still is cool, and thus we are cool by association is the way I look at it. :slight_smile:

I’m 61 and work in the audio group of a major car manufacturer. My senior manager is 40 something and he tells me he is jealous of the time I grew up in, the concerts I went to and the way we partied without serious repercussions. He loves newer music as well, but its like he attended the school of rock and is obsessed with our era.

3

I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong, but you must be careful about confirmation bias. What I mean is that if you hear a song you know, you’ll probably notice it. Whereas if you hear a song you don’t recognize, it might just pass without you even noticing.

4

Not too complicated; too over-produced for a bar band to replicate. As opposed to Louie Louie and Mustang Sally.

5

… and, to this point, LSL might be going to places which cater to specific age demographics which play music appropriate for their desired age group.

Lastly, compared to a lot of modern pop, 70s stuff is pretty anodyne. You generally don’t have to worry about language or theme or if it’s safe for the kids.

6

This might be just tangentially related to the OP, but the thing I noticed a while ago was that when I was a kid in the 1980s, the “oldies” radio station played music from the 1950s and 60s, music that was 20-30 years old at the time. By that definition, oldies stations today should be playing music from the 1990s and 2000s. But, at least as far as I know, no one calls music from that era oldies. I’m pretty sure oldies still means music from the 50s and 60s.

On the other hand, “classic rock” radio added 90s grunge music to their rotation a long time ago.

7

We’ve had similar threads in the past. My perception (I’m 45 for whatever that’s worth) is that there is in fact less differences in music from the last 20 or so years than there used to be. Today’s hits don’t sound much different to me than the hits from 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago. Prior to that, the differences seem a lot more obvious, not just between whole decades, but parts of decades.

There’s also the matter of what seems old fashioned. When I was a kid in the 80s I had the sense that groups and music as recent as the 70s seemed old fashioned (disco and the BeeGees being the most obvious). That doesn’t seem to be the case any more. Take Rihanna’s recent halftime performance at the SuperBowl. It received a lot of criticism, but as far as I can tell that criticism didn’t include that Rihanna and her music are too old fashioned, and that the old folks who like that kind of music should have been in bed anyway, which might very well have been a criticism if the BeeGees had performed at the SuperBowl in 1988.

8

If you look at number of plays on Spotify, you’re going to be amazed. Queen rules. And they did before the movie. There are artists with larger numbers, but Queen hasn’t produced any new material for 30 years.

Queen was also very early in uploading their music to YouTube. Their official channel has someone who takes an active interest. Even without Spotify it’s possible to access a large chunk of their of their catalogue. Beatles also has a lot of stuff on YT.

So accessibility is one factor. And to have that you have to have management/minions who know how to navigate the digital era. And having a semi-good videoclip helps too. When you look for stuff from before the 60’s, a lot of the time the YT clip will have audio and a still pick of the artist or the record. Another factor is that those artist don’t have active managers/minions active today, at least not digitally. Most of the older stuff is uploaded by fans. An example is Orange Colored Sky by Nat King Cole. On his official channel the song has about 150K views. A fan upload has 3.4M.

So what about “the kids?” First of, the music has to be out there, easy to find. The attention span of a teen in the digital era is on par with a mayfly. Another important factor is lack of a prior bias. We of a certain age ‘know’ that Lennon was the coolest Beatle. A kid born in 2008 will judge the music on its own merits: A good song is a good song. And so a playlist may include Arctic Monkeys, My Chemical Romance, Elton John, CCR and Rihanna. It’s not that they don’t listen to new music, it’s that the archive of the past 60 years is immensely bigger than it was when I was a teen in the 70’s.

Still another factor, maybe the biggest, is that the music of the 60-70’s was really the genesis of all modern music. Punk gets revived in cycles, rap was born in the 70’s. young singer/songwriters will find Joni but probably not Woody Guthrie. The heavy metal mold was basically created in a few short years around 1970, and its newer versions are basically variations on a theme (faster, louder. harder), EDM has its roots in the 70’s as does modern r’n’b. You will not find a lot of Coltrane, Parker, Monk in the music made by Black artist today (there are exceptions).

I could write a lot more, but still another factor, briefly: The artist of the 60-70’s were insanely productive. CCR:

The band’s most prolific and successful period between 1969 and 1971 produced fourteen consecutive top 10 singles (many of which were double A-sides) and five consecutive top 10 albums in the United States – two of which, Green River (1969) and Cosmo’s Factory (1970), reached number one.

Bayou Country was released January 5, 1969, Pendulum on December 9, 1970. Five albums in 23 months.

9

@WildaBeast hit my perception of it exactly. Used to be “oldies” meant “20 years ago”. For the last 30 years it seems to mean “1970s”. What changed?

I’ll gladly cop to @suranyi’s point. Songs one notices vs songs one doesn’t, despite the continuous music all day everywhere.

And to @JohnT’s: Some venues are all retirees all the time. And I bet I’m misleading myself at least some about how all-ages my venues are. I do see families with little kids and I do see post-college young adults. I sure don’t see too many unaccompanied teens in the course of my daily adventures. Wherever those teens are hanging out when not trapped in school, it ain’t where I am. Except at the beach on school holidays. Wow that’s a teen show. But there’s no piped-in music there and the cover bands in the eateries / bars are still playing the 80s.

I think you’re onto something with the “anodyne” comment. There’s an element of angry shock music that’s not corporate-friendly. Music form the 70s may be all misogynist stalker-y by modern standards, but that’s a familiar banal form of evil, not a scary form of evil. At least not if you’re a suit.

10

I remember that as well. The oldies station when I was I was a kid in the 80s played 50s, 60s, and 70s music. By that definition, Rihanna was playing the oldies during her SuperBowl halftime performance, which seems strange to me.

11

Your observation is curious, because I hear an inordinate amount of 90s music everywhere I go. “Semi-Charmed Life” at the grocery store, Sugar Ray at the bar, Green Day at the steakhouse. I like a fair amount of 90s music but there was a lot of tripe as well, and they don’t seem to discriminate. The last time I was at my friend’s bar they had a music video marathon of pretty much every terrible song from the 90s. It was torture.

12

Great post, thank you.

13

Nostalgia is always popular. Super Bowl commercials this year, as in every past year for many years, featured dozens of faces who have nothing to do with today’s culture. They were paid millions for no other reason that people like to remind themselves of pleasant memories.

Public music providers have similar incentives to emphasize the music familiar to and liked by the largest purchasing demographics. I don’t frequent places popular with teens and Gen-Z but I guarantee they are playing today’s music or music from their youth. Supermarkets will do the same, except that the people spending the most money are the moms and dads who are feeding their families, people in their 30s through 60s.

I agree with those who said that such music is mostly anodyne. So was most of the music then, and today’s public music is cherrypicked to remove hip hop or heavy metal, no matter how popular they used to be. I also bet that the music is picked to favor melody over rhythm. Hip hop is rhythm over melody.

One thing I realize about myself is that I literally tune out the music when I recognize none of it. A familiar melody will make me tune in to see whether I can identify the song or artist. If most people do something like this, what you “hear” may be a narrow segment of what is played.

14

I think there are a few things going on - the malls etc probably don’t include people of all ages and you probably remember familiar music more than unfamiliar music. But there are other issues as well. I think the biggest one is that I did not listen to my parent’s music and my 32 year old son listens to music from as far back as the 60s. And he first heard them in video games , skateboarding and BMX videos and that sort of thing , not because he heard classic rock stations playing on the car radio. He would never listen to the same radio station as I do ( although I don’t think he listens to the radio at all ) but once he heard “Horse with No Name” in a video, it ended up on his playlist. And he’s not the only one - it’s his contemporaries that put those songs in the videos

15

Familiar music is comfortable, public places want visitors to feel comfortable, and nothing is more familiar to more people than popular music from the 70s and 80s.

We were just on vacation in Jamaica and the resort had an ongoing playlist of familiar rock music recorded reggae-style. (Lourdes’ “Royals” sounded like it was born reggae; “Sweet Child o’ Mine” not so much.) I thought it was a smart way to help guests feel comfortable without just playing the same old obvious shit.

16

I know when I used to pick my son up from school, so many kids were wearing Tees from when I was young. Ozzy, Run DMC etc…

I kind of felt bad for them that new music today sucks so bad that they have to use “our” music to identify with. They don’t have any of their own generation.

17

Is there a rolls-eye emoji? Grrr, that’s not at all what’s happening. There’s plenty of great music being produced today, it’s just that with the internet and, especially, YouTube, the kids today do not have a generational bias when it comes to music - it’s all there. I watched my kid go from a Celtic music phase to Frank Sinatra, leading her classmates along with her.

But she still loves todays music, it’s just part of a larger framework which we didn’t have when we grew up. I genuinely think that there is no comparable age in which Sophia wasn’t smarter, had more cosmopolitan tastes than I, at the same age:

… When she was 12, she knew far more, and more varied, music than I did when I was 12.
… When she was 13, she knew far more, and more varied, music than I did when I was 13.
… and so on.

So the wearing of a grunge t-shirt really isn’t a commentary on today’s music, it’s a commentary on the accessibility of yesterday’s music in the YouTube age, accessibility we just did not have, as well as the ability to share your newfound discovery with your entire group of friends, instantly.

18

That’s a fair analysis. But IDK, if you’re wearing a Tee, I feel like your favoring that over the new music. Even if one still does listen to it occasionally.

19

Of course the kid is favoring grunge over today’s music. It’s just that today’s kids realize that it’s all available and that they are not bound to identify with a current band just because they’re the current band. (But when they go to concerts, they go to current bands - it’s where the other kids are.)

In some ways, I guess what I’m saying is that it was harder for my generation (70s kid, 80s teen) to form a fully adult musical identity because peer pressure, the “generation gap”, and the lack of sharable alternatives. Back in 1979, I would NEVER say a word about the beauty of Karen Carpenter’s voice because it would have been verboten among my peer group. Sophia? She doesn’t have that problem because Karen is right there next to Billie Eilish, Tom Rosenthal (who Sophia introduced to me when she was 14), and Frank Sinatra on her playlist.

20

For what it’s worth, my claim isn’t that today’s music sucks. My claim is that it isn’t substantially different than the music from 10 or 20 years ago. It’s just as good as music from any other era, it just happened to stop changing as frequently as it did in the 20th century.