Thinking back on pop radio up until around 1983, there were always at least a couple of “real” country songs in the Top 40, but after 1983 or so, it looks like they quit getting airplay on Top 40 stations. It’s not like people quit buying it or liking it, as concert and album sales for country acts are as high as any other genre. Does anyone know the reason for the change? They still play pretty much every other genre, but not country (discounting pop/country acts like Shania Twain and the occasional novelty like Billy Ray Cyrus).
I don’t recall pre-1983 country on Top 40 as being terribly “country.” Certainly, it wasn’t the over-the-top twangin’, cheatin’, and hurtin’ country; it leaned more towards pop done by country artists:
Rhinestone Cowboy, by Glenn Campbell
Please Mister Please, by Olivia Newton-John
Here You Come Again, by Dolly Parton
Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue, by Crystal Gayle
Smokey Mountain Rain, by Ronnie Milsap
These are only a few samples, but they are a long way both musically and in subject matter from “Take This Job and Shove It,” “All My Exes Live in Texas (That’s Why I Hang My Hat in Tennessee),” and “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine.” There were a few exceptions, of course, but I wonder if “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” wasn’t helped by its exposure in Urban Cowboy.
Just a WAG, but maybe 1983 marked the point where it became increasingly difficult for the “country pop” I mentioned above to compete in the Top 40 with the likes of Michael Jackson and MTV videos. As well, it could be that once the Urban Cowboy craze died, so did widespread interest in all things country. Country fans stuck by it, but the folks who follow the latest craze had turned their attention elsewhere and just weren’t listening any more. So even the most inoffensive country pop wasn’t going to be heard on the Top 40.
Good point and I agree- “harcore” country like George Jones, Moe Bandy, Waylon Jennings, Conway Twitty etc. rarely crossed over but with the exception of Bandy, all of the top artists at least had a few pop top 40 songs, and there were many regular country songs that were big “Flowers on the Wall” “Rose Garden” “Luckenbach, Texas”, several Alabama and Oak Ridge Boys songs, etc. Since the mid-1980’s or so, I can’t think of any.
Cause country sucks?
Seriously, country just doesn’t mesh well with pop (god how I loathe that term) and stands out pretty drastically. It needs to have its own channels.
I’ve sure pop radio never played any Shania Twain over the past few years.
To answer the question about 1983, I’d say one reason is that there weren’t as many movies set in country settins as there were in the late 1970s. A lot of the country played on the radio in that time was featured in movies.
You come into a thread about country music to drop this?
I would say less and less today does it stick out. Look at the Dixie Chicks, Keith Urban, Faith Hill, Shania Twain. You’ve got country acts basically writing “pop” songs. So much so that you’ll even hear “pop” acts covering country songs and vice versa. Then there are the “pop” acts doing country-- Uncle Kracker, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crowe.
Given the fact that she hasn’t released a new album in four years, I’m sure you’re right.
Perhaps country artists were not inclined to climb aboard the New Wave / Synth train that was really gaining momentum around 1983 and peaking around 1985, IIRC, with a heavy metal “underground.” Some metal bands adjusted to the synth movement somewhat and did ok (e.g., Dio - Rainbow in the Dark, Van Halen - Jump, Ozzy - Bark at the Moon, ).
By 1985, pretty much the whole Top 100 was New Wave / Synth. It was the 800-pound gorilla that squashed everything else.
By 1987, the New Wave / Synth tsunami was breaking up and some R&B, metal, “hair bands” (e.g., Bon Jovi), and dance were making inroads into the Top 100. By 1988 and 1989, the Top 100 was fairly diverse and pretty well split up between these groups, with the “New Wave” acts on the decline and R&B, rap, and dance on the incline, with a strong showing by hair metal groups.
I don’t know where country was from 1986 to 1992. Then, there was Achy Breaky Heart. UGH!
Happy, it was kind of a teasing joke, and I figured the fact that I went on to give an answer & my opinion would make it evident it wasn’t a threadshitting. Especially the “seriously” part - I am pretty positive that makes it clear the previous was a joke.
This is Cafe Society, not GQ, so I am OK with saying: I still think country music stands out, and I would argue that at least some of those singers you mention don’t really classify as country anymore. I’d be open-minded to a new classification, but it’s not really the same thing.
The early '80s are the period when AM radio formats started to become quite specialized. The days when you could hear (just as examples) BTO followed by The Captain & Tennille followed by Freddy Fender followed by The Police followed by John Denver followed by a novelty record etc. were over. Radio really used to play all those types of music in the same format.
Then the business began to be overtaken by consultants and the results of focus groups, and the types of music a station could play became quite restricted (repetitive and boring and with a sense of “sameness”). That’s when the country music format really took off. There were country stations before, but it became a homogenous format that was sold to stations in cities all over, starting around this time.
… and also perhaps because country and MTV didn’t court each other, for whatever reason.
Yeah, I actually tried to edit that comment out of my post, but the board seemed to have frozen for exactly 5 minutes and 1 second. Sorry about that.
No harm no foul. Though currently I am trying to decipher your location and that might give me an injury of some sort trying to pronounce it!
It could, if I recall, have something to do with country music changing to more pop-oriented output at that time, so much so that it no longer sounded like country music.
That’s what Steve Earle was railing against when he first started releasing albums. His Exit 0 and Copperhead Road were his responses to a country music world that that cared more about “dumbing down” traditional country music just to move more units. (Remeber, Earle was the guy who later called Shania Twain “the highest paid lap-dancer in Nashville.”)
The early 80s completed the “segmentation” that radio stations began to go through in the 70s – it completed it by turning it into “fragmentation.” Not only did country disappear from pop, but rock disappeared from pop. A format that scarcely five years earlier would have had room for what fishbicycle describes, had by then ossified into Captain and Tenille on one station and The Police on another – Freddy Fender wouldn’t have had a chance.
Well it seems to me that they have all been happily reunited on the FM easy listening station that my alarm clock got accidentally set to.
A couple of points:
- By 1985, the pop-country bubble had burst. Country sales fell to only 9% of overall album sales, and a NY Times article famously proclaimed country music was dying. With country in such bad commercial straits, why would Top 40 look to that genre to help build listenership?
- The country sales revival began the following year with Randy Travis’ “Storms of Life”, a triple platinum album. It wasn’t even remotely pop. The next few years were a huge boom for country music. By this time, it took large amounts of money to promote an artist on country radio. Why spend big money in a hopeless attempt to get your songs on pop radio when you could get the same sales by focusing on country radio? The current pop-country boom only started when sales started slacking off in the late 1990’s.