Thread for coordinating the order and timing of ILM ballot polls

second should be: http://open.spotify.com/user/doctorcasino/playlist/2P1NcRZBeRwPk74MEbWWWH

One thing that's always amused me about classic-rock radio (the station here, anyway) is how they'll play "Miss You" and "I Was Made for Lovin' You" and "Under Pressure" and "Another Brick in the Wall" while continuing, seemingly oblivious to the irony (and long past the point where they ought to know better), to deride disco as everything that was bad about the '70s.

oh man, just remembered to go back through the balls/AG nomination playlist for ideas

ok yeah 'alive' is lurking near the bottom of this thing (which is the 500 most played tracks on classic rock radio in 2011 so i'd only imagine more stations have made the leap into the 90s since then), as are 'smells like teen spirit', 'come as you are', 'man in the box', and o hi dere 'plush'. there's eight u2 tracks on this thing. by comparison ten eagles tracks. ccr - six tracks, motley crue - five. at some point 'take me to the river' slipped off as well.

i think if we do nominations we're gonna end up w/ something that pretends david bowie and neil young are bigger than .38 special and kansas. think bypassing nominations and just going w/ industry source would save work, be more accurate, avoid whining. also ppl bitching that the list kinda sucks or is boring or doesn't have alot of huge obvious rrhof type stuff that how the fuck is this not on there etc would sorta be fitting also - this is basically the classic rock format in a nutshell.

I always thought this poll was going to be based off of an industry playlist, so the idea of nominations is completely new to me.

Yeah, I basically agree in principle - what I always imagined was "poll of the 500 classic rock songs everybody knows" with less emphasis on deep cuts and the maybe more hipster-kissed music that also thrived in the 70s. Trick would be finding the industry list that actually nails it - in a dreamworld it'd be some kind of computer-aggregated list of the classic-rock-airplay top 500 lists since the format was introduced or something.

i'm definitely not going to make it a fully open nominations process -- will probably lay out that 500, subtracting songs that totally don't fit by some chronological or other criteria, and adding additional songs by the same acts that really deserve to be included, but then encouraging suggestions and opening up discussion and then making the final call myself.

ideally, if i found a longer list, of 1000-plus, i'd go with that. 500 just seems possibly too restrictive -- there are a LOT of things i'd consider staples (or were staples 10-20 years ago) that are just not on there, often the 6th or 7th biggest song by an act that only has 5 songs in the top 500 or something.

as much as i can sympathize w/ setting a cutoff point for this cuz man do i rmde when i hear 'mysterious ways' on classic rock radio (which admittedly doesn't provoke nearly the outrage and existential dread that hearing 'like a prayer' on oldies radio does), i think ultimately you shouldn't cuz time marches on and death waits for us all. all we are is dust in the wind.

in a weird way i feel like this should be about Classic Classic Rock -- as much about the format in its 80s/90s heyday as what it is now. i'd rather include dusty 70s cuts that fell out of favor in the last 10 years than late 80s/early 90s songs that are creeping onto playlists out of sheer ubiquity that nobody needs to be reminded of.

I've got a copy of an a-z list my local station (a clear channel outlet) made public around 2007 or so. Definitely more than 500 songs on it.

i have nothing to input into the process but i wanted to say that i will def submit a ballot for classic rock poll

in a weird way i feel like this should be about Classic Classic Rock -- as much about the format in its 80s/90s heyday as what it is now. i'd rather include dusty 70s cuts that fell out of favor in the last 10 years than late 80s/early 90s songs that are creeping onto playlists out of sheer ubiquity that nobody needs to be reminded of.

― Dr. Shipping Al (some dude), Friday, July 5, 2013 12:32 PM (50 seconds ago)

This is exactly what I was hoping for.

agreed with some dude - as I said, uh, a surprisingly long time ago:

Seems like the right historical moment too, since a lot of CR stations have been changing formats - the one here calls itself ''the next generation of classic rock'' and basically shifts the timeline up until Use Your Illusion. It'd be fun to survey the CLASSIC classic rock canon.

― Doctor Casino, Monday, February 27, 2012 10:11 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

basically it turns out a disturbing amount of my music-thinking time is devoted to the pretty uninteresting subject of rock radio formats

like, i wanna cast a light on the rock monoculture before it really started to splinter: hard rock before it was metal, new wave before it was alternative, noodly country rock and prog before it was jam bands, power ballads before it was adult contemporary.

Grisso, can you send that to me? shipley.al at gmail

If you linked to big countdowns from four or five representative stations, that would probably cover just about everything (with obviously a huge amount of overlap, but linking to a few would safeguard against egregious omissions). Here's Q-107's last Labor Day Top 500, as an example:

http://www.q107.com/music/countdown/top500songs.aspx

see also: Classic Rock Radio Is Really Wierd When You Think About It

Ooh, aggregations from five labor day countdowns is a REALLY good idea. It'd be like the Scrabble dictionary.

i don't know where you'd find it but if you could find a list from say 2000 and 1995 and maybe earlier (though i really think it doesn't shift much until this century) to fill in gaps and round out the list (it blows my mind that classic rock radio doesn't play the fuck out of 'take me to the river' anymore) that should do the trick. maybe pull some playlists from around the country also as i've always suspected there's some regional variation at work here. this thing really doesn't need as deep a well to draw from as yr usual genre poll.

many xposts

i've always suspected there's some regional variation at work here.

This is 100% true - when I moved to Ohio from Georgia there was this long re-acculturation process, gradually realizing that everyone I met had heard this slightly different set of songs at every barbecue their whole life, different set of "oh hell yeah" songs at karaoke etc. I kind of can't think of any concrete examples right this second but it was basically what you'd expect - less Southern Rock, more midwestern meat-and-potatoes bands.

The Tragically Hip have six songs on Q-107's list. "?" says the rest of the world.

okay I've calmed down, I won't burn anything I promise.

everything yr saying is getting me hyped for the poll, some dude

esp this, seems v otm

like, i wanna cast a light on the rock monoculture before it really started to splinter: hard rock before it was metal, new wave before it was alternative, noodly country rock and prog before it was jam bands, power ballads before it was adult contemporary.

even if it hadn't been you posting it it wouldn't have take long at all to realize that list originated in canada. kinda disgusted at how low 'lunatic fringe' is on it tbh.

My "Lunatic Fringe" thread is one of the least popular things I've ever posted to ILM, I think we may be in a minority here balls.

I just made a pdf of the clearchannel list--will be sending it in a moment--and it has by my estimate over 1500 songs.

Lunatic Fridge is awesome, "final solution, ohhhhhh"

man rock monoculture was splintered by the time north korea crossed the 38th parallel /tosches

i basically start my days recreating this -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRfeK7jtvq0

/simmons

otm

When I was a kid in the late '70s, I think there were three FM stations where I lived that were basically "classic rock" format. One of them switched to a post-KROQ "rock of the '80s" format, but to me, this is what FM radio basically was. I don't know what else there was at the time - maybe a soft-rock station, though that might have been later. I think there were muzak stations on FM as well.

fwiw I made a made not to even open those threads b/c they looked annoying so you might have an audience that's much different

― Euler,

I'm sure it will. I didn't have anything to do with that tracks poll at all, it was all Ball's thing, but i do recall that pretty much nobody from these series of polls nominated or voted in it (like yourself euler) so I'm sure you will get very different results.

I am very sympathetic to the whole idea of a classic rock poll, because the era when rock radio turned into classic rock radio almost exactly coincided with my adolescence -- I was a witness to the ossification. When I started listening to what was still just "rock radio" in 6th or 7th grade, it was a current, going thing -- "You Shook Me All Night Long" was a recent hit, the Scorpions were just really breaking, lots of the '70s heavy hitters were still filling arenas, and Foreigner and REO Speedwagon were giant hit machines. By the time I graduated high school, all of that had somehow frozen into place and the local station that played it had rebranded itself as "classic." They played a little R.E.M., a little U2, a little Talking Heads, but basically they were rolling up the carpets and bolting the doors.

One thing, though: the Police and the Cars are absolutely part of the Classic Rock canon. They were the token New Wave acts granted full credentials.

That's interesting - so did Classic Rock really ossify in response to college rock rather than disco, punk, etc.? Wouldn't have thought there was enough of a 'threat' posed there.

Britain didn't have classic rock stations afaik. But it did have The Old Grey Whistle Test on telly, and most stations had some kind of 'drivetime' hour - I reckon between them they've got covered what you're talking about.

i wouldn't say that. if anything classic rock seemed to cement itself in the 80s, in opposition to the MTV hair metal on contemporary rock radio (which of course now fills classic rock playlists to an extent), and then when alt radio blew up in the 90s it just held its ground, until eventually it started to accent U2 and Nirvana as well.

so did Classic Rock really ossify in response to college rock rather than disco, punk, etc.? Wouldn't have thought there was enough of a 'threat' posed there.

You'd have to ask Lee Abrams, but I think it was a demographic thing -- way more Boomers than X'ers, so it made more sense to continue to cater to a base that was listening to less and less new stuff and was comfortable with what they (and their older siblings) had grown up with.

All this makes me want to hunt down books about rock radio and its formats and history.

From what I remember, it was fairly settled as a particular genre format even as early as the late '70s.

All of the above makes sense to me. An imaginary, impossible-to-write history I'd love to see would track the popularity of particular tracks/sounds (wooliness vs. streamlined, etc.) in classic rock playlists over time, versus other things happening in the radio rock landscape. Did the heavier/fuzzier stuff get a boost from grunge, or would Steve Miller Band have cut through the landscape clearer as an alternative to alternative? If you were a programmer in 1988 trying to make the station sound as little like Def Leppard and Bon Jovi as possible, which tracks from the 1500 would help you do that?

Dunno if that would have really been the way these things worked - might be just as simple as "people know and like the songs they know and like" but...

I used to know a couple of guys who worked at Radio & Records magazine back before it caved in -- I might try to hunt them up and see what they recommend. xp to self

The precise point at which "AOR" became "classic rock" is probably hard to spot, because it rolled out over a number of years from, I don't know, 1980 to 1985 or '86? The big change to me, as someone who was listening to it at the time, is that the playlists were added to pretty regularly until sometime in the mid-'80s -- there was still a sense of new things coming out, new bands, or old bands with new albums. When it became "classic," that was like musical chairs ending -- the canon was set, things that were in were in and there was a high bar to get over for things that weren't. At least, that's how it sounded.

This is a funny history of some of the same questions through the other end of the lens: year-end lists from our local "modern rock" station going back to 1978.

http://www.spiritofradio.ca/Charts.asp#1986

I like how ELO is #40 on 78's best list, and then #9 on '79's worst. Were CFNY listeners deeply disappointed in Discovery after Out of the Blue? Possible but doubtful--with the exponential explosion of new-wavey stuff, I imagine they just cast ELO out of their universe.

if anything classic rock seemed to cement itself in the 80s, in opposition to the MTV hair metal on contemporary rock radio

I don't even remember a contemporary rock radio format in the '80s. My experience was probably more that Bon Jovi and Def Leppard were being played a fair amount on the same stations that were playing Lynyrd Skynyrd and Aerosmith. (These stations might not even have been identifying themselves as "classic rock" until late '80s or '90s.)

xp

The AOR/Classic station in my town when I was young (85-90 or so) is all I really have to go on when remembering the early days of the format. I'd say they tended to lean more classic, because very little new stuff was being played. Also, Styx is the personification of "classic rock" for me because the evening dj there had a huge hardon for Styx.

Hey, you're just trying to plant display names.

Thanks, Johnny Fever!

haha