'80s tunes become the new oldies - Yahoo! News: "NEW YORK - The music blaring from the speakers of a small pub on a recent Friday night seemed like typical oldies fare: Aretha Franklin's 'Respect,' the 1970s tune 'Disco Lady' and the 1950s surf instrumental 'Tequila.' Then, 'Karma Chameleon' — the 1983 hit by Culture Club — came on.
The music was from WCBS-FM, a New York-based station that used to rely on songs from the '60s and '70s, and occasionally, the '50s. Now, like similar stations around the country, WCBS has deemed music from the '80s as the new oldies."
11 comments:
well, much of the music from the 80's is 25 years old or older, which is one of the requirements for qualifying an artist for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame...er...isnt it?
oh, and a local classic rock station in Louisville has started playing Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Metallica, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I feel really, really old.
The "oldies" and "light rock" and "hits from the '70s, '80s, 90s, and today" stations locally are all Clear Channel, so they all play pretty much the same slate of music. The "oldies" station will sometimes have something from the '60s. They dropped '50s stuff a few years ago. Billy Joel and Elton John are on heavy rotation on all of the stations. Clear Channel, at least, must believe that all '50s fans are either dead, comatose, or deaf by now.
Well, they might have a point.
none of them play Strapping Young Lad. So who cares.
Gray hair aside, I started feeling old about fifteen years ago when a teenager claimed that he and his friends listened to the "classics" and named the bands I grew up with -- Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, and the like.
My mom and I were listening to an oldies lunch hour in the car one day and they played Running On Empty by Jackson Browne. I was momentarily speechless.
Then I started swearing.
Any song that came out when I was in school, any school, can't possibly be old enough to be played on an oldies lunch hour, right? Just agree with me here people.
All I choose to add here is that OLDIES BUT GOODIES collections started coming out ca. 1960 with songs that were all of five years old or so. Commercial hype is commercial hype. But, yes, where did that decade or so go?
But at least oldies are back in NY. Except for online, CBS gave up the oldies format about 3 years ago, fired the DJs (including the new morning man, Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees), and went to the Jack format, which sent me scurrying for the local classic rock station, WAXQ here in NYC. Now, oldies are back and we oldies fans are vindicated and if it means playing '80s music to stay viable, so be it. There's some good music in that decade, more than in the '70s. And they had to rehire DJs, too, although some had moved on. :)
All this explains why I have XM Radio.
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