What strikes me about this Top 40 countdown is the almost total lack of significant new acts in it. Except for Christopher Cross, Air Supply, and Kim Carnes, virtually the entire rest of the survey consists of (1) the same cast of aging veteran performers who had been charting and dominating the charts so long most of them had already become legends, and (2) several one-shot pop and C&W artists who never even made it past 1980. Name one person who remembers Rocky Burnette, Robbie Dupree, or Johnny Lee. For the most part, if you wanted any excitement at all in the music you had to turn away from Top 40 and toward British or other new wave/punk. Some switched altogether from rock to country (Billy Joe Royal and the group Exile come to mind). 1980 was indeed a watershed year musically, but in mainly a negative sense. The loss of John Lennon merely added to it. 1980 and '81 marked a breather period between disco and MTV, when the state of Top 40 was like What do we do now? and started to die as a radio format because the music was fragmenting and no longer uniting people under the one banner of rock 'n' roll as it once had. When Stars on 45 hit #1 and ushered in a host of similar "medley" records, it seemed to me as though rock music had momentarily paused to take stock of itself and everything it had accomplished in the previous 25+ years before moving on. Top 40 radio appeared to go thru a similar self-congratulatory stage in 1974, with records like Rock and Roll Heaven, Life Is A Rock, and W.O.L.D. complementing it. But the changes in the music itself in the early '80s went deeper, and the primarily video-oriented hits from 1982 onward are remembered and celebrated more by Gen-Xers than us Boomers. Don't you agree, as in Hollywood Squares? Jeff
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Posted By: Jeff on: 09/07/2006 19:10:32 EDT