One could say a similar thing about country music. It's artists primarily live in Nashville. The songs for the most part are written in Nashville. The music is mostly recorded in Nashville using Nashville musicians. The record labels have offices there. A lot of country music institutions are there. There is an entire media structure based in Nashville.
And the average country fan wants to know how many pounds Jelly Roll has lost this week, not what studio he laid down his latest tracks in or who has a new building on Music Row.
Lew Dickey even named a bunch of his radio stations "Nash."
And how did that go for him?
And yet amazingly, the music is played on radio stations around the world.
Mostly in just a few English speaking countries, mostly Canada, Australia, and a bit in England. In the rest of the world, country is either a niche genre or has spawned a local variety, such as in Germany... in German.
The idea that all things American are world famous is absurd. "The World Series" for decades only had American teams. Even now, baseball is of limited world interest, with just a few pockets of interest outside the United States.
My point is that the inner workings of entertainment sources, whether movies, radio, TV, music or the like, are generally not of mass, wide-spread interest.
In radio, it used to be "the thing" to talk about "Dallas" the morning after a new episode. That was because fifty or sixty million might have watched a key showing (90 million for "Who shot J.R?") with many more wanting to know even if they did not get to watch. Today, a TV show gets 8 to 10 million viewers at best... meaning that probably only about 1% to 2% of your listeners even watched it. Same for baseball, even most basketball games.
There is very little that radio can talk about in the fields of entertainment that listeners either don't already know or simply don't care about.
However, when Nashville radio stations play country music, they often make reference to some of the geographic facts I listed above. In my view, that was an opportunity missed by KLOS for its yacht rock special. But that's just me.
Until you started bringing it up, I never thought of yacht rock as being geographically identifiable with any city or area. It's not like country with Nashville or Motown with Soul or Blues with New Orleans.
The amusing thing about yacht rock is that every magazine or online article about the genre has a different perspective of what songs are and are not in the genre. Obviously, the answer to all this is to recruit a sample of people who like a montage of what everybody would call yacht rock and have them score hundreds and hundreds of other songs that might fit the broad category.
This is what would solve the question of whether "Go Your Own Way" without Lindsey's guitar solo is yacht rock or not. It's a listener decision, not one made by "experts" and "music critics".
www.955klos.com
