This wasn't a big hit. Prince didn't become a big star until the 80s. When Doves Cry was 1984. Then Purple Rain. Boom!
The early 80s songs such as 1999 and Little Red Corvette get airplay now. But they weren't pop #1s.
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Songs that no longer fit the format?
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This wasn't a big hit. Prince didn't become a big star until the 80s. When Doves Cry was 1984. Then Purple Rain. Boom!
The early 80s songs such as 1999 and Little Red Corvette get airplay now. But they weren't pop #1s.
Does anyone know how KLTH in Portland performs 25-54? This station is literally still playing “California Dreamin” and is well back in to the 70s - “Fire and Rain”, “Summer Breeze”, “Build Me Up Buttercup”, “You’re So Vain” among the same older tracks WWSW plays. 90s music is also incorporated.
1067theeagle.iheart.com
Find the most recently played songs on 106.7 The Eagle
Find the most recently played songs on 106.7 The Eagle, Portland's Classic Hits Station
Yacht rock had a resurgence in popularity in the late 2010s, yet What a Fool Believes, Sailing, and Reminiscing have not been prioritized for airplay on Classic Hits radio, at least not the past 5 years.
Have you compared playlists? They may come from the same hard drive.
That's the thing though, Prince had NUMEROUS hits on the Black/Urban/Soul charts well before "Purple Rain" and "When Doves Cry." "Party Up," "Let's Pretend We're Married," "Little Red Corvette," "Delirious," "1999," "Lady Cab Driver," "Let's Work," etc., etc. And no young lovers could forget the R-rated, Quiet Storm staple "Do Me Baby"!
Yes, "Purple Rain," the movie and the song, may have made Prince a bigger star, but he had been a HUGE presence on the Black charts since his 1978 debut single "Soft and Wet," which is why I figured his earlier material might receive a warmer reception from the audience that heard it first.
I must add that Prince was booed when he opened for the Rolling Stones in 1981, two years after the now infamous Disco Demolition Night.
Using a multi-month rolling average, it is #3 in 25-54, #2 in 25-49, #2 25-34, #2 18-34. It does a bit better in women than men, but, for example in 35-64 it is 3rd in Men and 2nd in Women.
Sure but none of that factors into classic hits. Classic hits is based on what was playing on CHR.
But yes I agree he was a genius and a true star. When I program for me, he gets max spins.
Popular at classic rock but not classic hits. Songs are tested to people who are identified as most likely to listen to a given format. Obviously, classic rock and classic hits listeners differ on certain songs. I have a feeling that "1999" gets the opposite reaction. It's a classic hits staple that I hardly hear on classic rock radio.
And I am eternally grateful for that!
Could be worse. You could have emo rock creep into Classic Hits should they play more music from the 2000s.
You may have to still deal with an increasing amount of "yacht rock" on America's Best Music stations (long known to have an Adult Standards format), even if Classic Hits stations haven't warmed up well to such music.
I hadn't heard about the booing incident, and while I certainly don't condone it, I can't say it surprises me. While Prince rocked out pretty hard and could shred with the best of them, he was Black, and being Black was associated with disco, and disco was a highly polarizing genre (in the United States, that is) so it looks like Prince got a raw deal.
Give me "The Freshmen" and "One Last Breath" over "Reminiscing" and "Sailing" any day. Of course, I've been a P1 for country for much of the past 40 years, so it's not like I'm actively looking to hear those mopey early 2000s hits on my radio these days. The only reason I know of the Verve Pipe and Creed hits is that I was turned off by the way country music was going during those years and listened to all sorts of stuff.
Yes, you're right. I'm a pretty big Prince fan so I got carried away!!
Reaching #11 in early 1980, not bad for his first popular song.
Not among his strongest. Even the man himself didn't perform it much. But in his last tour, he still would do Little Red Corvette.
The artists know which of their songs are the hits. Because they see the response from the fans.
1. The Rolling Stones made their career by playing "Black music," aka the blues. In fact, today (7/12) is the 60th anniversary of their debut at the Marquee Club in London.
2. Being Black was associated with disco? On what planet did that occur? Certainly some Black folks did (as did White folks), but not all, especially considering rap was ramping up in the late '70s. I lived in Chicago during the Disco era, and most of the fans of that kind of music were either of Puerto Rican or Italian ancenstry -- at least, the ones I knew. Also... the Bee Gees were Black? 🤯
Right here on planet Earth, United States of America. Yes, there were White disco artists, but the genre was still closely linked
with Black people. And while that shouldn't be considered a negative thing, it certainly was. An even bigger "problem" with disco was that it was associated with gays, think "YMCA" and "In the Navy," what do you think those songs were really about? Think Chandler Bing's father singing "It's Raining Men." Surely this didn't go over your head. The double-whammy of being associated with two groups that were not, and are not loved by all, helped put a stake in disco.
(Fun fact, I always wanted to go to a disco, but the fad was so short-lived that by the time I was 21, or even 18, it was over.)
Below is a link to a Guardian article about the aforementioned Disco Demolition
Disco Demolition: the night they tried to crush black music
When a DJ called on listeners to destroy disco records in a Chicago stadium, things turned nasty – and 40 years on, the ugly attitudes behind the event ring out loud and clear
Below is something from Reddit. Moderators, please remove it if I didn't credit it correctly.
On reddit, music blogs and other places in recent years, there have been countless stories about how Disco was hated/killed because it was largely made by black and gay musicians. The reason why disco demolition night and other rock radio stations/rock fans/rock magazines targeting disco was because they were racist and hated black musicians.
BeeGees, Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, Rose Royce, KC and the Sunshine Band, Lipps, Inc.,Tavares, Irene Cara, Rose Royce, Salsoul Orchestra, Gloria Gaynor, ABBA and lots of lesser known groups that did extended mixes mostly for clubs.
The genre in the 70's included Blacks, Hispanics and lots of plain old white folks. If you add the European influence , it was pretty international. And disco did not die in in 1980 in much of the rest of the world, particularly Europe and Latin America.
In the US, yes.
I think that is totally invented by people who want to make racism the cause of every social event in history. I programmed a disco station in Puerto Rico in the early 80's, and did not sense any ethnic label being put on the genre. On the mainland, I was with and AM/FM that included Y-100 in Miami in 1980 and we still did lots of disco events after disco died in most markets... and the attendees were predominantly non-Hispanic white and Hispanic.
WKTU in New York had a predominantly white and Hispanic audience. The PD was white, the MD was Newyorican.
The Chicago "disco demolition" was done by a rock morning guy from an album rock station. The event was propelled by rockers hating disco, not white people hating blacks.
Heck, the most important music industry label for disco was (white) Niel Bogart's Casablanca where the head of promotion was (white) Scott Shannon.
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Chicago house music trailblazer Vince Lawrence, age 15 when he was an usher at Comiskey Park that day in 1979, recounted what happened in this Yahoo Music article from 2019:
The Loop advertised that if fans brought a disco record to be detonated on the baseball field on that hot July night, they’d get in for the discounted admission of 98 cents. Fifty-thousand people turned up, which was more than three times the average attendance for a game, and 5,000 over the venue’s official capacity. It was the job of Lawrence and his fellow ushers to collect the records and put them in dumpsters by the entrance gates. That’s when Lawrence first noticed something wasn’t right.
“I was like, what the f***? People were bringing [blues/soul singer] Tyrone Davis records to this thing, and they were still getting let in for 98 cents. I mean, there were people bringing in Marvin Gaye records, Stevie Wonder records. Black records,” Lawrence recalls. “So, get this: I went to my chief usher and I bothered him, like, ‘Hey, do we have to let them in if the record is not a disco record? Because I know what disco records are.’ They said, ‘If they bring a record, let them in.’ Now, what's interesting is there were lots of ‘black disco mistakes,’ let's call them. But didn't notice any ‘white disco mistakes.’ Like, no one came in bringing a Supertramp record! So, maybe Steve Dahl wasn't actually saying, ‘Hey, just bring your black music in, we're going to blow it up,’ but it's funny how that's what happened.”
Once again, my point is that Black people were closely associated with disco music even when they actually were not. Here's the link to the full article.
www.yahoo.com
The Loop advertised that if fans brought a disco record to be detonated on the baseball field on that hot July night, they’d get in for the discounted admission of 98 cents. Fifty-thousand people turned up, which was more than three times the average attendance for a game, and 5,000 over the venue’s official capacity. It was the job of Lawrence and his fellow ushers to collect the records and put them in dumpsters by the entrance gates. That’s when Lawrence first noticed something wasn’t right.
“I was like, what the f***? People were bringing [blues/soul singer] Tyrone Davis records to this thing, and they were still getting let in for 98 cents. I mean, there were people bringing in Marvin Gaye records, Stevie Wonder records. Black records,” Lawrence recalls. “So, get this: I went to my chief usher and I bothered him, like, ‘Hey, do we have to let them in if the record is not a disco record? Because I know what disco records are.’ They said, ‘If they bring a record, let them in.’ Now, what's interesting is there were lots of ‘black disco mistakes,’ let's call them. But didn't notice any ‘white disco mistakes.’ Like, no one came in bringing a Supertramp record! So, maybe Steve Dahl wasn't actually saying, ‘Hey, just bring your black music in, we're going to blow it up,’ but it's funny how that's what happened.”
Once again, my point is that Black people were closely associated with disco music even when they actually were not. Here's the link to the full article.
'Let's blow up this black music!': The ugliness and unrest of 1979's Disco Demolition Night
Some say an anti-disco rally in Chicago 40 years ago was merely protesting a musical genre, but others argue something nastier was at its core.
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