This Chicago Tribune article looks at the radio format traditionally called “The Oldies” and how that has become a moving target as time has inevitably marched on.
As the article mentions, the original concept of the “Oldies” format was music from the beginning of the Rock-and-Roll Era in the 1950s up through the early 1970s. But generation creep has pushed the music of the ’50s right off of the radio except for very niche stations and the occasional one-night-a-week special program, while extending the other end of the spectrum all the way through the rest of the 1970s and well into the 1980s. If you have listened at all to stations that had billed themselves as “Oldies” stations in the last ten years, you will have had the experience of hearing plenty of Billy Joel, Bee Gees, and maybe even Bon Jovi in the same programming block as The Beatles, Bachmann Turner Overdrive and the Rolling Stones…but probably not a single song from earlier than 1968.
This article was of interest to me since it focuses on the development of the format in Chicago back in the mid-1980s, which is when and where I first “discovered” the music of the 1950s and fell in love with the original “Oldies”. I fell out of the habit of listening to commercial radio back in the 1990s, when I went through a period of only listening to NPR, and then I stopped listening to radio entirely after I bought my first iPod. Over the last couple of months, though, I’ve started turning the radio on in the car now and then and typically go back and forth between a pair of stations that both run the format that has evolved from the “Oldies”: the very aptly named “60s-70s-80s Hits”. The playlist on one of the stations is surprisingly and pleasingly heavy on earlier 1970s funk, while the other is more focused on late 70s-early 80s rock, though there’s a pretty good amount of overlap on stuff like Elton John and the Bee Gees. Neither one really captures my interest strongly, but both have enough music I recognize and enjoy to keep me listening when I am waiting to pick up Charlotte from school or driving down Rt. 93. In the end, I am mostly left feeling that I need to get off my ass and get my music collection back into usable form so that I don’t have to listen to either of them.
