In September 1988, I had been at Billboard for three months when the new “Modern Rock Tracks” chart debuted. That launch is a happy memory during a happy career moment. I left the publication in 1992 as the “New Rock Revolution” was starting, with Modern Rock, R&B/Hip-Hop, and Country all generating the type of excitement that Top 40 was not at the time.
In September 2018, Billboard’s Alternative songs chart turned 30 years old, touching off a lot of articles on the chart’s early days, its long-out-of-use original name, and the odd mix of music that the chart comprised. There were so many articles that I didn’t feel the need to chime in, but there was always a lot of speculation in those articles, particularly about that name.
Now, as the 35th anniversary approaches, Stereogum’s Tom Breihan has launched a weekly subscriber-only look at the chart’s No. 1 songs in order, a companion to his successful Hot 100 column. In that column, and particularly the comments, there’s a lot of attempts to parse Billboard’s intentions at the time. Breihan senses that Billboard “didn’t really have an agenda”; some respondents saw the chart as a reaction to CMJ’s college radio charts or the Alternative coverage in The Gavin Report.
Here’s what I remember:
In 1983, “Modern Music” had a short-lived boom/bust cycle. The success of KROQ Los Angeles meant that programmer Rick Carroll was able to launch similar stations in Philadelphia, Seattle, and more, but of the format’s “Class of ’83,” only XETRA (91X) San Diego took hold. Others, like KEGL (Eagle 97) Dallas, would eventually end up in Mainstream Top 40. In general, there was enough “new wave” on MTV, CHR, and even Album Rock radio that there wasn’t a full-time opportunity in most markets.
Through the mid-’80s, the few dedicated Alternative stations were embedded in the regular Album Rock charts. When I worked at trade publication Radio & Records in the mid-’80s, there were stations like KTCL Denver and KCGL Salt Lake City that continued to report AOR. Some, like WHFS Washington, were holdouts from the “progressive rock” era of the format. A song that was a hit for all these stations might make the lower reaches of the below-the-chart listing of “new and active” titles. But usually, there wasn’t a lot of consensus among those stations.
By 1988, another format up-cycle was under way. The turning point was when KITS (Live 105) San Francisco segued from Top 40, a reaction to one of the first-generation stations, KQAK (The Quake), dropping the format. Owner Entercom was a small-group operator in what was mostly a field of mom-and-pops. Live 105 continued to report to the CHR chart for its first few years, and that put it in front of the industry in a way that even KROQ and 91X were not. The biggest success story, CFNY Toronto, was already drawing mainstream, not niche, numbers. CFNY wasn’t on many American programmers’ radar. When the chart was launched, we had to use CFNY’s Buffalo, N.Y., ratings as a workaround to include it.
The format pioneers of 1988 didn’t have the chart they needed. In between R&R and Billboard, I was briefly a copywriter at WDRE Long Island, N.Y., the once-and-future WLIR. WDRE cheerfully did its own thing, scouring the import bins and often championing songs and even bands that didn’t get played anywhere else. (One of them, APB, can still play New York gigs 40 years later.) But I still remember being frustrated along with PD Denis McNamara by the album-only Alternative trade charts that made it hard to identify whatever consensus hits there might have been.
By 1988, there were acts with major followings and not enough chart evidence. At WLIR, you certainly saw that Depeche Mode and the Cure were arena acts, but there was also “Forever Young” by Alphaville, still the station’s No. 1-requested song after four years. For Billboard’s Ron Cerrito, the format’s first chart manager and later president of AWAL North America, it was watching 10,000 Maniacs have a top-30 album without a song on any of the radio charts. (That example was one of the ones that made it into the chart-launch story.)
By 1988, there were fans at Billboard. The agenda might have been as simple as that. Cerrito saw the 10,000 Maniacs-type stories, but was also playing in punk and alternative bands himself. It was his enthusiasm that head-of-Billboard-charts Michael Ellis remembers as key at the time. Billboard editor Ken Schlager and I were fans going back to Alternative’s beginnings, and I had certainly left WDRE as a believer in the format’s new potential. I don’t remember if the Billboard sales department was clamoring for the chart, although they were certainly supportive once it arrived.
The decision to track songs was controversial. I also don’t remember any spoken intent to play catch-up to CMJ or Gavin. If anything, their being album-based was our opening. Not everybody was happy about that at the outset. Cerrito remembers going to the 1989 Gavin Report convention and being screamed at by label reps who still wanted an album chart only. But he also remembers looking at monitors of Live 105 and others at the outset and seeing that stations were already using songs as their unit of currency.
There was no single name for the format. KROQ was famously the “Roq of the ’80s.” Other stations were “modern music” or “new music” or felt that positioning the format at all was to pigeonhole it. “New wave” sounded quaint. “Alternative” already begged the “alternative-to-what?” question, but it also committed the format to niche status, I thought. Live 105 was using the “modern rock” name, which we all liked, although I remember that term going back at least to the first format boom.
“Modern Rock” and “Triple-A” were always linked. Anybody writing about that first Alternative chart always notes with bemusement that Tracy Chapman, Edie Brickell, and 10,000 Maniacs sat alongside Erasure, Escape Club, and the Psychedelic Furs. That dates back to the mid-’80s, when progressive AOR holdovers like WXRT Chicago had to fill the need for both. With WKQX (Q101)’s switch to Alternative still three years away, stations like WXRT and KBCO Denver were part of that first Modern Rock panel.
By the mid-’80s, there were also a lot of “alternative” acts that were essentially AC acts with more provocative haircuts — whether first-gen acts (Tears for Fears, Thompson Twins) or newer (Dream Academy, Johnny Hates Jazz.) Oddly, some of the Dream Academy/Prefab Sprout acts also found a home at the more conservative Album Rock format that was reacting to the rapid growth of Classic Rock. That conservatism was indeed part of the impetus for a Modern Rock chart, and also slowly helped Active Rock take hold as well.
In 1996-97, Modern AC splintered off and took the female singer-songwriters (and the softer male-led acts) with them, ending the Jewel-to-Tool era of Alternative. That changed again when “true.alt” stations started to assert themselves again in the mid-’00s. Today, Alternative, Triple-A, and particularly non-commercial Triple-A are all larger formats than they were in 1988, but they’re all relatively short-spaced to each other.
In 1988, Modern Rock was basically a cooler, alternate-universe Top 40. It would have been even more so if it had acknowledged Hip-Hop. (I had my own version of the format in my head that summer. That one included “It Takes Two” by Rob Base & DJ EZ-Rock and “Don’t Believe the Hype” by Public Enemy, and I called it “Loft Party CHR.”) I didn’t see “CHR, but cooler” as a bad thing, especially after a summer of Chicago and Richard Marx ballads at Top 40. We celebrate today’s younger listeners not having silos, but they certainly formed unlikely coalitions in 1988 as well. (That said, format partisans were always adamant about what fit and didn’t, even if everybody’s personal tastes differed slightly.)
When Modern Rock rocked out, the Alternative name came back. In the early ’90s, the positioner many stations used was “the new rock alternative,” which covered all the bases. Ironically, “Alternative” as the enduring name for the format took hold around the mid-’90s, when grunge and punk had helped make the format truly “modern rock.” When Active and Alternative splintered again in the mid-’00s, the influence of SiriusXM’s “Alt Nation” had a lot to do with “Alt” becoming the station handle of choice.
The Modern Rock vs. Alternative debate continues, even if we don’t call it that. Alternative’s big moment didn’t come until 1993-95 as a guitar-based format. When that gave way to 95% overlap with Active Rock during the Limp Bizkit/Linkin Park era, Alternative programmers weren’t happy, but they’ve never been truly happy with the less-defined, poppier version that took hold afterward. They were particularly unhappy during the brief moment when 24kGoldn’s “Mood” brought rap into the mix. Meanwhile, some of the more rock-leaning stations in the format are those that have done the best job of recreating the mid-’90s coalition, and its ratings.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com