RAISED ON RADIO

An oral history of the hard-to-define, easy-to-love rock music genre.

You might not have heard the term “album-oriented rock,” or “AOR,” but you know the music when you hear it. The genre that ruled the airwaves in the late 1970s and most of the ’80s, AOR was marked by melodic, hard-edged rock with high production values: Think Journey, Heart, or Kansas, and imagine you’re driving down the highway on a hot summer night, and you’re on the right track. Music journalist Rees tells the story of the genre’s ascendancy, which at the time “was as much the reigning soundtrack of Middle America as country music is today.” Rees credits the beginnings of AOR—originally a radio-industry term of art—to Boston’s self-titled 1976 debut album and its smash-hit lead single, “More Than a Feeling.” Its success led to hits from other bands, including REO Speedwagon, Styx, and Toto, which delighted listeners but rankled critics: As Dennis DeYoung of Styx said, “The fact of the matter is, Foreigner, like all of those bands in the ’70s, were immediately dismissed by people in the rock press. Because they had the audacity to write memorable songs that people liked.” MTV debuted in 1981 and maybe led to the genre’s eventual decline: Rees flags Billy Squier’s so-bad-it’s-just-really-bad 1984 video for “Rock Me Tonite” as a canary in the coal mine for the genre, which lost its appeal to mainstream listeners who ended up turning to country. Rees does a great job compiling quotes and anecdotes drawn from interviews with musicians, producers, and journalists; it’s a tightly edited oral history that manages to be both informative and entertaining. He also makes a good case that the genre never disappeared but rather “seeped back into the mainstream” and “ingrained itself into the fabric of American music.” This is a deeply fun look at music that might have lacked hipster cachet but, for a period of time, defined a nation.

A treat for 1970s and ’80s rock fans who never stopped believin’.