AOR and why I don't like it.

Album Oriented Rock (AOR) is one of the most commercialized forms of pop music, imo. Built on the premise that "independent" minded DJ's played whatever they wanted to on early 70s radio stations, until the record industry saw big money being thrown away and wanted to influence the FM playlists. Payola now went to studio executives who hired "program directors" to pick songs for the DJs to play. Songs that were now only part of record albums, as singles were now redundant. So, many of these so called "deep cuts" were played in daily rotation just like singles. The list of which is endless: Blinded By The Light, Come Sail Away, Born To Run, all of Fleetwood Mac's side one songs from the Rumors album, etc., etc. To be honest, some of these songs are quite good rock music, but their over saturated broadcasts and commercial origins tarnish them for me. What say you about AOR?

Edited by SteveG - March 19 2020 at 09:21

Never as in never listen to radio, unless I drive a very short car-ride, so i dont care what they are playing.

Reading reviews during my early days on this site lead me to believe that AOR was another term for MOR or Adult Contemporary. My conclusion nowadays is many that throw the acronym around in reviews to bash post-artistic-peak albums by prog bands don't even know what AOR is. They can be forgiven though because before we even get to tagging a genre, there are two variants by name of what AOR is anyway. SteveG has gone the "Album Oriented Rock" variant, which in my mind should be a separate thing from "Adult Oriented Rock", which is what AOR is as well. What is most annoying to me though is the term Adult Oriented Rock, which is a terrible and misguiding name for a genre that could hit closer to the mark by being called Arena Rock. 

Jeffro wrote: SteveG wrote:   To be honest, some of these songs are quite good rock music, but their over saturated broadcasts and commercial origins tarnish them for me. What say you about AOR? I don't give a rat's ass about categories or origins. If the song sounds good to my ears, I like it.  I will agree that over saturation is a problem. There are many songs I used to like/love that frankly I never need to hear again.

ah, the ever convenient "no and yes" answer.

Edited by SteveG - March 19 2020 at 10:22

Jeffro wrote: SteveG wrote: Jeffro wrote: SteveG wrote:   To be honest, some of these songs are quite good rock music, but their over saturated broadcasts and commercial origins tarnish them for me. What say you about AOR? I don't give a rat's ass about categories or origins. If the song sounds good to my ears, I like it.  I will agree that over saturation is a problem. There are many songs I used to like/love that frankly I never need to hear again.  ah, the ever convenient "no and yes" answer. yeah but over saturation is not exclusive to AOR.

true, but that's the fault of modern Classic Rock Radio.   Another one on the top of my hit parade.

Edited by SteveG - March 19 2020 at 11:43

As mentioned, AOR can mean various things (album-oriented rock, album-oriented radio, adult oriented rock and radio, a sort of melodic rock, arena rock, Andalusian Oriental Raga....). I commonly value quirky, off-beat music expression, and I found it generally seemingly too conservative for my tastes. I also associate it with a certain kind of Americana that I don't like.

I love much American folk, psychedelic music, jazz, art pop, blues, soundtracks/ library music, academic/ art music, electronic, avant-garde/ experimental music and more, but I have negative associations with AOR. I don't care that much either about radio saturation as I'm not a big radio listener when it comes to music at least, but when I was listening to classic rock radio, certain AOR stuff just, well, it just didn't resonate with me at all.

As The Cars was mentioned, I like early The Cars, but I don't associate that so much with AOR as later stuff by the band ("Candy-O" in particular is for me a great track). There's a lot of music hits that did get played a lot on FM radio, such as Madness' "Our House", that I continued to like.

Funny that no one posting (mostly from the US) mentioned the other A word that is used in this context - 'American' . For those from the UK this was music that was peculiarly a United States style of music and epitomised by Foreigner , Toto, Kansas , Boston and eventually by Styx and the utterly dreadful Reo Speedwagon. I'm not trying to be xenophobic about this ( I don't need to try lol) but it did seem like 1% inspiration and 99% drivel. Another explanation for its existence I've heard is that the massive stadium acts like ELP, Genesis , Floyd and Yes stopped touring and something had to take its place. It was radio driven but that was less obvious to us here as we didn't listen to US radio! That said I can list at least half a dozen so called AOR songs that I love. Perhaps the earliest might be Chicago 25 or 6 to 4. Of course its an incredibly cool track that's not really considered 'AOR' but I think of it as very early example of what was coming. Stuff like Carry On Wayward Song and More Than A Feeling is also great even though the formula is emerging and becoming more obvious. I will also admit I have a massive soft spot for Toto -Africa . That was such a deceptively delightful record if ever there was one.

Edited by richardh - March 19 2020 at 16:13

I think of “AOR” as more of a radio format than a style of music. If it is a style, what is it exactly? When you think about it, Boston and Fleetwood Mac have very little in common musically, yet they’re two of the first bands that come to mind with that term. The pejorative nature of the term today comes from over saturation and (possibly) some resentment at those bands’ continued popularity when most of them haven’t released anything new/decent in decades. Enough already, we cry. But ya know? I can remember a time when Foreigner sounded pretty damn cool, and those songs that were the coolest continue to get played today. So they serve a nostalgic purpose at least.

Bad Company's debut is a very solid album.

Sean Trane wrote: I have a bit of a problem with AOR as a concept It seems that the Album Oriented Rock actually meant in the early 70's about Prog bands and assimilated, and the North American FM radios often played big chunks of albums, sometimes a fill side. This wasn't financially viable for private radio stations, which didn't have many commercial spots to air between 9 or 15 minute tracks.  However, the AOR concept changed in the mid-70's, when Adult Oriented Radios (FM stations, going to compete with AM stations) chose singles and commercial tracks lasting between 3 and five minutes from rock albums (and their singles) and thus being able to insert much more add slots Thus, you'll understand that I generally like Album OR, but dislike Adult O Radio

Unfortunately, this is the popular misconception of AOR as Adult Oriented Rock. It's not a business term that was ever used by either the record industry or FM radio stations in the 70s. This a concept that appeared in the late 80s and has no bearing on Album Oriented Rock, which is what my post is about, exclusively.

Edited by SteveG - March 20 2020 at 06:34