More overplayed songs, according to our readers
Reader comments keep coming in, and this one stopped us mid-scroll. A reader who spent over fifty years as an underground DJ left a response to a recent article on classic rock that was less a comment and more a verdict: the problem isn’t identifying the great songs, it’s what radio did to them. The reader named a list and signed off with a link to their podcast. We took it as a challenge worth accepting.
If you have your own take, submit them at Ask MediaFeed and follow us to stay part of the conversation.
Stairway to Heaven — Led Zeppelin
Professor Mikey called it genius burned to a crisp, which is the most efficient summary anyone has managed. The damage wasn’t done by one person or one station. It accumulated across thousands of FM program directors independently reaching for the song that filled seven minutes without incident. Rolling Stone keeps placing it among the greatest rock compositions ever recorded and that assessment hasn’t changed. What changed is that most listeners stopped being able to hear it. The familiarity got there first.
Rhiannon — Fleetwood Mac
Most classic rock stations have decided that Fleetwood Mac begins and ends with The Chain and Go Your Own Way, which means Rhiannon keeps getting filed in the second tier despite being one of the stranger things to ever chart. Stevie Nicks wrote it after reading a paperback novel about a Welsh witch on a tour bus. Rolling Stone calls it Stevie’s signature song, and if you go back to it now, the thing that hits is how far Nicks takes the vocal without any apparent safety net. Most singers would have started pulling back. She kept going.
Fly Like an Eagle — Steve Miller Band
Steve Miller Band’s relationship with radio is basically The Joker and then a long silence, which is a strange editorial choice given what else is in the catalog. Rolling Stone voted the album its best of 1976. Listen to that opening synth sequence and try to place what it sounds like. It doesn’t sound like 1976 and it doesn’t sound like anything around it on the radio. That kind of sonic displacement usually means someone made a genuinely strange decision and got away with it.
Free Bird — Lynyrd Skynyrd
At some point, this song became the thing people yell at concerts to disrupt a moment, and it’s hard to remember when that transition happened. Rolling Stone places the live guitar performance among the greatest in rock history, and that’s not a courtesy ranking. Most people who think they know it have only ever half-listened, from the punchline to the next thing. It requires nine minutes of actual attention that nobody gives it anymore.
What’s Going On — Marvin Gaye
Rolling Stone named the album the greatest ever made in 2020. Radio largely ignored that verdict. The reason probably has something to do with what the song asks of a listener, which is more than most programming directors want between a car ad and a weather update. It doesn’t resolve into comfort. It remains in question, which is what makes it extraordinary and genuinely hard to slot into a rotation built around songs that make people feel okay about where they are.
Start Me Up — The Rolling Stones
In 1995, Microsoft paid to license this song for the Windows 95 launch, and Rolling Stone has documented the Stones’ catalog extensively enough to put that transaction in context. What it did was replace the song’s original meaning. Most people who were alive during that campaign now hear the ad before the music. The actual track is a Tattoo You performance that builds from the first chord with the kind of momentum the Stones were still capable of in 1981 and wouldn’t reliably produce for much longer. It deserves to exist outside of a software launch memory.
The bottom line
Professor Mikey spent fifty years in underground radio because mainstream rotation keeps making the same mistakes, and his list is a clean inventory of what those mistakes look like in practice. Keep the suggestions coming using the Ask MediaFeed option below.
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