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By the late seventies, FM had become paradigmatic, and the college stations were burgeoning and sometimes influential. As opposed to commercial stations, which were committed to a highly restrictive “Top 40” format, college radio was fairly free-form in its programming. College stations saw promulgation of lesser-heard groups as their responsibility; their sacred mission. They were staffed by music enthusiasts who worked without pay, and who saw college rock as a desperately needed alternative to the platinum tedium of “classic” and Top 40 drivel.
While university students certainly comprised some of the audience of college rock, all kinds of people were potential listeners. Still, because of its ivory-tower associations, a certain type of education and class background were assumed of both the producers and consumers of college rock. If Lou Reed and Iggy Pop are the “godfathers of punk,” Roger McGuinn and Jonathan Richman could arguably be considered the alpha college rockers.
College rock often had a vaguely political or satirical bent. After the campus takeovers of the sixties and seventies, universities in the 1980s were still considered progressive institutions, places where social consciousness and political activism could be found alongside toga parties and keg-stands. Universities had deftly weathered the culture wars of the sixties by pretending to be outside of commerce—benevolent institutions created as places for pot smokers to congregate and talk trash. By the eighties, St. Elmo’s Fire, Animal House, and the Reagan-era frat revival were incinerating all traces of campus radicalism, but there were still a few lingering totems of the student power movement; one was college radio. College rock could therefore be seen as a last gasp of the revolutionary student movement of the sixties.
College rock could be defined as a middle-class and art-conscious permutation of radio rock, without the Year Zero pretensions of punk. Though just a scant decade earlier rock ’n’ roll or “rock” had been vaunted as the vanguard of a new revolutionary consciousness, by the seventies it had become codified, established, and even conservative; particularly since its courtship of the country music audience with its “Southern rock” gambit (which begat Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, America, Molly Hatchet, Crazy Horse, et al). At the other end of the spectrum from rock’s Southern affectation was rock’s punk mode, which—though initially entertaining—had become alienating, remote, militant, and noxious (-looking and -sounding). A college rock variant was therefore necessary for casual middle-class rock fans, left cold by heavy metal, punk rock, Southern rock, and the breezy West Coast sound of Steve Miller Band, Fleetwood Mac, and the Eagles.
As previously mentioned, college rock’s musical characteristics are not necessarily apparent to the listener. While it had some of the same bourgeois sensibilities as modern “indie” rock, it lacked the willful obscurantism. Indie rock is marked by “slacker” cynicism, aloofness, introversion, and formalism, whereas college rock was still goofy, political, risible, idiotic. There was hope and playfulness in college rock. It was still rooted in the ambition of making a “hit”: popular music for radio play. College rock had to be fun; frat rock (i.e., Swingin’ Medallions, Kingsmen, John Fred & His Playboy Band) and soul revues had long been mainstays of campus life, so college rockers were under pressure to entertain in a visceral way. Therefore, there was often a novelty, populist component to college rock that is missing in today’s opaque, elusive, and willfully obscure “indie” world.
Many college radio stations had powerful bandwidth and far-reaching influence. These stations published their own nationally syndicated newsletter (College Music Journal or CMJ) about college rock trends and happenings. As a result, college rock’s production values (with regard to discernibility, high fidelity, etc.) were configured for perceived “mass” tastes. Still, it was distinct from normal rock in that it was elitist, artier, and pandered to the Anglophilia of its middle-class audience. While college rock was informed by punk, new wave, and other subterranean trends, it was more “M.O.R.,” with a roots element that would have been eschewed by those more radical elements, intent as they were on artifice, newness, aesthetic orthodoxy, and the destruction of tradition. Popular college rock bands included Violent Femmes, Guadalcanal Diary, REM, Love & Rockets, Robyn Hitchcock, Feelies, Shriekback, Fleshtones, Rank and File, Replacements, Hoodoo Gurus, Pixies, Elvis Costello, Haircut 100, Throwing Muses, XTC, the Church, Connells, and Let’s Active. Most groups from Britain or Australia were given sanctuary at the left of the dial as its campus programmers would read the Anglo accent as cultured or educated; “one of us.”
Simultaneous to the college rock phenomenon, the “yuppie” archetype of monied liberal connoisseur had been developed—a foil to lingering postsixties leftist boomers. The yuppie was an adult version of the privileged campus longhair who had outgrown the juvenile provocations and naive politics of his youth and now had a “pragmatic” approach to changing the world. This mostly consisted of buying things that were sensible, bourgeois, and decorous, such as Volvo station wagons and imported Italian olive oil. Their coed activist impulse was channeled in adulthood into improving their “quality of life,” using material things which reflected their values: quality, wholesomeness, worldliness, and decency. French cheese, Scandinavian design, Italian espresso, olde-time American folk traditions, and many of the same sundries that would have been admired by the folk and protest movements centered around sixties college campuses.
The yuppie lifestyle was itself a cousin to the “Back to the Land” movement of the hippies; a protest against the grotesque mechanization of fast-food culture and the pervasive plastic crap of postwar America. But while the hippies’ attempt had been revolutionary, the yuppies’ concerns were merely aesthetic.
Central to the yuppie ideology was mature pragmatism; activism, communes, and protest weren’t pragmatic and carried few palpable dividends. Making lots of money, though, was considered very pragmatic. Political opinions were measured. Shrill voices were a sign of imbalance. Privilege was to be enjoyed, though not too ostentatiously; this was in poor taste. Yuppiedom was heavily rooted in the Protestant aesthetic of moderation and decorum. Liking a sports team was a stand-in for community outreach; wearing a proletarian-style ball cap with the logo of a favorite team showed solidarity with the less fortunate better than any donation ever could.
As yuppie tenets became codified during the eighties, its adherents needed a mouthpiece through which to promulgate their values, spread their seed, communicate to one another, and also define themselves. This would be vital for them if they were to develop their ideologies, as well as to grow and flourish as a people. NPR, a public radio project of LBJ’s Great Society legislation, was chosen as their party organ. Instead of becoming a target and whipping boy for “small government” privatization proponents (as the libraries, public schools, US post office, Amtrak, and NEA famously did), NPR grew muscle through generous donations by well-heeled corporate sponsors (Joan Kroc of McDonald’s donated $250 million, for example) and set to work colonizing station after station at the end of the dial—right where the college stations traditionally hovered.