Raised on Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine, and Payola: The AOR Glory Years

Music biographer Rees (Shooting Star) pieces together a colorful if crowded oral history of album-oriented rock and its key practitioners, including Journey, Bon Jovi, and Def Leppard. The genre emerged in the disco-dominated mid-1970s, as record execs brainstormed a mix of polished pop melodies and hard rock suited to the increasingly popular FM radio format. Rees traces the genre’s history in chronological chapters, unraveling its roots (radio executive Lee Abrams describes wanting to develop a highly commercial, radio-friendly genre where listeners already knew the artist; another executive notes that the aim was to create songs that “giv[e] you goose bumps... even before the vocal comes in”); the origins of specific bands, like Toto; and how the genre influenced the music industry, including by inspiring the 1981 debut of MTV, which featured music videos by AOR bands. (The channel ultimately contributed to the genre’s decline, however, as the popularity of music videos began to erode “the sanctity of the relationship between listener and radio,” according to solo artist Billy Squier.) Rees nicely balances the expected tales of sex and drugs with more intimate, revealing disclosures from AOR acts, even if the cocktail-party cacophony of quotes may confuse readers less familiar with the era. Still, superfans of 1970s and ’80s rock will find this a screaming good time. (Feb.)