At FMX we have always bobbed and weaved a bit to reflect whatever was popular at the time. It's simple, you're always going to have a soft side and a hard side and what constitutes those two is always changing.  Yeah, we played some funky stuff in the 1980's in particular.

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So the 1980's were a weird time. MTV came along and influenced was was considered "rock", so naturally lines got blurry for a bit.  So in order to show you how out of place this stuff was, I'm actually going to put the videos up.

Tina Turner ruled over the rock landscape in 1984. I guess a lot of the rock programmers at the time still remembered her tearing it up with Ike in the old days.  The song "What's Love Got To Do With It" is still one of the biggest songs of all time. Still, I would say the few spins that "Private Dancer" got, was the low point for us:

I tell this story all the time. When rap first came out, it had hard rocking guitars on it, so a lot of people assumed it was "rock". KFMX was one of the first radio stations in the nation to play "rap" when we got our copy of "Walk This Way" by RUN DMC and Aerosmith. Yeah, sorry for that whole "helping rap get started" thing.

I remember FMX was brought into the Prince era kicking and screaming. Our program director at the time refused to play them until the record company begged him to go see the movie.  After he saw the movie, we were playing Prince the next day.  We played practically ever song from the Purple Rain soundtrack and even a little bit from 1999 and whatever the heck the album after Purple Rain was.  I don't know if any one song was a "low point", but once we played "Raspberry Beret" we quit playing Prince altogether. Unfortunately Prince does not allow his videos on YouTube, so you're spared this one.

So, in place of Prince, wow about a little Culture Club? C'mon, Boy George was everywhere!  We didn't play "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me", but I remember we relented to the Boy's hugeness and played "Church Of The Poison Mind" when New Wave was big.

Do you even know how big the Rocky movies were?  Unless you were there, the answer is "no you don't". For a while there all the world revolved around the movie Rocky and it's sequels.  Rocky IV brought us the Godfather Of Soul and "Living In America".

Were Katrina And The Waves rock? I guess at the time they were. Now this song is all over the place from kids movies to commercials. It's hard to believe that we ate this stuff up like chocolate pudding at the time.  Yeah, we were partially responsible for "Walking On Sunshine".

So our list of "disgraces" could be a lot longer, but I'm pleased to say that while many rock radio stations were convinced to play "Beat It" by Michael Jackson (because of the Eddie Van Halen guitar solo) we never did.

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