The story of 2011’s breakthrough records may not be those that moved radio forward, but those that slowed it down. Programmer-turned-Episcopalian minister Josh Hosler clocked the tempo of Top 40 last year and found that, depending on how you looked at it, 2011 might be the most relentlessly uptempo year ever. The songs that broke through were the records that brought the radio to a halt—the hits that brought the ballad back with a vengeance. Were they a trend? And, for that matter, would you want them to be? In any other era, Adele’s “Someone Like You” would have been a sign of a Top 40 downturn—this year, we were glad it could still happen.

In 2011, Top 40’s mother/daughter coalition stayed put, for now. “Turbo-Pop,” the 125 b.p.m. cauldron of techno, pop, R&B, and teen punk, started to repeat itself, but it also offered up two of its best, most fully realized hits at year’s end, between David Guetta & Usher’s “Without You” and Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” The only sign that one-size-hits might not fit-all was the growth, especially at the young end, of Country radio. Country, which did nothing overt to welcome its young listeners during the boom of 1990, was actually holding school spirit contests this year. There was also some possible blowback at Hot AC, although it’s hard to tell if there was a conscious effort or just more available pop product that led to a slightly less rhythmic stance at year’s end.

So now the songs that signified a possible change at radio in 2011—not a comprehensive list of the year’s biggest hits, but certainly the songs that might not have been hits a year earlier. Whether the year’s biggest surprise is an outlier or a game-changer remains to be seen. I stopped writing articles about a pop/rock comeback after the one I wrote in 1991 that included “Losing My Religion” and “I’ve Been Thinking About You.” But unlikely hits deserve acknowledgement, so we must start with:

Adele, “Rolling In The Deep”
Adele, “Someone Like You” – When I called “Rolling In The Deep,” then being played primarily at Triple-A and Hot AC, my record of the year (at least so far) in early 2011, one CHR PD friend wrote “really?” And I found myself in a Tweet war with another PD who dismissed it as no likelier to be a real hit than Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” or Duffy’s “Mercy.” Instead, both of Adele’s smashes were proof that there was life beyond "Turbo-Pop." It also proved that the “quality” after-dinner CD in everybody’s collection didn’t have to be something that would never work on the radio—progress from the Norah Jones era. And then “Someone Like You” quieted all that talk about PPM hating ballads. And, by the way, I’ve seen recent Hot AC music tests where Amy Winehouse and Duffy do pretty well.

If CHR was to take the correct message from Adele’s success, it would be that the next very mass appeal record could still be coming from anywhere. The wrong message would be to “play a bunch of ballads” or to load up on prestige records with no oomph. At the end of the year, a number of prominent artists were leading off their albums with surprisingly mellow midtempo ballads, which is not, in the aggregate, what the format needs.

The Band Perry, “If I Die Young” – Country emerged in 2011 as “The Other CHR.” It was the other format that played current hit music in large enough quantity to send it over (at least occasionally) to CHR all warmed-up. It was the other format that could sell songs in the iTunes Music Store. It was also the format that did an increasing number of school spirit contests, a decided change from even a few years ago when PDs and GMs declared young-end listening nothing more than a nice bonus. So it didn’t take a Taylor Swift-size social media buzz to make 14-year-old girls aware of this song six months before CHR PDs were willing to do something about it. But it’s typical of their refusal to be properly pro-active with Country that I’m writing about a 2010 hit that got played at CHR in 2011. And, again, it’s not like I want the format to fill up with death ballads.

Jay-Z & Kanye West, “N**as In Paris”; Drake, “Headlines,” DJ Khaled, “I’m On One” – Sometime around the second half of 2011, Hip-Hop records began to reappear in the upper stretches of iTunes without (or in advance of) Top 40’s help—and not particularly CHR-friendly Hip-Hop either. Being able to go from Drake to Lil Wayne to the hits that featured Drake and/or Lil Wayne didn’t necessarily solve anything for Urban radio, which still had issues with tempo and overreliance on all of the above artists, (plus Nicki Minaj). But it was nice to see the format calling the shots again sometimes.

Alexandra Stan, “Mr. Saxobeat”; Afrojack, “Take Over Control”; Martin Solveig & Dragonette, “Hello”; Rihanna, “We Found Love” – As recently as 3-4 years ago, it was difficult to find three legitimate pop/dance songs to represent the genre in a radio station’s music research. In 2011, you could have tested separate cluster of superstar singer/arena-filling DJ collaborations and another pod of specialist-label one-offs. (And, hey, the “dance” labels still have to work twice as hard to force those songs halfway up the charts, so there must be a difference between the two, right?) On majors or indies, these songs were triumphs of “real dance” in 2011—sonically aggressive songs that couldn’t have made it 18 months earlier (or, for that matter, during techno’s previous 1992 heyday).

Pink, “Raise Your Glass” – It wasn’t soft or relaxing. And neither was Mainstream AC, which made it their No. 6 song of the year, explaining its presence in this 2011 wrapup.

COUNTRY BECOMES THE OTHER CHR

Jason Aldean, “Dirt Road Anthem” – It says something interesting that the ballad, “Don’t You Wanna Stay,” was the crossover—not the young-end reaction record. But KEEY (K102) Minneapolis PD Gregg Swedberg says it was the summer record of 2011, at least for Country radio, and one that single-handedly helped attract new audience.

Zac Brown Band, “Keep Me In Mind”; Eli Young Band, “Crazy Girl” – Even more than his other hits, Brown’s “Keep Me In Mind” could have been on Top 40 and “mellow rock” radio in fall 1977 between Firefall’s “Just Remember I Love You” and Dave Mason’s “We Just Disagree.” In that regard, Brown really is the new Garth—the mellow-rock Country act with the arena-rock Country following. But if Garth gave a 35-year-old James Taylor fan a place to go when Top 40 was getting/getting/getting kinda hectic in the early-’90s, his successors are bringing the sound to at least some listeners who never heard the original.

Toby Keith, “Red Solo Cup” – It wasn’t only late ’70s soft rock that Country plundered this year, it was late ’70s Country as well. This novelty (save, perhaps, for one word) could have been on Country radio in fall 1977 next to “Take This Job And Shove It.” (The same goes for new Craig Campbell single, “When I Get It.”) It just shows that the “new country” is actually a dozen different coalitions—’70s traditional, ’70s soft rock, ’90s female singer/songwriter, post-Taylor Swift teen acts—and healthier than ever for it. “Red Solo Cup” also earns its spot here by being a top 10 iTunes single almost entirely on the strength of Country airplay (although Sirius XM Hits 1, always the first to understand the significance of a song like this has now come along).

AN INDIE POP/ROCK BREAKTHROUGH, ALMOST

Foster The People, “Pumped Up Kicks” – In the mid-’80s, probably around the time Randy Travis was recording “Forever And Ever, Amen”—the New York Times wrote a story about the diminished relevance of Country music. We know how that turned out, so take heart Rock fans in the Times’ Jan. 1 wrap-up on the state of rock that dismisses everything between Chevelle and Hot Chelle Rae as “the most numbing year for mainstream rock music in history.” The article also tries to take down those few acts that did seem like positive bellwethers for the genre, including Black Keys and Foster The People, which it dismisses, oddly, as “soul-infused lite-rock of the 1980s.”

If the NYT article had instead derided the “Torches” album as smoothed-out indie pop/rock—the codified version of other more ambitious albums—it wouldn’t have been the first to make that observation, but at least I would have thought they’d actually listened to the record, since MGMT and Peter, Bjorn & John come to mind far more easily than, say, Tears For Fears or Go West. In an excellent series of comments (see below) reader Tom Smith suggests that FTP was the indie pop/rock breakthrough I’ve been predicting, but if so, it’s not quite a breakthrough on its own terms.

As with Adele, I’m not willing to decide whether this is a groundswell or a one-off yet. The encouraging indie pop/rock stories of 2010 (Black Keys, Florence + the Machine, Mumford & Sons) were still the best other stories that 2011 had to offer. Foster The People isn’t guaranteed another hit (although the “Torches” album definitely has songs that should be hits). And you can’t be sure that Foster The People (or Adele) will pave the way for different sounding hit records (although Gotye is looking good).

But “Pumped Up Kicks” was still proof that a hit record could incubate at Alternative radio—even if Top 40 was almost entirely unlikely to notice until the song was worked to them six months later. And proof that a rock edge and a pop center were additive together. And perhaps validation that a lot of the eclectic pop that defaulted to Alternative (where it was often doomed to mid-chart) would have a place at Top 40, if only it could somehow come to PDs’ attention.

As in 1992, another “Modern Rock Revolution” probably can’t take place at radio until there’s a Nirvana and Pearl Jam to drive it. But worse things could happen to Rock radio for the time being than to load up on those records that are pop at their core, but just rock enough to fit. If there were a “Pumped Up Kicks” or Neon Trees’ “Animal” every six weeks instead of every nine months, there would at least be enough cume-friendly music for the format to play, until the next galvanizing act comes along.

SONGS THAT DIDN’T CHANGE THE RADIO

There are also some interesting stories in songs that didn’t become hits:

Coldplay, “Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall” – One of the few instances this year where it didn’t work for a superstar act to follow the beat. And it was that much more ironic because “Viva La Vida” had been so important in redefining what sort of non-rhythmic record could still work.

Taio Cruz, “Hangover”; Britney Spears, “Criminal” – Proved that there were apparently some messages that parents still didn’t want their kids to listen to. Cruz, who’d already joined that short list with last year’s “Dirty Picture,” found that binge (and purge) drinking was seemingly not OK, even if ménage-a-trois and having a warrant out for your arrest was. “Hangover” was significant in another way. While the U.S. market has become Jamaican in being able to accommodate multiple similar tracks at once (think of this as being on the Avicii rhythm), there are clearly still limits.

Rihanna, “You Da One” – She helped cement the now common strategy of approaching an album’s street date with a first single in power rotation at radio and a second single in “power new.” “You Da One,” as it turned out, isn’t headed for power, despite immediate support across CHR and Rhythmic radio. That’s no big deal from a career standpoint. Rihanna is a steady supplier of hit records, and nobody begrudges her an occasional “California King Bed” or “Shut Up And Drive.” But it does point out something interesting. The same CHR PDs who no longer immediately plumb a new superstar album for the next potential single have no objection to being two tracks deep on an artist, as long as it’s the song the record company chose. (Special credit here to the dozen or so Rhythmics that are playing “Talk That Talk” in double-digit rotation. Or, for that matter, to the CHRs who tried to get something going with Coldplay & Rihanna’s “Princess Of China.”)

Finally, regular reader/correspondent Tom Smith sent his own wrap-up of 2011 (which also touches on the indie-pop/Foster The People connection, among many other great observations). Rather than excerpt them, I felt Smith’s comments deserved a chance to be read separately.

And what songs do you think represented a change in the radio in 2011? Please leave a comment.