What is AOR?
And before you wiseguys give me the predictable answer, here's what I see as a basic, if not perfect, definition of this genre of music.
From what I read, it grew out of the practice of many of the FM radio stations in the USA for taking tracks from albums rather than just playing the singles, leading to its name, and acronym, which can mean both Album Oriented Rock or Adult Oriented Rock (and not, as I used to think, Airplay On Radio, though if you think about it that certainly fits. Then again, so does Awful Old Rock, so let’s say no more about it) which covered initially the radio format and then later became a catchall term for the genre. Essentially we’re talking rock here with a softer edge, rock with banks of keyboards, guitars that punch but don’t draw blood, and vocals that can always be understood. Another, perhaps less kind name for it might be Pretty Boy Rock, and in some ways AOR does share certain traits with what became known as Hair Metal. Not that there’s that sort of image in the genre - or indeed any image - but the idea of punchy, commercial rock finds its expression too in this genre.
Subjects are usually love songs, though not always, and some AOR can be downright political, but overall the bands tend to shy away from the more controversial subjects and go for the low-hanging fruit lyricwise. Not always of course, but it’s seldom you’ll see a protest song or anything necessarily politically relevant in an AOR song. Mostly AOR is about having a good time (or bad; crying into your beer in the ballads, or crooning outside your lady’s window in an attempt to woo her back) and much of it tends to look to the past, often wishing to undo mistakes. Doesn’t sound like much fun, eh? Well that’s the ballads mostly, though AOR has the ability to put sad/regretful lyrics into powerful songs - look at “Worlds Apart” by Journey as an example, or even (shudder) Europe’s monster “The Final Countdown.”
Anyway, if you want a better explanation of what AOR is, look it up on Wiki. I just wanted to give a basic idea of what I feel the genre is, what it encompasses, and what it is not. Overall, AOR is almost - but not quite, as we’ll see - exclusively a male-dominated area, even more so than metal, and therefore the lyrics tend to focus mostly on women, though again, this is not by any means all AOR is about. But if you had to describe the genre in three words, maybe “rock love songs” would not be all that wide of the mark.