What makes a band safe?

The control room at WWYO in Pineville, West Virginia. Source:https://jeff560.tripod.com/wwyo.html

I’m not the sort of person who goes around all willy-nilly calling any band that doesn’t particularly strike a chord with me ‘safe’. I don’t get any kicks out of doing it, either–lumping musical groups under a one-word label often feels reductive and quite rude. (Can you imagine that? A music critic worried about being rude?) But, alas, there is a good amount of rock and roll groups who are, in many different aspects, safe. 

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are safe. Barclay James Harvest are safe. Three Dog Night are safe. Supertramp are safe. John Denver is safe. Fleetwood mac (1975-onward) are safe. This isn’t a statement made to disparage any of these bands (except for Fleetwood Mac, but that’s another essay for another day), but is more intended to be an accurate assessment of their characters. 

When a band is Safe, they are the kind of group you could bring your dear, square conservative mother to see and she won’t have a single complaint about them. She won’t object to any of the lyrics (so long as she doesn’t pay too much attention or, goodness forbid, read into anything), and the instrumentation will be simple and relatable for her. You could easily play their latest top forty hit-single on your AM radio bands for her and she wouldn’t tell you to not play that sort of filth in the house. 

Safe bands are things that are generically popular, and are usually the first to be picked from the grab-bag of the limited playlists of today's FM rock stations–thrown in there right along with Sublime and Jane’s Addiction (unfortunately). They strictly adhere to the conventions of whatever their day is, and god forbid you even think of them doing anything else. Their words often don’t address any serious situations, and when they do it’s usually poorly written or in bad taste entirely. They are uncontroversial and have little to no innuendos or suggestive turns of phrase, and violence is something almost never to be touched. They are primarily easily consumed singles lacking anything hard to digest, thrown into a collection of mediocre, forgettable songs when it comes album time. 

Now, there are two aspects of songs that make a band safe: Instrumentation is a bit more self-explanatory when it comes to it being safe. You won’t find the expansive musical landscapes of a Yes song or the grueling, faux hippie-blues-cum-hazy-coke sojourns of a Led Zeppelin song. The instrumentation, apart from the solo, operates almost strictly as a backing track without much thought seeming to have been put into it. It doesn’t need much skill to pull of, and it doesn’t stray from being comfortable and AM radio friendly to keep as wide an audience as possible. You won’t find songs that are divided up into different movements or that stray from the standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-(verse)-chorus structure, which causes them to become bland and repetitive quickly. Safe bands love sticking to their guns. 

Instrumentals are generally unsafe. I wouldn’t call The Allman Brothers Band’s “Jessica” safe simply because it goes on for seven and a half minutes, even though there’s nothing in it that would cause your dear square conservative mother to think you’ve suddenly morphed into a longhaired acidhead (something that would do that is, say, The Nice). 

Lyrics are where it gets a bit trickier. If I can imagine someone like David Cassidy or Donny Osmond singing your song and it doesn’t seem far-fetched and out of place, then your lyrics are safe. However, the lyrics of most bands that are safe cannot be imagined being said by David Cassidy or Donny Osmond, which thus gives us a different lyrical category to organize these bands by that only serves to further complicate things: A ‘straight’ lyric. 

A straight lyric can be strictly applied or loosely applied, and they are either safe or not safe. A ‘straight’ lyric is one that is relatively straightforward, easily understood by a wide audience with minimal metaphors and which could be sung perfectly well on a BBC show in the seventies without any fear of censorship. This does not always mean a lyric is safe. 

What makes a lyric safe is an overly simple lyric designed to be catchy while having little to no real substance. If there is any, it’s barely surface level and there is absolutely no thinking at all involved when listening to the song. Generally on the cheesier side, there will never be anything even implying objection-ability in it. Often they feel condescending. The groups that primarily have these kinds of lyrics are the pure 70s pop ones: people like Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds, Yvonne Elliman, Loggins and Messina, Seals and Crofts, shlock like that. Oh, and Joan Jett. 

Most bands who’s straight lyrics can only be loosely applied are not safe: Buffalo Springfield, Brownsville Station, The J. Geils Band post-blues, Slade, things like that. Most bands who’s straight lyrics can be quite strictly applied are safe: Steve Miller Band, Carly Simon, Dire Straits, Bruce Springsteen, CCR and such. 

There is, however another category of band that isn’t safe but is adjacent to it. And those bands are just Good Clean Fun. 

When a band is Good Clean Fun, your mother would only detest them if she pays a little too much attention to the lyrics (either there’s something crude in there or they’re confusing) or the instrumentation is just a little too much for the AM radio crowd to handle. They also–sometimes but not always–tend to not take themselves or their songs too seriously. They’re upbeat and that’s all that matters. 

Good Clean Fun bands also tend to have a more accessible style of playing, but they aren’t afraid to get creative with it and throw some hard-edge or a little taste of experimentation into it. They aren’t afraid to occasionally address more serious topics, and they often do them well. Their lyrics are layered with innuendos, controversy and violence (not all at once), but since their lyrics are just straight enough they still have big hit single and AM radio potential if they can manage to get popular enough. They draw a much bigger teen audience then the safe bands do, and for good reason. In the rock industry, if you can’t win over the 15-25 crowd, then good luck getting out of that pit you’ve sunken in to. 

Bands like The Cars, Cheap Trick, Grand Funk Railroad (unfortunately) and T. Rex perfected the idea of being a good clean fun band and being widely popular, but there are a good amount of groups who are good clean fun and just never managed to reach the same feats of popularity. Face Dancer, Starz, Zebra, Pat Travers, etc. (check Travers out–he’s got a great voice). 

The safe bands also have a bad habit of making monotonous and homogeneous albums–Technically this criticism can be applied to the good clean fun bands as well, but the difference here is that a good clean fun band has a certain spark that makes each song distinct and enjoyable while a safe band does not. Most of a safe band’s songs that aren’t played on the radio are just background noise while with a good clean fun band there is always a lot more to be had outside of just their most popular songs. 

There are a few bands that should fit in certain boxes but don’t. The Babys are a great example of a band that should, by all means, be good clean fun but doesn’t fit into that box, nor do they the safe one. They have all the makings of a good clean fun band and don’t suffer from the monotony that plagues the safe one, but instead their just off in their own little world. Kiss should be good clean fun but is safe, and J. Geils (post-blues) should be safe but is just good clean fun. I guess that’s what happens when you try to categorize bands, there’s always so many that fall through the cracks. 

As an offshoot of good clean fun we also have bands that are just stupid. They’re fun, but they’re just a little stupid. The only examples I can conjure up on that so far are Styx, Grand Funk (who lack just enough substance to fit mildly into this category) and Foreigner, but I’m sure that if I ever get more into eighties music I can accurately provide more examples. 

In conclusion, most bands you come across won’t be safe, but when they are you certainly can tell. If you don’t want your music collection to get jammed with a bunch of lackluster albums, CDs, cassettes, or even 8-tracks, then I’d say to just steer clear of those low-hanging fruit groups and make a real effort to find something worth your while–go bin diving whenever you get the chance and maybe tune in to Little Steven’s Underground Garage some time.