Contemporary Usage
The term "middle of the road" is used pejoratively by genre-specific music aficionados to describe musicians who avoid "edgy" (innovative) material, and who calibrate their musical appeal to commercial, popular musical taste. For example, in writing about Mariah Carey, critic Sasha Frere-Jones characterized her music as "appeal to people who don't, otherwise, listen to pop. These are people who probably also like Andrea Bocelli and Céline Dion, singers who avoid the sexual tug of the blues, and the glorious noises of rock and hip-hop, in favor of tremulous expressions of chaste emotion". Artists such as Westlife (pop) and Train (rock) are considered middle-of-the-road musicians.
Moreover, MOR also pejoratively describes a musical band's creative and commercial progress from the innovative path to the tried-and-true-pop-catalogue path. For example, Pitchfork Media's review of Duran Duran's Rio said: "The band peppered the 80s with a number of hot singles (most of which can be found on the unstoppable side A of Rio) before departing for MOR country." The lyrics to the song "Hit Factory" (by Godley and Creme, in the record album L) include the phrase: "MOR is safe. MOR is here. MOR is you." Nonetheless, middle of the road music currently has a following among people fifty years and older, and is found under the rubric of adult standards and nostalgia radio.
Read more about this topic: Middle Of The Road (music)
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