100.3
There’s a new station in L.A., it bills itself as "World Class Rock".
Wow, I’m glad they told me, I was worried they were only going to play SHIT! That’s the problem with radio stations today, they just won’t play the good stuff. We want the hits, and they won’t give them to us. They keep subjecting us to obscure cuts only geeks will like, that won’t play outside of Peoria, we need WORLD CLASS ROCK!
You wonder why radio is in trouble. It still believes it’s functioning in the happy news era of the seventies, like the Internet never happened. Do these radio pricks watch MTV or VH1? Have they ever noted the irreverence, the irony permeating our society?
Oh, don’t tell me about the morning shows, all that crap on the other stations. 100.3 is trying to appeal to an upper demo, it bills itself as AAA. Thank god we’ve got a station that will finally play the acoustic version of "Layla". I haven’t been able to hear that in EONS! Can’t fire it up on YouTube, can’t steal it, can’t rip the CD… I’ve been living in the wilderness here in Santa Monica. Thank god these bumpkins from Bonneville have come to my rescue!
Your only hope of surviving in the terrestrial world is to serve your location, a paradigm given up when Clear Channel started broadcasting the same tripe in every market. It’s the era of personalities. The music is secondary to the CLUB! Make me feel like I belong, in the era of social networking isn’t it hilarious that terrestrial radio has abdicated its power! We’re not in a heyday of music innovation. The music shouldn’t come first, the deejay should. He should guide and inform. With useful information. He should show his rough edges and his smooth ones. We can get aural wallpaper from our iPods, with guaranteed "World Class Rock", featuring the same oldies you’re playing, but with nothing we don’t like, why should we tune into your station? Does anybody ever contemplate this when they’re doing the ethnic cleansing known as research that eviscerates tune-outs and leaves music with no character? It’s kind of like Jennifer Grey… She got rid of her prominent proboscis and it ruined her career. She was just another cute girl, no different from a thousand Hollywood wannabes. Whereas she had been Baby, the imperfect suburbanite who came alive by dirty dancing in the Catskills!
Then there’s that canned voice that comes on every few songs to inform you that your music is back. But this speech has been combed over by so many execs that the disembodied male isn’t really saying anything. Just endless cliches, guaranteed not to offend. How about saying that the other stations SUCK, and now there’s a new one, break the radio dial so it’s stuck on ONLY this station! That would get the driver’s attention. That would get him calling his buds on the cell phone to ask them if they heard this coming out of the speakers, that it’s a RIOT! But no.
It’s like there’s two codes in America. The establishment, what you’re supposed to do, the mainstream vision… And the Internet.
Hillary Clinton voted for the war because conventional wisdom was you needed to do this to become President, to satisfy those leaning red, you couldn’t be a Democrat and be soft on defense. This mistake singlehandedly doomed her campaign. The press didn’t even catch on to Barack’s power until he’d strung together a run of victories that was impossible to ignore. They’d already anointed Hillary, how could this be?
The press, the government are behind the public. And radio too. The public is hip. And time-constrained. It’s got little patience for bullshit. It wants honest information, instantly. The way things are going there won’t be any music on terrestrial radio soon. Because the stations are being programmed for automatons, people who don’t exist.
