I. Hate. The. Radio.
To be quite honest, I'd like to use a few expletives in the previous statement as descriptives to show much I hate the radio, but I'll forgo that in the interest of public taste. In the mean time, just imagine the previous statement laced with horrible words of your choosing.
You know the feeling you got as a kid when you were rough housing with your sibling and he accidentally hit you in the nose and you became filled with rage? That's the feeling I get whenever I hear a Top 40 station, except it's that feeling for 8 hours on end.
I suppose a narrative may be necessary to provide the kind reader with some background here. I currently work in an office with 6 other women (my wife included), myself being the only male. These women all insist on listening to the same radio stations without fail everyday: Power 96.5, which is a Top 40 station that is repetitive even by Top 40 standards, and Alice 95.5, which claims to play "90's, 2K, and Today!". What this really means is that the station plays all the same songs as Power 96.5, but will play "Kiss Me" by Sixpence None the Richer or "How to Save a Life" by the Fray once in a while.
On a tangential note, "How to Save a Life" may be in my top 10 most hated songs of all time. I blame this mostly on a guy that lived in the dorm above me my freshman year that would play it on repeat in the morning, afternoon, night, and when I was trying to put my beaten soul to sleep. Seriously, if I'm ever detained at Guantanamo Bay, they will play this song on repeat to torture me, and I'm sad to say I'll break.
Sometimes, my coworkers allow me to change the radio station. "Fine" I think, "Anything is better than this drivel". Springfield doesn't have the best variety of radio stations, so I decide on one of the two classic rock stations in town. It's the case of out of the frying pan into fire- I am treated to AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long", Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll" and Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell", and again, these are played on constant cycles throughout the day. I want to drive over to the radio station, launch my car through the wall in an over the top fashion and fly out of my vehicle, shouting "YOU HAVE 40 YEARS OF EXCELLENT MUSIC TO CHOOSE FROM! WHY DO YOU KEEP PLAYING THE SAME TEN SONGS?" I then want to wrench the DJ's out of their chairs and play David Bowie's "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars" in its entirety, some lesser known Queen Hits, or other songs from Pink Floyd instead of "Comfortably Numb", "Wish You Were Here" and "Another Brick in the Wall". Don't get me wrong people, these are wonderful songs, but familiarity breeds contempt, and that contempt has been born, gone through puberty and is now an adult. An adult that I hate.
If you can believe it, sometimes I switch to country radio, as my coworkers tend to like it. I dislike country music, but most of the country music stations in Springfield are locally owned and operated, and thus don't play the same songs over and over. It's also fun to hear the local element- there are reports on the price of cattle, advertisements for feed auctions, and farmers discussing drought conditions. I can respect this.
This brings me to my next point. As some of you may know, most of the radio stations in this country are operated by an evil corporation called Clear Channel. In the late 90's, Clear Channel came to power because Bill Clinton signed an act deregulating the airwaves from corporate takeovers.The result was that big business won and ate everything. Clear Channel's approach to radio is to do market research to find the most popular songs possible in every genre of radio station, and keep pumping in these songs incessantly. Most live DJs have been eliminated as they are deemed to expensive, and much of the playlist you hear is the result of a computer picking tracks based on algorithms of what's popular. The result is that radio stations all across the country are indistinguishable from one another, and many of the independently run radio stations have been bought out or closed down as they cannot compete. The few independent radio stations that are left use the same format as Clear Channel as this is what hooks listeners.
People today also listen to the radio differently than they did years ago. Most people just listen to the radio in the car. Radio stations know this, so they repeat songs so often because they have found that most people want to hear songs they know when they turn on their car radio as they drive over to pick up some diapers for their whining child.
Also, radio today is not targeted at people in my demographic anymore. I am a male in between the ages of 18-34, and research has shown that people in this demographic don't listen to the radio. They have found that males tend to be early adopters of technology, and are using things like Spotify, Pandora, Sirius, or plugging their Ipod into their car and listening to their own music. Thus, all of the terrible Matchbox 20 songs, Usher, and Black Eyed Peas tunes play constantly because women like this kind of music, and women are the people that are listening to the radio. NOT ME. So if you're a woman, thank you for bringing this blight upon mankind.
Part of the problem could be me. I am either blessed or cursed with a very good memory, so every lyric of every song I hear is instantly recorded into my brain. The lyrics are then stuck in my head, bouncing around like some sort of tiny demon. At times, I want to re-instate the practice of trepanning, the defunct Middle-Age science of drilling into the brains of mentally ill people. Maybe drilling a hole into my head will allow these abominable sounds to escape. In the best case, the songs will escape my head and I'll never hear them again. In the other best case, I'll die and never have to hear these songs again.
There is one ray of light in this sea of darkness for me: NPR. As soon as my fellow employees leave, I flip the dial over to that station and get to listen to their excellent news stories, interviews with scientists and policy makers, and on Friday nights, I get to discover new, eclectic music. This is how radio should be done, and I am earnestly considering supporting NPR as they provide a service I use regularly. NPR really improves my life- it introduces me to new ideas, and I feel like I learned something, even if I listen to it for five minutes. If you don't listen to NPR, I encourage you to check it out.
Throughout this whole thing, you may be asking, "Why don't you just listen to Pandora at work?". The answer is that my job blocks any online radio players, and there is no sound on our computers, so I am forced to listen to the radio.
Thus ends my rant! Let me know what you think of the current state of radio. I realize my criticisms are nothing new, but I've felt this way for a long time and had to get it out!
