Radio Radio

It doesn't seem so long ago that Elvis Costello ( Declan McManus) was singing those words in the heart of the punk revolution. There are several other songs I could have chosen, R.E.M's "Radio Silence" would be appropriate, so would Joe Jackson's, " On The Radio". All are iconoclastic tunes from the same era, an age when radio was alive, it bristled with excitement about what new music would show up on any particular day. Radio isn't like that any more. Radio is a business, and creativity is nothing if it isn't making money. So Here in Metropolitan New York, the hippest city in the world, there is no good commercial radio to get exposed to new artists. Radio has been choked by the bean counters. Of course the listeners are also to blame.
When I was in college, I had an instructor for one of my radio classes, and he kept on saying,
" You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American audience". I sat in those classes thinking to myself, 'It's the 1970's, this isn't the nineteen twenties, Americans are educated, informed and alert, we're not a bunch of dupes!'. Boy, was I ever wrong! We're worse than saps, we're a bunch of sheep, lemmings following the lead of whoever is out in front.

I grew up in a time when radio was playing everything that came out, entire albums got played to let us decide what we wanted to hear, now it's a bunch of doofuses who decide what we're to be force fed. The legendary rock station in New York was WNEW F.M. I heard so much from listening to them, not only music but opinions about the times we lived in. The disc jockeys went on tangents playing stuff that came to mind as they went along. It was exciting. There are now only two so-called rock stations in New York City. The classic rock station plays a steady diet of stuff that gets played over and over on a daily basis. This stuff has been around since the nineteen sixties and yet they cannot find enough to vary the play list so we don't get bloated listening to it. I think Billy Joel is an extremely talented song writer and musician but I don't want to hear "Miami 20/17" every day. This goes for all the other stuff that's crammed down our throats, and yet every day I hear people call in saying how much they love this station,. These are the ones that my professor was talking about. American Idiots! There is another station that plays some of the overlapping music. Sure they play Cheap Trick's " Surrender" and "I Want You To Want Me" but none of the other great Cheap Trick tunes ever hit their airways. They tout themselves as the only station in New York playing new music, it's semi true but it's so watered down with the leftovers from the nineties that it sounds as static as the stuff the Classic Rock station plays. For months I heard the airstaff raving about a hot new band called, The Black Keys. They only played one song and it was mediocre to a painful degree. It's title is "Tighten Up". I kept thinking, "If they're so good, how come they only play one song?" In the 1960's there was a band called , Archie Bell And The Drells, they had a song called "The Tighten Up" which was also a dance. Back in those days, there were all sorts of stupid dances, The Watusi, The Frug, The Freddie, The Swim, The Pony, and a myriad of others. John Travolta could do a hundred more "Pulp Fiction" movies to get them all in. But the Archie Bell song was more memorable than the Black Keys tune, and it has long ago faded into obscurity. The Black Keys record company has released another song to be pounded into our eardrums. I don't know the title of this one, but it sounds like a mash-up of Gary ( I'm Not A Child Molester) Glitter's Rock And Roll Part II. Needless to say, I turn away whenever either of those songs pop up on the dial. Much of what they play, I have a similar feeling towards. I don't think it's an age thing, because much of the stuff I love, but it is so watered down that any impact is negated. The Cars released their first album in twenty years and it sounds pretty good from the one song they've played, but if it gets no support from radio stations it will end up in the back rack with all the other stuff that's gone unplayed. Late in 2010 DEVO released a new recording, that also sounded like the vintage stuff they put out, but it got no support from radio and it never was more than a curiosity, I can't even recall the title of the disc.
So we're going to be hearing a lot of Supertramp's "The Logical Song" and the typical Beatles, Stones, Who, Led Zeppelin, blended in with Tom Petty, Van Halen, Spruce Stringbean, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, etc., etc., etc untill we cannot stand it anymore, the ratings on those stations fade and they're taken over by Spanish and Eastern European language speaking stations, and that's the dollars and cents of it all. Radio is NOT our sound salvation, Radio is pure frustration...with apologies to Elvis Costello.