When we bought the Acura it came with 90 days free of XM Sat radio. Trust me, it wasn't what clinched the deal, but what the hell. I programmed in some favorite stations and have actually come to like the lack of static, absense of commercials, and wide choices available. Of course the whole narrow banding of genres is just one more way for all of us to lose any sense of commonality, but that's what this country is all about: the opportunity to insulate myself from anyone else and their potentially alien choices.This freedom of choice in the USA drives everybody crazy.
Anyway, enough of the tirade. The stations I programmed aren't anything special; a great pure jazz station, a fascinating station that plays nothing but stuff from the 40's (if you've never heard Doris Day's, It Depends On You, you've missed a masterpiece), BBC world news, a great latin station that occasionally turns up some narcocorridos, and some others. One of the ones I programmed in fancies itself a version of an 80's alt station and calls itself FRED. Hits and album cuts from 80's bands, some of them fringe, bump up against one another 24 hours a day. It's a bit of nostalgia, and and as it goes not bad because most of the music has been vetted. When's the last time you heard the Replacements, Gary's Got A Boner, on the radio?
The strange thing I've noticed of late is that every time I punch over to FRED they're playing a Mekons song - I mean every time. It's never the same song, but it never fails: go to FRED, hear the Mekons. Now if FRED is someone's idea of an 80's station do they imagine the Mekons actually got played on the radio in the '80's? To that degree? It's as if they are desperately trying to revise history by dumping the crap and latching on to the stuff most people slagged or ignored.
It makes me wonder about that 40's station I'm so fond of.
1 comment:
Ah, but that's the science of the lookback and the winnowing down of the canon -- which is always odd around pop. Look at all of the stuff on those retro '80s compilations -- there's always a few cuts that were never even released in the U.S. until a decade later.
The part of it that makes me so nauseous is the way people get suckered into thinking "the good old days" were in fact all that good, as the detritus that dominated at the time gets shaken out and buried. Like the weirdoes who only listened to classic rock during my high school years in the mid/late '80s -- "Music was so much better back then." Why, no -- you just happen to be into the dozen artists that have been vetted over time....
Post a Comment