A post that originally appeared on the WUSC-FM Columbia DJ blogs in 2008
In independent broadcast radio we are well aware of what car CD players and digital inputs have done for business. I would be lying if I said that I listened to independent radio all day, all the time. Often, the radio is what I turn to in those times of need when I cannot possibly listen to the Smiths greatest hits or that “Happy 21st Birthday!” mixed CD one more time. But every so often, longing to relive the early days of my radio love, days when I listened to the radio for Southern rock and Burt Bacharach songs, I’ll flip around on the dial and see what commercial radio sounds like these days.
Wow. Commercial radio has gotten really unbearable. Like reuniting in the grocery store with a former classmate who has clearly given up on their youthful idealism, there is no longer any common ground. While I’m sure I’ve changed a little, I can’t help but feel that commercial radio has done the real 180 in our relationship. If you dial up any two classic rock stations, you hear the same ten bands repeated. The adult contemporary stations are just… you know, bad. The music that those commercial stations play is just ungodly… and I regularly listen to Diamanda Galas and Anton LaVey, so I’m not just tossing the term “ungodly” around all willy-nilly, I really mean that angels cry every time a “rock” station plays an Eddie Money song. Commercial radio is so bad now it is more than a coincidence; it is a conspiracy.
So, here’s my question, does the C.I.A. get some sort of kickback every time the radio plays a Phil Collins song? Maybe someone at Clear Channel owes someone in Genesis a favor? I’m not really sure what is going on, but I swear that in the thirty minutes I was flipping between commercial radio stations the other day, I heard no less than four songs that Phil Collins had something to do with.
Personally, I like Phil Collins just fine. The public radio show This American Life completely sealed the deal for me, just see what I’m talking about. Phil Collins seems like a super nice guy. The real issue is that maybe he’s a little too emotional, not that Phil Collins feels things more deeply than I do, but he definitely feels them for much longer, because I just don’t think a pop ballad should last longer than three and a half minutes. His version of “A Groovy Kind of Love” clocks in at five days and twelve hours. The other issue with Phil Collins is that, as a drummer, I’d really expect the man to have some deeper understanding of, you know, beat. If, as a percussionist, you are rocking out with a song like “Sussudio” it might be time to trade in the skins for something that hinges less on the ability to rock, like a recorder or one of those machines that makes barnyard animal sounds. His approach to rhythm makes Karen Carpenter look like Keith Moon.
But Phil is just an easy target/symptom for the underlying illness with commercial radio. It has become nothing more than commercial radio, syndicated music shows that are made for the lowest common denominator as filler, and lots of commercials. The last era of my life during which I listened to commercial modern rock was in the early Jimmy Eat World/Third Eye Blind days, and back then it seemed like the exact same songs were being played three and four times an hour. Now that ridiculously narrow definition of music has become even slimmer, and, without question, it is killing radio as a medium. Commercial stations, mostly owned by the same handful of companies, are programmed with the least offensive, most uninteresting music possible. And in offending no one, they please no one.
And that’s where non-commercial radio comes into play. I don’t want to listen to every song that is played on any given college radio station across the country. And talk radio varies wildly from unbearable shock jock wannabe to the best story you’ll hear this year. But this variability is independent radio’s strongest selling point, good or bad, all killer no Philler.
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