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2003-04-18 - 12:59 a.m. Hummingbird Report: I was just sitting here wondering, where the heck are my female Ruby-Throated migrants? when a beautiful female sampled the near feeder. It's Good Friday, and as I was driving along minding my own business, a radio station which will go unnamed here apparently decided that a great way to honor the day was to have an egg-eating contest, complete with the very realistic sound of vomiting. Gack. Now I understand perfectly well that women of my age are an unwelcome demographic for "alternative" music. We should be tuned in to easy-listening "soft rock" pop pablum for brain-dead office workers. It is apparently very important to maintain these distinctions by offending and chasing off everyone who doesn't fit the right listener profile, even though the same car insurance ads for deadbeats seem to play the same way on all the stations. It is perfectly fair, in corporate radio's view, that there is no vomit-free, stripper-free forum for worthwhile new music, because there are the ubiquitous "oldies" stations, so that we grumpy old folks who object to vomiting sound effects can listen to the exact same music 30 years later that we heard on the 7th grade school bus. Yeah, right. That'll work, as Cookie says. Not. One of the primary purposes of old music is the time travel effect; one hears a song from back in the day and is instantly if momentarily transported through time. Unfortunately, one quickly develops a tolerance to this effect. If you haven't heard the work in 20 years, and then, boom, you hear it unexpectedly in a movie or a cafe or even if you discover it in your record collection after not having played it for many a year, then you experience the magic of time travel ...and this is true even if you disliked the song when it was originally issued. If, however, you are a regular listener to the "golden oldies" or "the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s," then you won't experience any time travel effect, because the music has become unglued from its moment in time and become more closely associated with being stuck in traffic yesterday than with the events of years ago. All magic and meaning have been effectively and efficiently drained through repitition. So, a pox upon the oldie stations. When I lived on the south shore, I used to listen to Tulane University's radio station. When I first moved over here, some doctor who dabbled in country music had bought an alternative station, and it was actually pretty good. About once every two months or so, the doctor would play one of his country songs on the air, but, OK, fair enough, it was his radio station after all. And, otherwise, he let some folks who were genuine alternative fans pick the music. No one seemed to feel that it was necessary to have promotions with strippers -- let alone eat-till-you-barf contests -- to keep out the thirtysomething soccer mom or the 13 year old boy band demographics. But, alas, as far as I know, all locally owned radio was sold to the corporate interests some years ago, and I had to give up listening to the radio at home altogether, although I still listen in the car, since driving can be somewhat hypnotic, so I need the noise to keep me awake. But noise, alas, is all it is -- and much of the noise is a bold insult to my intelligence. I would like to hear new music that doesn't involve belly button pop, boy bands, dinosaurs, or overly "produced" sounds. But I am not going to listen to frat boys barfing up eggs -- on Good Friday -- to do it. That's what the OFF switch is for. And then corporate radio has the nerve to complain that intelligent people don't listen to radio and that they are somehow forced to pander to the lowest common denominator. No. They made a choice to program for idiots, because idiots are more likely to buy something that doesn't work (crappy auto insurance, herbal viagra and hair growth creams, etc.) than intelligent people. Besides, intelligent people can generally at least get humped without paying a stripper to rub her fanny on their crotch, so programming for winners lets out all the advertising tie-ins with the "gentlemen's clubs."
All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford
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