2001-01-23 - Night
Damn you, koogle. Here I thought I was done with the subject and you get me ranting about music again.
A few days ago, while stuck in traffic, I started scanning radio stations. The alternacrud station was playing Blink Fucking 182 yet again. One of the �80s stations (there are two--two!--in San Diego) was playing some Huey Lewis song whose name I forget (as if I or anyone else can tell one Huey Lewis song apart from another anyway). And the Klassik Rawk station was playing "Light My Fire." Big surprise there.
But you know what? When it came time to stop scanning and let the radio sit on one station till the next traffic light, I chose Klassik Rawk. I�m sure they played the Doors another million times that day, but I personally hadn�t heard a Doors tune in quite some time. And while I despise the whole Jim Morrison personality cult and that godawful movie Oliver Stone made to capitalize on it, the music itself has a gloomy, noirish streak that appeals to me. X once did a kickass cover of "Soul Kitchen," so there must have been something there.
Like many things Boomer, the Doors didn't become annoying all on their own--they were helped along by being exalted far, far above their actual level of artistic talent or social significance. As someone (herself a Boomer) put it on a newsgroup I used to read, Boomer cultural icons "didn't become ridiculous until the sun, the moon and the stars were made to revolve around them."
The true evil of Klassik Rawk Radio lies not in the kind of music it plays, but in the reduction of an entire era in music to a heavily rotated playlist of some two dozen or so songs, most of which are crap. You�ll never hear "I Wanna Be Your Dog" on a Klassik Rawk station. It�s not part of the Canon.
Likewise with �80s radio--or Kajagoogoo Radio, as I think I�ll start calling it. The Cure has written tons of songs that are way better than "Love Cats" but you wouldn�t know it by listening to the radio. Peter Gabriel was one of the most talented and innovative performers of the �80s and now all he�ll be known for 30 years from now is the piece of dreck that is "Sledgehammer." There�s some ironic fun to be had in ridiculing the shittier �80s songs, something Klassik Rawk Radio lacks (if Men Without Hats had been a �60s band they�d have been on the soundtrack for The Big Chill and made Boomers all teary-eyed whenever VH-1 plays "The Safety Dance"), but beyond that Kajagoogoo Radio is the same old same-old.
Oh well. FM radio is no longer for music lovers, anyway--it�s for people who want background noise while doing their taxes. Finding music you might actually like is what MP3s and shoutcasts are for.
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