The In-credible Occupation of the FM Airwaves

I haven't listened to the radio in about 6 years. I hate the radio.

Well, I don't hate the radio, as it's a medium. And a pretty nifty one. I hate what radio music stations represent. I appreciate when radio mirrors a magazine, or a television. Sports coverage, news discussions, programs that aid people in managing their finances, evangelic programs and the like all make sense to me. People can read about all these things. Why shouldn't they be able to listen to them as well? NPR encapsulates all these things rather well. But I don't listen to NPR.

Because the only time I listen to the radio is when I'm in a car. And the only thing I want to listen to in my car is music.

Which brings me to my subject today: The (continued) homogenization and general decline of broadcast radio in my lifetime.

Let's quickly zip through the last 30 years of radio from my vantage point.

28 years ago - MTV is born and will eventually hijack most of radio's relevance until MTV stops playing music and becomes very strange. As MTV becomes more influential than radio, radio starts to focus on what's popular on MTV, and to zero extent, VH1. 80's punk is largely marginalized, 80's hip-hop is increasingly celebrated. Mainstream pop music (which is guess is what we today would call, appropriately "80's music"), intuitively, rules the roost.

23 years ago - Hair metal and the toddler years of rap are what first comes to mind. Hair metal is well-represented on the air. Hip-hop - with exceptions - is played widely on pop stations. Also, during this period, Paula Abdul danced with a cat that stole the covers and smoked.

18 years ago - Grunge breaks, monopolizing the airwaves pretty quickly to the exclusion of other rock. Rap is prevalent on pop stations and more obscure rap can be found on dedicated hip-hop stations. Modern rock stations also emerge, dedicated to grunge bands and other progressive rock. Positive K teaches America to love again.

13 years ago - Spice Girls, Hanson, Puff Daddy and Quad City DJ's. During this period, popular music ceased to be good. Daft Punk is the only exception to this statement. Towards the end of this period, any goodwill done by the aforementioned Daft Punk, Sublime, Jay-Z, Wu-Tang, and Eminem is negated by every rap metal band that surfaced after Korn. I listen to the radio a lot during this period, which I'm sure sure is why this period produced the fewest number of "keeper" artists.

8 years ago - 9/11 happens, which actually was a very profound event in my relationship with the FM dial. Following the tragedy, Clear Channel (which seemed to own every channel to which I listened) created a blacklist of artists and songs to supposedly aid in America's grieving process. How nice of them to decide what we should be listening to while wrestling with this tragedy. This would have simply been an annoyance, but the fact that Clear Channel owned all the stations I listened to meant that I wouldn't really be able to hear any of the blacklisted songs, (without purchasing them) until the ban was lifted. For obvious reasons, I found the blacklist very disturbing and insulting. The absurdity of some of the selections makes me laugh out loud (DMB's "Crash Into Me", Foo Fighter's "Learn to Fly"). Some puzzle me (Everclear's "Santa Monica", Alanis Morissette's "Ironic"???). Click here to see the list.

At this point, radio and I were no longer sleeping in the same bed. That policy ruined radio for me. Which is bizarre, because I'm sure I endure far more insulting actions from television stations, but I keep coming back. Then again, TV offers at least SOME quality original programming with no other substitute outlets. Music radio offers NO original programming whatsoever with myriad substitute outlets (a cd, MTV, the internet, satellite radio).

Since about 2001, my only encounters with the radio have been: Indie 103.1 in LA (now off the air), sports coverage, any time I'm stuck in a rental car without satellite radio), and riding in the cars of friends who aren't nearly as awesome as I am and still listen to the radio. These experiences will constitute a sufficient amount of rope for me to metaphorically hang myself with the stance I have taken.

My observations about the state of radio today:

1. The stations I have checked in with (mostly rock stations) seem to ignore the fact that good music was put out after 1998. The "modern rock" station in my area went from a progressive outlet from which one can get turned on to new songs and artists to what is essentially a padlocked jukebox from 1998.

Hmmm...ok...I just realized that all my gripes stem from this one observation. My limited exposure to broadcast radio has demonstrated that, save for pop ephemera, I'm hearing very little new music on the radio. When I say "new music" I don't mean the latest release by Weezer or the Foo Fighters, but new music by new bands.

My research staff has informed me that there is new music out there is SOME new music out there that isn't in my sonic wheelhouse (that's right, I own a sonic wheelhouse), such as The Fray. A quick review of the Billboard Hot 100 gives me such bastions of legitimacy as All-American Rejects (U-S-A!, U-S-A!), Plain White T's, 3OH!3, and a few other bands I don't listen to because I haven't been held back in 9th grade for the past 15 years.

(An aside: Why has radio planted a foothold in the fleeting, fickle psychographic that listens to bubble gum pop, modern rock and hip hop over other more meaningful extensions of these genres? The stations playing everything from classic rock, to country, to jazz that haven't had to reposition themselves (much) in order to maintain their relevancy. I think it's because to cater to these people, you don't have to be good at what you do. These fickle masses are largely spoon-fed their music. They will like what you tell them to like. And if you tell them to like something by Katy Perry, who is an utter abortion of a "musician", you don't need to continue to sell them Katy Perry. You can have them walking away from her work knowing only that she kissed a girl, and it was agreeable. On to the next catchy ditty they go.

The radio industry has long carried the stigma that its outlets are run by less than savory and less than savvy folks. My Clear Channel allegory above deomstrates that pretty well. Are these people just bad at what they do? Have they relegated themselves to providing the low-hanging fruit to the lowest common denominator? I feel as though they have. Again, following the TV parallel, broadcast television has been accused of the same thing, with cable largely picking up the slack as the "thinking man's television". Are we seeing the same thing with satellite radio?)

My underlying question, which I may have just answered in the two paragraphs above, is why doesn't radio show the same respect for music that we have seen on satellite radio, on the internet, and to a lesser extent, in MTV's halcyon days? Save for MTV, which has regressed in this regard, the other media I mention has been born and evolved over just the last 10 years. Is indie/alternative/hip-hop that doesn't make my ears bleed/garage music so niche that it doesn't warrant mass-marketed stations through broadcast radio?

This isn't so much a position as a prompt; what's the deal with FM radio?

Also: Chocolate chip cookies are delicious.

Please leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts.