Sunday, May 10, 2009

Life is beautiful


So now that I finally have a car for the first time in 10 years it's become pretty apparent how miserable the radio station options in NYC have become. Today there must be ten top 40 stations and the sad thing is that there probably wasn't a better radio market than NYC 15 years ago. When I was a kid there were stations for every taste KRock, Q104, Z100, Power95, 97.1, WFAN, WNEW and 92.7). When I was 15 you defined yourself by the radio station you listened to. You had cutting edge stations, separate rock and classic rock stations, a great hip hop station, good R&B station, stations for pop music, ones that played soul and other only one dedicated to Top40 pop. I turn on the radio today and it's all whitewashed and boring, every station plays the same 10 crappy songs. This is the downfall of modern music, everything has become cross-over bubble gum mass marketed dribble, nothing has bite and everybody listens to everything.


This is the Coldplay effect, music which thinks of itself as cutting edge rock but it's just disguised Top 40. It doesn't move you, doesn't change you and doesn't make you want to pick up a guitar. This is what happens when a band stops having a manager and instead has an ad agency, you get pop marketed to not offend a 14 year old girl which translates to the loss of Rock & Roll's soul. It's not even commercial music it's music for commercials.
Maybe this is what happens when you are in a tough economic climate, everybody starts acting like carbon copies of the one thing that seems to work. Or maybe this is the downfall of terrestrial radio with the options offered by the basically bankrupt XM/Sirius combination but all in all good rock radio has apparently disappeared from sight.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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