I’ve never liked popular music.
That sentence sounds so goddamn pretentious and hipster but I’m really just trying to set up the fact that local radio isn’t for me. My tastes tend more towards punk/indie rock so local radio doesn’t really have what I need. That’s okay because I have a smartphone that I can hook up to my car and play Pandora, download music or comedy podcasts while I drive. That hasn’t really been available to me for the last week, though.
My sister has been out of town on vacation and I’ve been cat sitting for her while she’s gone. She’s letting me use her car while she’s away and I’ve been taking full advantage of it as her little car get’s a lot better milage than my 1997 Grand Marquis –
Old people like these because it reminds them of the tanks they drove in WWII
but there’s no place to plug in my futurephone to get my pandora, music and podcasts so I’ve been listening to the radio. Here’s the preset stations I’ve been listening to –
The Current (89.3 FM):
Okay. This is my go-to station. It’s run by Minnesota Public Radio and they actually play some good stuff. They don’t always have what I want but back when I listened to radio in my pre-smartphone days they were what I listened to. Okay music, no commercials. I turn the radio on and they’re in the middle of their fucking pledge drive.
I get it. They need the pledge drive. They rely on listener support to be commercial free and play what they want blah blah. I get that it’s necessary but I haven’t listened to them in a year. I’m not going to sit around and listen to them blather about how the pledge drive is needed to have me enjoy the station if I haven’t been enjoying the station for a year. Not to mention the couple of songs I did hear just sounded like I got hit in the neck with a tranquilizer dart while a guy with a beard whispers in my ear about swamps or something.
Radio K (770 AM):
This station isn’t on my sister’s presets but I switched to here after getting fed up with the panhandling and narcoleptic indie-folk whatever they were playing on The Current. Radio K is the U of M college station and was the first radio station I’ve ever liked. Why did I ever stop listening to it?
Turning the station on I remembered why. It’s a college AM radio station. The songs all sound like an angry teenager screaming at you through a tin can and string telephone.
Kool 108 (107.9 FM):
Maybe I’m just too old for college radio (I am). I’m getting old. I’ll check out the oldie’s station. I’m not a big oldies fan but maybe they’ll have some CCR or something.
I turn it to Kool 108 and they’re playing Michael Jackson. Not the Jackson Five. Michael Jackson. Beat it. He’s on the oldies station. That can’t be right. He was popular when I was a kid. Oldies are stuff my dad listens to. Oh God, I’m getting “oldies” old.
“Beat It” is 29 years old. If “Beat It” got a girl pregnant right out of high school “Beat It”‘s kid would be going into middle school next year.
KS95 (94.5 FM), KTwin (96.3 FM), KDWB (101.3 FM) and Jack 104 (104.1 FM)
These all get lumped into the same category because as far as I can tell, they’re the same station. I’ve flipped back and forth between them and I think they only play Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, Carly Rae Jespen’s “Call Me Maybe” and a third song that’s different for each station so you can tell them apart. At one point I flipped from one station playing “Somebody That I Used to Know” to another station playing a remix of the same song.
At one point Jack 104 threw to a bumper that said “LISTEN TO JACK AT WORK (beeping noise, car tires screeching, space laser sound effects)! (sarcastically) It’s either that or a podcast of ‘All Things Considered'”.
I’ve never listened to “All Things Considered”, I’m not even sure of what they talk about but I would fucking kill for some “All Things Considered” right about now.