A Little Bit of Nostalgia

That clunking sound you're hearing is the sound of me rummaging around my music collection trying to figure out what to post today since my budget is still AWOL and there isn't much interesting coming out in the next week or so (feel free to prove me wrong or try to excite me about something you have in mind). As such, you can expect some actual content next week, but for now, trip down memory lane.

Music videos were a new thing when I was growing up. Point in fact, MTV is younger than me by about a month (yeah, totally dating myself right there... somewhere between "too old to pass as a youth" and "fossilized"). When we moved when I was about 8 years old, we lost our connection to music videos and television since the new house was in the midst of a fantastic nowhere with no cable. No more music videos for me until about 6 or 7 years later when the family decided on getting one of those big, old-fashioned satellite dishes that now is used as a rust collector.

In the era before we moved, I remember sitting in front of MTV quite frequently. I can't remember many of the videos I saw back then, but a few stand out. One of those standouts is Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing." Maybe it was the computer-generated animation (one of the first music videos to feature such animation), or the awesome opening hook, or Sting's falsetto in the beginning and end, but I never could forget that song and its video.

Anyway, here's the video for your perusal. Hope you enjoy it and fondly recall days of lying on the rug in front of the TV.

Commercial Radio's Rotting Zombie Wants Your Brains

I haven't listened to commercial radio in a long time. I gave the stuff up around the time I had the CD player put in the car. But there are some things I miss about tuning into various radio stations while driving, wandering around the house, and sitting in front of the computer.

Before the epidemic of the three-chord/power chord, idiot pop-punk virus, there used to be great bands on the radio. Tuning in brought great new bands that you hadn't heard before, induced you to pursue their music, turned you into a fan. Remember back when Soundgarden was in frequent rotation? When was the last time you heard Soundgarden coming from a commercial radio station? Hell, they play Temple of the Dog more than they do Soundgarden, or even Pearl Jam, these days. I, like many of you in the pre-internet, pre-iPod-glued-to-your-skull generation, first encountered many of my favorites via commercial radio. I remember staying up late one night with my headphones on and hearing this one amazing song that, to my shock and mystery, used piano as the lead instrument. Past my bedtime will forever be associated with "Spark," the first song by Tori Amos I ever heard.

Aside from the fact that today's youth don't seem to have bedtimes, it is no longer necessary to wait until odd hours when even God isn't awake to hear your favorites. With an internet connection, online music stores like iTunes (or bootlegging via peer-to-peer), and an mp3 player, any song can be acquired at any time. Where's the struggle? I have fond memories of tuning in and waiting for just that one song to come on, or the snowday requests called in to the popular alternative rock station (although at the time I wasn't hip enough to know that "alternative" was a distinct style that by then was nothing more than a buzzword to get people listening). We truly loved our music, and were willing to wait for it.

The variety of tunes was thrown together by lovable disc jockeys. Well, some of them were lovable. Some were huge jerks. But for the most part, that voice on the other end of the transmission that told us who we were listening to was almost a savior, guiding us towards new auditory journeys. And the jokes and ridiculous banter and all kinds of goofy promotions and games they'd play on the air. I remember the "playing the song backwards and seeing if someone can guess it game;" I was amazed at how many people guessed the same thing ten times in a row.

I guess what I really miss is what commercial radio used to be like. Before cookie-cutter pop-punk idiocy and mindless ego-drivel. Before technology made patience obsolete. Before the era of preprogrammed commercial slots that kicked the DJ off mid-sentence or cut off the beginning of the song. Before all the good DJs were replaced by computers run by someone miles away. Before commercial jingles and idiot blather that somehow passed as advertisements (anybody remember that "I'll cross that bridge when I come to it" malarkey? God, I can't ever remember what they were selling) became more important than the music. When they used to play a variety of tunes instead of running the same damn songs at the same damn times every damn day of the week for months on end. Before Clear Channel owned everything (and if Clear Channel doesn't own it, Cumulus Media does).

I won't miss any of that. Radio has done a good job of killing itself in the eyes of the discerning listener. Unfortunately, it's pus-bloated, vile-smelling cadaver doesn't want to stay dead. Point in fact, it wants to sit you down and gnaw on your skull for awhile, using bad soundalike music and annoying adverts to crack through the bone.