Jock-less Radio

One of these days I'm going to break down and get satellite radio, although that wouldn't solve my problem with what some could consider to be the "on-air talent" found on most radio stations, terrestrial and otherwise.

I'm talking about the radio disc jockey, the "jock", the... whatever the hell other word you can come up with the typically boorish and "shocking" personality that drones on endlessly between "80 minutes of 80s" rock-blocks, or whatever your local radio station provides for your listening enjoyment.

Radio jocks fall into four basic categories, which I've taken the pleasure of breaking down for you:

The Jockette: Typically does the mid-day stuff. She tries to come off as part of the scene, but her trying too hard comes across flakey. Also, these females of radio will have some-what hot voices, but in all reality, they're 400 lbs of slob.

The Shock-Jock: You can find these assholes on most mornings or afternoons. They typically work the commute listenership. They coincide with the "Morning Zoo (see below)" and when not sucking up all the air time between Foreigner B-Sides and Clash classics, they're pulling off "ridiculous" on-air pranks and gags, or getting listeners to promote the station whilsts engaged in some sort of gelastic contest for concert "tix."

The Morning Zoo: Usually a compilation of shock jocks who sit around between the hours of 5am and 10am and bitch and moan about whatever. There's usually a ring leader, someone who typically takes the moral high ground, a neaderthal-like mysogynist, a token minority and a news/weather/traffic guy. In the course of 5 hours of air-time, the Morning Zoo will take approximately 400 intelligable phone calls from listeners on cell phones in tunnels, and play about four songs.

The Couple: The most unholy of all radio jock pairings is the "typical" husband-like on air personality and the "typical" wife-like on air personality. Though not married to each other, they present a show that would be similar to getting coffee with an actual married couple every morning. In other words, an annoying pairing that would make you take a nail gun to the temple of your own head and not stop pressing the trigger until the clip was empty. The male will act in such a way to be toeing line of offensive behavior, and the female will abide good naturedly with "oh yous" and "hey nows."

Again, nail gun to the temple.

So this is primarily what I find myself having to deal with when I'm traveling around on the Cape. I want an iPod with a car adaptor really bad, because I don't see myself shelling out for a Sirus subscription any time soon, only to be faced with basically the same options, only commercial free.

I didn't know what to do, honestly, until I came across Boston Radio 92.9, which is basically someone's plugged in iPod and "robojocks" doing station IDs every half hour. A pleasent sounding male or female voice simply comes on and says "hey, you're listening to Boston Radio 92.9, here's six more songs." And you get six more songs. It's that simple.

Commercial breaks are only about 65 seconds long, approx. Granted, it's the same three commercials and it gets very repetitive, but the fact that I don't have to deal with some fat prick with a microphone talking through the first twenty seconds of a Neil Pert drum solo is a fair trade.

Why aren't there more stations like this; completely automated to just play music? It's almost the exact opposite of talk radio: music radio.

As for 92.9, their playlist is mostly songs from ten to fifteen years ago (remember Bush?! How about Eve 6?), but for someone like me, who was first creating his own musical identity in middle school, I was able to sing along from Saugus through to about the other side of New Hampshire.

If this trend continues, could contests like "carry this hotdog clenched between your ass cheeks for an Xbox" be near extinction? Will comely coeds no longer bare their "Tits for Tix?" Will the unfunny Opie and Anthony have to take jobs at Subway?

I can only hope.

The Problem With The Top-Whatever of Anything

I find myself driving down some back street in Saco yesterday listening to the classic rock station WBLM, "The Blimp" when something catches my ear.

No, it wasn't a deep cut from Led Zeppelin III, or that tartish bitch Celeste pitching her abomination of a morning show with the once cool Captain, but an advertisement for the radio station's "Top 500 Albums of All Time."

Let me break it down for you: You either go on their website or call in or ... fucking mail in something, breaking down your very favorite classic rock albums of all time, and some fucking intern at the radio station will tally up the votes and I guess the station will pick some weekend coming up where they will break down the list of fucking 500 (that's a five, with two, TWO! zeros...) albums. Now, I doubt they'll play each album in it's entirety because that would take way too long, but I'm sure there will be tracks from each record.

My problem is that radio stations like The Blimp feel that their listeners care about what the ... best 500 classic rock albums are. We don't. We don't even care what the top 100 best albums are. It'd be a stretch at 50, to be quite honest with you. So why are you going through all this bullshit to list out 500 albums?

"Holy shit, Billy Squire came in at 278?!" Someone will say, and then put the barrel of their shotgun into their mouths and kill themselves because life has come to a grinding halt for them. No. No that situation will not occur because this is all meaningless promotional bullshit. The design, on some level, is to get people to do exactly what I'm doing right now, which is talk about the station. Though I'm certain few people are taking the same approach I am. It's most likely like this:

"Wow, did you hear that BLM is going to play the top 500 albums of all time?"

"...No,"

"Well they are."

And there you have it. BLM further shoots itself in the foot by posting the results online, negating the listener from having to sit through everything, which in the end, robs the station of it's core duty, which is getting yokels to sit through poorly acted, tedius advertisements on it's station.

I really hate Top-Whatever Lists, for the same reason I hate Christmas: The beauty and the magic is lost on the actual day, because as comedian Lewis Black suggests, it's all in the anticipation. Christmas time is all about running around and buying gifts for people and waiting for them to open them, at the same time wondering what other people got you. You look at Christmas from Thanksgiving and it's a beautiful mecca on the horizon. Top-Whatever Lists work on the same basic principle. Because when we get to Number 1, we all collectively say:

"The Blizzard of Ozz was the number one album?" The equivelant to getting a pair of fucking wool socks on Christmas Morning.

(Editor's Note: James originally ended the article there, with the Ozzy reference, but then he went on forty-five minute tirade around the office talking about how The Beatles 'Sgt. Peppers' album will likely be number one, and kept crying 'bullshit' and then kicked over a rack of coffee mugs in our break room. He then left the building. If anyone knows how to get in contact with James, let us know. There's a pile of broken mugs, and a busted computer chair the janitorial staff would like to talk to him about.)