Todays Raido Stations suck


Is it just me, or does todays Radio suck?
When I was a teenager FM was cool, it had laid back D,jays and they played cool new music. That's were I first heard Alex Harvey, Hawkwind,Atomic Rooster,Zappa,The amboy dukes,
Robin Trower,Roxy music,BOC,Captain Beyond,Audience,
Bowie,Steely Dan,etc.

The AM of that day used to be Hit Radio, and played the top hits of the day.

FM today has become Hit radio, with a lot of cookie cutter stations all playing the same old hits, with a few of those old fm classic hits as well.

Does it only bug me, that they only play the one hit off the LP over and over again. When in fact the lp had even better tunes on it, but they never play them.

Recently with the advent of eBay, I have been able to collect a lot of rare and Great music that I never new existed before.

When my friends here the new tunes I have They get the same Idea that I always get, to start a new radio station that plays this unknown treasure. As well as the songs like "Candys gone bad" off of the Golden Earring lp with Radar love on it, you know the one.

You know what I'm talking about, am I alone here.


I must state that I live in a smaller town now, but we can still pick up the Jacksonville Florida stations.
Does this kind of practice go on all over the country?

The new music of today no longer interests me with Rap and the Rock of today all sounds the same, with only minor exceptions like Radiohead.

WHAT do you think, is their some stations that I could pickup on the internet that would satisfy my craving?

would you like to be able to get in you car and tune the radio to a station like the one I described?

rockinroni

Showing 5 responses by zaikesman

Yes, we all know that most radio blows, and has for quite some time now. The really scary implication of this lies in the musical atmosphere that the 'artists' of tomorrow grow up in today - I think we've already seen this factor come home to roost with the MTV generation, and it's only getting worse. The irony about this, at least as far as pop music goes, is that it was the product of the mass-media culture spawned during the second half of the last century, but now that media culture's continued amalgamation seems to have strangled pop's artistic development. And the funny thing is, the industry's starting to pay the price now for having finally gained the near-complete control they were always after, in declining sales. For my money, this all began back when CD's and videos combined to kill off the medium of the single...Congrat's fellas, you've murdered your golden goose, and will spend the rest of your lives trying to suck the marrow out of a corpse.
Unclejeff, I disagree with your analogy about the state of todays radio vs. 50 years ago - it was much more local and diverse then. You can pick a trivial tune off the hit parade, sure, but you're ignoring the rich stew of musics from which rock & roll developed. Also, you're confusing the continued evolution of a pre-established art form with the birthing of something really new - do you actually think that in our current mass-media climate, a new musical art form on the scale of rock & roll could spontaneously arise? I don't believe that's happening any time soon, and that the continued viability of rock as a post-golden-age but still-able-to-regenerate art form is being stifled like never before. Keep this up for long enough, and even the quality of the underground withers over time, as new generations coming up lack the exposure to a stimulating, organic artistic environment (remember, it's a pop art form, and that implies some degree of mass accessability and participation in its growth) that forms within them the raw material necessary for new important artistic movements. Rock is a dissapated and stratified art form whose remaining energy is either yoked to a money machine or toiling in obscurity, and whereas radio once nurtured it, it now does its best to squash the life out of it.
Ohlala, maybe Top 40 radio in the 60's was wasted on you, but it wasn't a waste. You take just about any Billboard Top 40 from the era you denegrate, and I guarantee you that around fully half those songs will be well-known and -loved classics to this very day, and will continue to be so on into the future. The same could never be said about today's charts. 1965 lies at the heart of the greatest vintages for influential singles in rock history. I'm not saying that everything deserving made the Top 40 in those times, just that an awful lot of what did was as good as it has ever gotten.

Ron, your reaction to the "degenerates gyrating their pelvises" which you find so "vile and insulting" echoes nothing so much as the criticism heaped on Elvis Presley in the 50's. Rock has always been about S-E-X at bottom...It's not that which is intolerable to us, it's the glaring lack of anything else in the way of creativity and expression to go along with it. Image isn't just everything now, it's the only thing.
The commonly held theory about getting too old to appreciate something new just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. That is, if you construe "something new" to mean something new to the listener - which is what is pertinent - and not necessarily to mean only the latest thing. Looked at that way, it becomes clear that we never lose our capacity to keep expanding our musical horizons as we grow older. Don't believe the hype (and yeah, I think Korn sucks, no matter how many strings their bass has).
Ohlala: Your response is not without validity (or predictability), as far as it goes. But it ignores our ability to develop tastes for musics from cultures foreign to our own, or from eras that can be described likewise. If familiarity with the elements (or lack of same) was the only litmus test for acceptance or appreciation of "new" (to us) musical styles, then it would fail to explain both why I don't like most of today's radio pop, as well as why I do like many kinds of music that were not a part of my upbringing or cultural background.