Another post complaining about Radio. Oh Joy.

Modern music is eating itself. There's the continuously recycled 80s influences, which are only partially shrouded by the bands who are claiming to be influenced by mid-90s bands, who were in turn almost always wholly influenced by early-80s bands, and then there's the fact that songs from the early 90s are still in regular radio rotation. This, more than the dull influences issue, is a big problem for me. There are still songs in regular modern rock radio rotation that are nearly twenty years old. This kind of blows my mind. Think back to listening to radio in the mid-90s. How pissed would you have been if you had been listening to rock songs from the late 70s sprinkled throughout your Pumpkins/Soundgarden/Green Day/Matthew Sweet radio set? It would have been preposterous! So why are we still content with listening to Nirvana songs from three presidential administrations ago? The fact that we haven't let these songs pass into the rock-radio library of yester-year is what keeps us in such a terrible cycle. It's why nu-metal never went away, but instead just morphed into "post grunge" (breaking benjamin, sick puppies, etc.) the way a fat ugly guy goes through trans-gender surgery to become a fat ugly woman: even with a face lift and a weird boob-job, it's still the same mopey, fat, ugly fucker.

I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of this is due to Clear Channel's heavy reliance on focus groups. I understand the commercial application of them, but I think it is unfortunate that they have handed over something that should essentially be a creative enterprise to the sub-democratic maelstrom. Individuals are bright, energetic, and creative. The collective is gray and mediocre at best. This is why focus groups are bad for radio business. If you put ten people in a room and ask them to agree on something to listen to, they're all going to default to a list heavy on shit they've already heard and kind of liked, with no regard for the law of diminishing returns. Not only does this make the radio experience boring as hell for the rest of us, but it dilutes the experience for younger listeners. I had the privilege of growing up with radio stations that rarely played songs more than three years old. But they never stopped playing those damn songs. Now, just think, every time you hear a Temple of the Dog or Collective Soul (UGH!) track on the radio, you're listening to four minutes of air that could have gone to a new band. Maybe you wouldn't have liked them, but at least it wouldn't be the same four excruciating minutes of bullshit you've suffered through countless times before.

Brain Laundry.

- I want the rhythm of my thoughts to be more like a noir detective story, punctuated with sharp wit and random, severe bursts of violence.

- I can turn my back on and walk away from absolutely anything in my life if need be, except my family and my books.

- I am not a musician. I do a damn good job playing one, though.

- Misanthropy is the mother of motivation.

- I can't remember how many times I've moved since I was 18. I can't be certain, but I think this is a good thing. It sure has been one hell of an adventure.

- People that talk about porn openly and normally, like they would any pixar movie, bother me. Not because I'm a prude, but because I feel like, somehow, they are trying to molest me any way they can.

- I think Steve Buscemi would play a very interesting Eeyore in a live-action adaptation.

- One of my life's goals is to sit through Pulgasari without laughing.

- I like dark, angular, subjectively artistic, sexual cinema. Everyone else should too.

- I also like Bad Boys II. So there's that.

Back to the grind...

OK Screw not talking about politics. It's who I am and it's how I do.

So the first two years of Obama's presidency have been rather interesting. The inevitable rise of the angry right took place, in the form of the oh-so-trodden-upon Tea Party. The reality show infection that took over our popular culture finally bubbled over into the political sphere and gave us that half-formed warble of a mindless, looping soundbite, Sarah Palin. Health care reform was finally passed, but in true Calvin and Hobbes form, the compromise was so good it left everyone mad. Remember the gulf Oil Spill from a scant six months ago? The Katrina-like disaster that was going to redefine Obama's presidency? Yeah, neither does anyone else. And now, in the end run up to a new, more hostile congress, they are ramming through every piece of social-left legislation they think might make it, and they're doing a pretty good job. DADT has finally been repealed, undoing one of the worst things to happen during the Clinton years, and a vote on the 9/11 first responders medical care bill has been promised before the recess.

Of course, the wars haven't been won, the economy still sucks, a tenth of the country is jobless, and another tenth doesn't see the irony in starting a fiscal insurrection based on the ideology of revolutionary men who didn't pay their taxes in the first place. A big part of the modern rehash of this revolutionary ideology also muddles a whole swath of socio-economic and political terms, like socialism, capitalism, fascism, liberty, etc. I've heard many an interview with some random FREEDOM-LOVING AMERICAN! on the radio or on TV where a beer-bellied "mama grizzly" tosses around brilliant phrases like "what ever happened to our free markets?" without any sense of what she is really asking. Truly free markets only exist in places like Somalia, and those obviously aren't too formal or worthy of academic study. To provide a very generalized answer to "mama grizzly"'s question, let's play a little logic game: In a truly free market, a company could put lead in baby food if it could justify a profit from the practice, even if only in the short term. Once consumers learn that this particular brand of baby food has lead in it, they will stop purchasing the product and the company will go out of business. This is what economists somewhat broadly term a market correction. The marketplace punished a company for bad decisions. Of course, thousands of babies died in the process. Simply putting them out of business is not an acceptable level of justice in our society, and it never should be. Thus, the baby food industry is regulated, and not truly free. Few if any markets in the entire western world are truly free. Another misconception I've noted is that free markets engender a free society. This is also not always true, but I'll save that lecture for another day.

Just because I like meaningless platitudes: I don't even want to think about what would have happened if McCain had won. The meaninglessness comes in because that is exactly what I plan to do. Here goes.

Even if McCain had eeked out a presidential victory, the momentum for change of party strength in congress would have been roughly the same. Franken might not have scratched out his MN victory, and a select few close congressional races may have played out differently, but the end result would be the same: a broadly bolstered, irritatingly farther-left democratic congress. This would have led to legislative gridlock early on, as McCain did not have many fans on the left. I also think his soulless snowplow of a vice president would have been shuttered fairly quickly by media handlers, for fear of adding another tick to the Republican column on the Quayle board. Cursing under your breath into a still-active mic, like Biden did, is a gaffe. Telling a national news network, with a straight face, that you have credible foreign relations experience because of your geographic proximity to Russia, like Palin did, is so criminally stupid it makes me want to be trepanned. I also shudder to think how a McCain/Palin white house would have navigated the financial collapse. I don't have anything to back up that shudder, as I don't know who was on McCain's short list for treasury secretary. I guess I shudder because we would have to see so much more of that ugly fucking Goiter of his. Yech.