Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I know I've wondered this aloud before, but it still bothers me ... why does a "classic rock" radio station, which has two or three decades worth of music to choose from and no "latest" or "current" releases to have to worry about, need the concept of "heavy rotation"? (Okay, to be fair, maybe it's only "medium rotation", but it seems like I'm hearing the same songs an awful lot.) However good a song is, I will notice that I'm hearing the same songs every day, and if I listen to the radio a lot, I most certainly will notice that I've heard the same song three or four times today! Yeah, there are songs I don't mind hearing that often, but with such a huge number of good songs from the period, why should the playlist get repetetive?

(What's the classic-rock period these days anyhow? Is 1966 still classic-rock or has it been redefined into oldies now? I know the upper end is later than I'm used to thinking of the classic phase being ... is the period roughly 1966-1980? Narrower? Wider? Later? Personally, I'd be inclined to say 1962-1976, but I'm neither a musicologist nor a radio-industry businessman, just a musician and listener. IIRC, radio stations calling themselves classic-rock started adding "and eighties" to their "greatest music of the sixties and seventies" slogans not long after they came into existence.)

Let's assume fifty minutes -- well, forty nine to make the math come out in round numbers -- of music, and eleven minutes of commercials, announcements, and chitchat every hour. Is that anywhere close to reasonable? (Maybe I should start timing the station I've been listening to. If the songs average three and a half minutes, that's fourteen songs an hour, or 336 songs per day. How many songs are there in the Beatles catalog alone? (Not counting the "rarities" albums and The Beatles Featuring Tony Sheridan (I can live without "Mister Moonlight", much as I like everything else they did.).) If I can list 672 songs Really Worth Playing (two days worth), that means we shouldn't have any good excuse for playing the same song three or four times in the same day, right? (Twice maybe just because a couple of DJs really like that song.) If you define the classic-rock period as 1966-1980, that means we need to find an average of 49 songs Really Worth Listening to from each year. Or about four albums worth. They can't find four LPs worth of good music per year from the period they're hailing as such a glorious time for rock 'n' roll? There are some years when you could just pick four actual albums that didn't have any duds on them, without having to pull the one good track from this album to replace one of the two not-good-enough songs on that other album to make your average.

(For example: what songs would fail to pass muster on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Revolver? Led Zeppelin's fourth album? It's been way too long since I've heard Frampton Comes Alive -- were there any duds on that one? There are entire albums from the classic rock period that you can just drop into the playlist whole.)

Of course, if we define the classic-rock period as 1960-1989, then we only need to find two albums-worth of Good Stuff per year. And if you're willing to include some really good stuff that was kind of obscure because it didn't get a lot of airplay at the time (not the duds, the buried treasure), the job gets easier still.

Come to think of it, I was listening to album-rock stations in the late 1970s and early 1980s (before classic-rock became a station-genre classification), and they'd sometimes do a "greatest rock songs from A to Z" weekend, and it'd take all weekend and somebody (okay, me) would complain that one of their favourites got left out anyhow.

So why have I heard "I Wanna Rock All Night (And Party Every Day)" four times in the past twenty four hours and at least three more times in the four days before that despite not having the radio on all the time? And I think I've heard "Paint It Black" aproximately once a day. I like "Paint It Black", but I wouldn't mind hearing "She's A Rainbow", "Ruby Tuesday", and "2000 Light Years From Home" as well, instead of "Paint It Black" every day. "Black Bottom Girls" is good, but why not push it aside once in a while in favour of "Killer Queen", "I'm In Love With My Car", "'39", "Get Down, Make Love", and "Death On Two Legs"? Why haven't I heard anything by ELO since I tuned in, and precious little ELP?

The problem isn't that they're playing bad music -- it's all good (some better than others ... though if you'd told the teenage me that I'd someday say a Kiss song other than "Beth" was any good at all, I'd have looked at you funny); it's that they're playing the same music over and over and ignoring so much other good music. And I just don't get it. Why?

(And why, if the period extends into the 1980s, can't I hear any Tuff Darts songs? Oh, because there isn't a classic-punk station, right. But that music is part of my treasured memories as well. *sigh*)

I've always been troubled by what I perceive as a lack of imagination in mainstream radio (though it's probably just "being cautious not to risk alienating any of their designated demographic"), wondering why only one track from an album was allowed to be "the hit" (while other tracks on the same album were better) when I was in high school, for example, but the idea that a station with decades of music to play would limit itself to relatively few songs just boggles me.

Of course, this is why I listen to an "alternative" station (by which I mean really alternative, not just slapping the alternative label on an old album-rock station that has since gone poppy) when I have a choice. The radio on the kitchen counter is tuned to WRNR (103.1 FM Annapolis), and my car radio alternates between that and WTOP (1500 AM Washington -- news/traffic/weather). Unfortunately, I can't tune that in on my shower radio, nor on the boom box that's feeding into my stereo, so I'm settling for a classic-rock station that would otherwise be my "when I feel like hearing something that brings back memories" once-in-a-while station.

I went through a "today's music really sucks" phase for a while, and started wondering whether I'd turned into a curmudgeon before my time -- was I really stuck on only the music I'd listened to as a teen, and nothing else would ever sound right? Eventually I realized that it was because so much of the music on the radio then really did suck. When I started hanging out with younger folks who really got into interesting music, they played me the records that were current but not getting airplay. Funny thing: suddenly many of my music-intensive friends my own age were talking about the same artists. Later, I did start hearing interesting music on the radio again, but I had to go to smaller stations to find the songs that were interesting and not merely technically polished. There's also the matter of exploring other genres -- early music, baroque, Celtic, Eastern, bluegrass -- but I think that maybe the rock portion of my brain hasn't completely ossified yet. I just had to get past the worst years of the synth-pop era (there's good synth-pop, but there was a lot of bad synth-pop) and a couple of other trouble spots.

The slogan of WRNR is "Everything, in no particular order," and while I have not heard opera, disco, or gospel on that station yet, I have heard songs that definitely weren't rock. They play current "alternative" rock, classics, oldies, and obscure songs that are solidly rock'n'roll by groups I'd never heard of before. They play local artists. While they definitely do have a strong rock leaning, I've heard folk, Celtic, something that I think was klezmer, and I think a few others that I'm not remembering at the moment. It's a reasonable match for me, exposing me to stuff I don't already know, so I can find out what else I like besides my known favourites. I don't have to like all of it; I'm willing to risk hearing something that makes me go "ehhh" if I know something really interesting is likely to turn up at any moment.

But then, I'm almost certainly not a typical radio listener. Heck, I'm not sure I'm a "typical" anything. People like me are probably the problem that internet "radio" stations are there to solve, but I've got this tiny 56K pipe and underpowered workstations, so I can seldom afford the bandwidth and CPU load for listening to those (though I'm aware of a few pretty cool ones, such as the one that specializes in artists who perform at Renaissance faires).