One of the colleges in town has a radio station that appears to run on autopilot. I have never heard a DJ, only a succession of songs from a catalog that stopped being updated in mid-1987, a recorded clip of a young woman telling me I’m listening to “The Awesome ’80s” and the occasional PSA. I don’t know if someone digitally converted all of the station’s Glass Tiger and Stacey Q cassettes, then set up playlists on a computer, or if there’s an actual human being, with limited options and no funding, selecting and playing tapes.
Be it by design or accident, by dint of robot or human, this radio station plays Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight” (feat. Ronnie Spector) almost daily.
I have heard this song on this station so many times since I moved here that I have successfully pried it from my previous associations (fading impressions of fifth grade; the time I walked into a CD store in Sierra Vista in 1995 and the young man behind the counter put this song on for me and said, without irony, “This is a classic.”). There’ll be a day when “Take Me Home Tonight” will remind me of this period of my life, particularly commuting to work and running errands.
…
There is another college station with human DJs and a vast array of music I know and music I don’t know. But I find that rather than trying to challenge and expand myself by listening constantly, if I’m not immediately engaged with whatever’s playing on the college station, I leap to the other end of the dial. Some of today’s pop producers are having fun with synthesizers, to the point where it reminds me of the pleasure I felt when discovering electronic music in the 90s. It’s more product than art, more accessible than daring, true, but there are fun sounds to be found. When I have to go to the grocery store, I want to hear bass and beats, even if they are accompanied by lyrics like Honey got some boobies like wow oh wow. (Really, Usher?)
…
Ke$ha has a new song that references the 808 drum machine. I would say the 808 is now depleted of indie/hipster cred, which would have been the case had this happened in the ’90s, but we live in more postmodern times. I only see a few die-hards espouse the notion that there is a morality inherent in shunning or hating mainstream pop music. I think about how I wound up living left of the dial and it was a combination of popular music being part of a culture in high school that I’d met with mutual rejection and the fact that, in my heyday, the pop music was largely, in and of itself, terrible, mostly guitar-driven and inspired by the fake notion of “grunge.” I still can’t stand modern music that is largely driven by guitars. If the three-digit radio station cuts from a Britney track to some man grunting over his electric guitar, I immediately slip back into the low 90s. And then I hear some man whining over his acoustic guitar.
And then I turn back to the robot-powered college radio station, and Eddie Money tells me he can feel me breathe, he can feel my heart beat faster.
