…but tomorrow we’ll be heading across The Bridge to Mill Valley to see The Verve Pipe! I’m really looking forward to this as they’ve been one of my favorite bands for ages, and Villains is one of my top favorite albums of the 90s. (And no, not just because of That Hit Song.)
I think the last time I saw them was in 1997 when they played in Boston with Tonic opening up (remember them as well?). They put on a great show then and I’ve heard their current tour is a lot of great fun too. They’ve mellowed out somewhat but Brian Vander Ark is still one of my favorite songwriters. I’m looking forward to this show!
Well, not too much other than catching up on revision work for Theadia and listening to Pere Ubu, a band I’d known about for quite some time but never owned anything by them for years. They’re like the American version of Wire: starting off deep in arty post-punk territory, sliding into ‘beat combo’ groove after an extended hiatus, thereafter putting out several oddball yet great albums and songs and even the occasional ‘wait, what…?’ cover. They’ve been around for decades (their first single dropped in late 1975!) and they dropped their latest just last year.
I don’t even remember when I started paying attention to the radio. It might have been my dad listening to classical or jazz on NPR, or us listening to pop on the car radio whenever we went somewhere, or my sister’s alarm clock radio, or the family stereo. All I know is that the music bug finally bit me in late 1977-early 1978, and that’s when the obsession started. Hardly a day goes by where I’m not listening to it in some shape or form.
Radio has a very fascinating and often heartbreaking history. I’ve lost count of how many stations seen as ‘groundbreaking’ and highly beloved by its listeners end up getting swallowed by corporate ownership and turned into Yet Another Soulless iHeartRadio Station. It’s a media format that had advertising baked in as its sole moneymaker since its beginnings, and it’s a format that chose not to evolve for decades, perhaps to its own detriment. The internet upset all of that, first with its streaming and downloading and then with its digital broadcasting formats like SiriusXM — which started out embracing freeform but soon relied on music rotation programming to remain relevant to the high number of passive listeners.
Still — I do see that there’s newer generations of radio stations, both digital and terrestrial, who are not so much bringing back the old days of freeform but creating their own iterations of it. College radio isn’t just about alternative rock anymore but all kinds of music styles. Stations like KEXP are commercial-free and rely on listener contributions like most public stations have always done. [And they’re doing so well that they bought the 92.7 signal here in San Francisco, where they have a strong listenership thanks to their online streaming and excellent programming.]
To me, I feel a lot of station owners don’t understand that they’re an entertainment and a service to its listeners and its communities, and not something that can — or should — be seen simply as a business venture for making money. The entertainment field was never really built to survive like that, not without major sacrifice in one way or another. Radio stations come and go in one way or another, but the sad fact remains that several of them end up going the same way: forced programming change enforced by the corporate level to please the shareholders.
But here’s the thing. Several stations lose listenership not because listeners grow out of it; they lose it because they play that same fucking Red Hot Chili Peppers song from ten years and four albums ago Every Single Fucking Day. Listeners get bored with strict programming and give up on the station. Overreliance on algorithm programming nearly ALWAYS brings out listener boredom. I’ve seen it several times with several stations over several years. Believe me, I’ve witnessed the downfall of a LOT of stations I loved because of exactly this.
Sure, we like our favorite songs and sometimes we’re fine with hearing them a lot…but come on. I’ve heard That Same Fucking Red Hot Chili Peppers Song From Ten Years Ago on your playlist for the last six years straight. Why are you not playing something from one of their newer albums and making that song the next track to enter heavy rotation? That’s how it’s supposed to work! Y’all are stuck on the same three albums and haven’t bothered to change for decades.
*AHEM*
Anyway.
Happy National Radio Day, y’all. For those of us looking for something new and exciting to listen to, it’s out there if you’re willing to search for it. You might need to stream it online, but do whatever you need to do to keep radio alive.
One weird downside to living in the Bay Area in the summer, specifically on the west side of San Francisco, is that it’s often overcast, highly humid and stuck somewhere in the mid-50s — and there’s also a high chance of various allergens floating in the air to give me a migraine. All this adds up to me feeling sleepy and lazy most days.
So yeah, that’s my excuse for not being entirely on point with my writing, journaling and blogging recently.
Hopefully I’ll have my head together a bit more next week.
I really don’t know of any other fans of The Wolfgang Press, one of the earliest 4AD signings from their early 80s origins, but I was introduced to them via “Cut the Tree”, a gloomy dirge off the label’s seminal Lonely Is an Eyesore compilation, and I loved their bleak post-punk sound. They seemed darker and more avant-garde than Joy Division, less about driving beats and more about making one hell of a weird noise. Their evolution is a fascinating one, finally hinting at an unexpectedly funky sound with 1988’s Bird Wood Cage, which brought them to the amazing and groovy 1991 album Queer which remains one of my favorite albums of the early 90s.
They’d broken up after 1995’s peculiar yet interesting Funky Little Demons and little was said about them other than 2001’s Everything Is Beautiful, part of 4AD’s 90’s-00’s run of best-of mixes, and a 2020 Record Store Day EP called Unremembered Remembered featuring post-Demons demos for an abandoned follow-up. They’ve all had their one solo projects since then.
The new album, A 2nd Shape, drops on 27 September, and I am totally looking forward to it!
…I often think about this particular song by The Clockworks, which remains one of my top favorite songs of the last five years.
Why does this song remind me of the pandemic? Actually it’s the video.
There’s a day-end drone shot of the Bay Bridge here in San Francisco at around the 2:20 mark (and again at 3:05) that brings up the memory of my thirty-mile commute to and from Concord in the East Bay, and whenever I see it in this video, I wonder if my car is somewhere in that shot, heading westward into the city at the end of yet another hellish day. Even though the band released this track in late 2021, at least a year after I’d quit that particular job, the song perfectly encapsulates what that job had been doing to me over the last decade.
This was also around the time I’d been listening to KEXP almost religiously at this point, already an Amplifier (I still donate to them on a monthly basis!), and this track had gotten some major airplay, and I don’t blame them for putting it on heavy rotation as it’s still a hell of a banger. That station got me through a hell of a lot over the last five or so years.
It’s been over four years since I left that job in March 2020 (and I’m still glad I did), and a few years since the peak of that particular pandemic wave (and I’m still wearing a mask to work and still Covid-free) (knock on wood), so this song definitely emulates a feeling of weariness and uneasiness for me, reminding me that none of us really know what the hell was going on at the time, or how long it would last.
Oof. Sorry I don’t have much to say here today, as my day job schedule is kind of heavy on the back end. In the meantime, I’ve been revisiting my U2 collection lately and remembering how much I still enjoy them. I’ve always liked them from the beginning (I actually remember seeing the “I Will Follow” and “Gloria” videos on early MTV), but I didn’t really get into them until the 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire, specifically the title song, which remains one of my favorite early tracks of theirs.
Walk In Silence 