WCBS-FM Getting Into Hip-Hop!

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I have always had a hard time and still hate the notion of fragmentation and formats that everyone is so 'tuned' into that they know what's coming next-and hate what's not on their radar.

Someone once described format radio as 'wallpaper on your life' and 'Oleo' (which I guess was a fake butter/margarine) and I still think it holds true. This is applicable to most formats. This is why all radio should be just news and information and talk formats. Music is dead because a) the record companies have no more money for promotions, indies and coke to get stuff on the air; And b) that stuff that made it wasn't any good to begin with-a lot of it is BRILL SWILL-why do we celebrate that crap? There's a lot of records that all stations have neglected I'm sure. Dig those out and I'll listen. Otherwise, all yawns to me.

Music on the radio? Who cares. All the magic is gone. The thing is dead, even for 'dangerous' music like Rap and Heavy Metal.

No one wants their precious sensibilities challenged-which goes a way to explain why we have some of the problems we do in this country. Old School Hip Hop is harmless-who cares if CBS plays it. Who cares about the wig-wearing humps who listen to that station, waiting for their ED pills to kick in. Just turn it all off.

Because the "BRILL SWILL" makes me think of the Brill Building, I'd suggest that when it comes to what's been labeled as "The Oldies" (the music, not the radio format), there's still an awful lot of good will attached--a bit because a lot of it is actually good music, but a bit because it reflected what I might call "the Warholean moment", when the highs and lows of North American-style popular culture just hung together perfectly. (And it's interesting that this all really started to fall apart upon Andy Warhol's death in 1987--it's afterwards when you started seeing Top 40 lifers pigeonholing rap and rock as a "threat" rather than as a "compliment".)

However, I do agree that the "oldies approach", or indeed radio's approach to popular music in general, has (b)reached the limits of its cultural competence. And when it comes to oldies, it doesn't help when supposedly celebratory fixtures like WABC's Rewound come across, in context, as the "Those Were The Days" theme for today's WeAlwaysBroadcastConservatives-listening Archie Bunkers.

In such a light, on "the other board", I find this to be one of the sadder threads lately on the dentist's board, because of how it falls under several delusions at once, among them,

(1) the notion that Generation X and its tastes can be broadly "read" through the filter of today's commercial radio, without considering that perhaps it's only the dregs who're left listening and pandered-to

(2) the notion that the endangerment of emblems of radio dewds' pseudo-sophisticated middlebrow schlock taste such as Smooth Jazz formats is a sign of impending cultural apocalypse, or of Z-100 being tops among "the oldest demo acceptible to most advertisers" being a considerable comedown from that

(3) the notion that the eclipse of "nostalgia" formats is an emblem of some kind of cultural ignorance and insensitivity. (Whereas in practice, I find Gen Xers actually quite historically sensitive, even more so than their forebears--paradoxically, to the point where the radio-style "nostalgia" factor seems rather dumbed-down and demeaning "remember when" swill to them. It is to history what Smooth Jazz is to Jazz, Light Classical is to Classical, Mitch Miller is to the standards, etc.)

The lesson here is: sure, you can take one look at Sarah Palin and say, "there goes that generation". But consider that Barack Obama is, basically, of the same generation...