Tuesday

I complained about the radio at my workplace earlier today.

BigDubb, jazz fan, asks: What are your acceptable genres of music?

First I must complain again. Unacceptable = light jazz. Real jazz can be great. For example, I would actually seek to listen to Miles Davis. I wouldn't choose to listen to Paul Hardcastle, lite jazz deity, but guess which one you're likelier to hear on commercial radio.

It almost makes me physically ill how backwards the world can be, how wrong it can get it. Commercial radio, by introducing money to music, has made a product out of something beautiful, sort of like prostitution did with sex. You want to have morons barfing (that's the radio industry term by the way, barfing) in your ear, tune in to big FM. My ears and mind are more sensitive than that. To reiterate, so there's no confusion, there's that which is automatically passively done, and that which is purposely done, and in the words of the band Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

Nobody listens to the ads on the radio on purpose, they just don't care. They are so intellectually lazy they'd rather unquestioningly absorb like a sponge. Oh well, someone's got to eat at McDonald's and watch American Idol.

My favorite band is the kinks, and I also love ween, the beach boys, and radiohead. My Bloody Valentine, Low, Negativeland, all those bands are always acceptable to me.

My musical tastes probably tell things about me that I don't understand.

I guess I couldn't resist the temptation to bitch because how we listen to music has to change before we can hear what we want, before we can listen to what is good, and it has to change pretty drastically. If people took the kind of pride in their music that they did in their clothing, shitty top 40 would die quickly. I get the feeling things are changing, that top 40 is already (unspokenly) the music of the poor. It's as if radio has been lost to the enemy.

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