tor·ture [tawr-cher] noun, verb, -tured, -tur·ing. Spending 16 hours driving through corn fields without an XM Radio.
Brutal. Completely brutal. I got a rental car for my trip home, and it, despite being a Pontiac, did not have an XM radio that I could even get so much as the Preview channel on. It had been a LONG time since I'd listened to that much local radio. And let me tell you, it will be an even LONGER time until I do again.
One bright spot, I did find a couple of really good classic country channels in Western Kentucky. Although one of them lost points when they played Tim McGraw's "I Like It, I Love It." I felt old.
The not-so-bright spots:
Loosing your signal every time a good song came on. Thankfully the car had radio controls in the steering wheel because I was CONSTANTLY flipping.
Lack of choices. One country channel, one soft rock channel, and a whole lot of farm reports. That pretty much describes my journey through Southern Illinois.
Commercials. REALLY - why does EVERY channel have to go to commercial break at the same time? Apparently the big thing now is to tell you how long the commercial breaks are. "You're just 5 minutes away from the latest from Sugarland." Guess what? In 5 minutes I'll have lost your lousy signal.
Redundancy. Do all channels have to share the same 10 power recurrents? If I heard "Fast Cars and Freedom" one more time I was going to drive off the road.
Pitching songs. Some stations - including apparently, the Springfield, IL country station - speed up songs so they can fit an extra commercial in each hour. I heard Billy Currington giving directions sounding like a girl... Faith Hill completely screeching her way through "This Kiss" and Kenny raising his beer in Mexico to the point my ears hurt. How can they mutilate the music that way? And let's say you hear something you LIKE, and then go out and buy the CD - and it doesn't sound anything like what you hear on the radio! Brutal.
And the thing that truly intrigued me for hours on end - voicetracked stations with DJ's who weren't in that city.
Now obviously, being in Nashville, we have DJ's who are really in Nashville. But a lot of smaller markets use a voice tracked midday show where the jock is somewhere else - in fact one of the Nashville midday guys voice tracks other cities from here. But what I heard on two different stations today was horribly bad radio.
If your DJ never gives the time... or mentions the call letters...or anything local... or someone else comes on and does the weather... and there are big empty pauses between the sweepers and the songs... you are probably listening to bad voicetracking.
Cardinal Country in Southern Illinois was like a train wreck I couldn't stop listening to. They had a great big voiced guy doing their imaging, and there'd be a sweeper of some sort that said "Cardinal Country - 90something point whatever" and then this weak voiced older guy came on and backsold the last three songs he'd played and said "Here's Reba". Or Kenny. Or Brooks & Dunn. WHAT was the point of that? There was absolutely nothing interesting or entertaining about his show - and I listened for a couple hours. I don't know where he's based out of, but I've googled him and he's on the air middays in Georgia and Arizona too. Why do listeners put up with that kind of crap?
Ok, so that's my local radio rant. I guess sometimes you have to be without something to truly appreciate what you have.
I did have a REALLY wierd moment though. I was listening to RiverCountry (which I used to know as Fire 97) out of Peoria as I was leaving town this morning, and I heard their morning news girl do a Bucky Covington news story that was taken word for word from my XM Backstage Buzz blog. I was like - woah! that sounds familiar! That's even cooler than when my hometown paper swiped something I'd written for PlanetGarth.
I was also a little mortified to learn that WXCL is now "The Wolf." My first foray into country music programming was directing "WXCL Hot Country Videos" for WEEK-TV. It was a horrid show - and completely proved that people in radio shouldn't try to do television.
Then again, I'm sure there are those who think tv people like me shouldn't try to do radio. ;-)
7 comments:
LOL! I took my parents on a trip to Savannah, GA, for Memorial Day weekend. My Dad can't fly anymore so we decided to take my Mom's new SUV which has XM in it. For 4 days straight I listened to nothing but XM and was amazed at the fact that there were stations that had more music than commercials... I had no idea local radio was so bad b/c it was what I was used to.
When I was in Nashville, I had to deal with local radio as stupid me forgot to take the car cradle for my radio - at least I found a decent classic rock station to listen to that didn't have too many commericials.
What is amazing to me is that you were able to recall so many details when you wrote this up! Were you taking notes while you were driving, or was it your mental blogging talent?
Paula
I felt the same way when I was in Nashville. I ended up with a Nissan Altima, nice car but they only offered Sirius so I declined. Thank goodness I wasn't in the car very often LOL I hate commercial radio.
Wayne! So good to see you! I have deals on XM you know... you too could be part of the XM Nation.
Although I am the self dubbed Queen of Multitasking, I will not write and drive. All mental blogging. ;-)
Its good to rant. We are blessed to have the right!
GREAT RANT! And I so completely agree. The local radio stations back home with the DJ from God-knows-where have been driving me nuts for some time now. That was always the best part of listening to local radio - getting to hear the local personalities, local flavor and feeling a part of "home". No more. And the voicetracking drives me NUTS (now I have a term for it - woot!) So since the music sucks on top of all of that - GO XM! They'll have to pry my XM from my cold, dead hands. :) Okay, I'm being a little dramatic today, but still.
Post a Comment