Mon 4 May 2009
All good things
Posted by bitterandrew under Culture, Music
[2] Comments
I don’t watch much television. That’s not an intellectual snob “Oh, I don’t own a TV” thing on my part, just a simple statement of fact. My free time is limited, and apart from the stray movie or handful of shows I watch in the company of the wife, I’d rather spend it playing videogames, reading, or preparing things for the site.
If I do have the set on, odds are it is tuned to one of the Music Choice channels that occupy the lower 500 block on digital cable and providing background music for whatever else I’m doing at the time. The stations offer commercial-free, narrow format music streamed over a slideshow of relevant artist/album/year info, trivia, and photos.
My favorite of the lot is (or rather “was”) “Retroactive,” focusing on punk/postpunk/new wave/college radio tracks from the 1970s and 1980s, featuring everything from Bowie and the New York Dolls up through Concrete Blonde and The Wonder Stuff. It was everything I ever wanted for a radio station, and for the past six years it was a reliable companion for times spent reading, writing, or doing work around the house. If the programmers had an unhealthy fixation with Matt Johnson, it was more than made up by the chance to hear someone, anyone, willing to show a little love for the likes of Department S or Polyrock.
Alas, such a thing of rare wonder could never last in our fallen world. I flipped to channel 516 yesterday afternoon to cue up some music to wash dishes by, only to discover that Retroactive had been replaced by a new “Classic Alternative” station. My hopes that the change was a cosmetic effort to clarify brand identity were dashed when “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus (a Retroactive staple) transitioned into “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys which was then followed by Blind Melon and Filter tracks scraped from the bottom of the 90′s alt rock garbage scow.
I know that time has passed, and this year will see the first wave of kids born after the release of Nevermind reaching voting age, but the expanded parameters of the new station utterly killed its appeal for me, similar to when the local “oldies” station decided to dump The Platters and Buddy Holly in favor of Hall and Oates and Billy Joel. I like Belly and Fatboy Slim quite a bit, but not shoehorned into what had been a unique and exceptionally listenable format.
Generational divides are arbitrary things, but the pre-/post-grunge divide is a musical K-T boundary as clearly defined as the arrival of Elvis, The Beatles, or the Sex Pistols were. Perhaps it just the nostalgia of a bitter old man speaking, but it’s easier to reconcile the Pistol’s “Anarchy in the UK” with INXS’s “New Sensation” than Blondie’s “Rapture” with Sublime’s “Santeria.”
If a nod to the march of time had to come, it would have been wiser (and less of a loss) if folks as Music Choice utilized one of the other “alternative” format channels — “Alternative” (functionally meaningless in an age when the “mainstream” has fractalized into an infinite number of flavor-of-the-moment microgenres) or “Adult Alternative” (a.k.a. “Yacht Rock for the bourgeiose bohemian set”) — for the change.
Recommended listening: Department S – Is Vic There? (from a 1981 single; collected on Sub-Stance
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Now to wash it down with some Goo Goo Dolls, Semisonic, and a hastily tied noose looped over the water pipe…
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May 6th, 2009 at 1:35 am
I feel your pain. I really do xx
November 1st, 2009 at 8:29 am
So I was writing a little post about nihilism vs finding happiness through the eyes of a realist not too long ago, listening to Classic Alternative (as Sounds of the Seasons’ slipped off The Bristol Sound to playing actual seasonal songs, or what passes as ‘halloween music’) and thought on it for a bit.
The brunt of my writing was of change, how it’s inevitable and better to live in and enjoy the present instead of living in the past or anticipating the future, right? But a past-dwelling monkey that I am, I longed for the old station. “What was it again?” I asked, “Retro… something. Was it really cheesy enough to be ‘retro’?” I asked myself, spitting Music Choice Classic Alternative and Retro into the Google beast, which spit out your url.
Just wanted to say, I feel you brother. To the tune of it all. I was also crestfallen when my oldies station surrendered the sounds of the fifties and sixties for the seventies and damned me for saying it, but eighties sound. Gods… It’s an affront, as we have three or four classic rock stations, but to be told that REO Speedwagon is an oldie? How fucking old are we? My mother and her friends are all still alive, it’s not like their target audience of guys and dolls who were teens in the fifties are all dead. It’s not like they no longer enjoy putting the bop in the bop doo bop.
We loose enough buildings to garages, it’s a shame we’re loosing our classics to the young folks’ classics. Not that we’re not young folk ourselves.
Regardless, glad to see there’s someone else unhappy about the same thing. Misery loves company. ;D Thanks for the post.