My roommate Joe has Sirius satellite radio in his car, and because they just had some sort of promotional deal for customers who already have one radio installed, we were able to get one of the boomboxes for our apartment cheap.
I'm not really a big radio listener because regular "terrestrial" radio sucks. Every channel is essentially the same - 20 minutes of commercials per hour of music, obnoxious disc jockeys blathering endlessly between songs, censored bleep-filled versions of recognizable tracks.
Not to mention the extraordinarily bland playlists. The only things that change from station to station are the specific, terrible songs broadcasting on repeat every hour on the hour. (And there's not even a high degree of variability on that any more. How many different radio stations have been playing the shit out of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy"?)
Sirius is somewhat different. Most of the channels have no commercials at all. The Howard Stern channel does, which strikes me as extremely lame considering how much of the marketing has been based on "no more commercials." The music stations unique to Sirius, in my limited experience thus far, don't have disc jockeys. You occasionally get station identification breaks, but it's pretty much wall-to-wall music.
There are a few stations that just repeat a lot of the same songs. I've checked in with "Classic Vinyl" three times since we hooked up the boombox three days ago, and each time I've heard a Led Zeppelin song. (Today it was "Communication Breakdown.") Plus there are whole stations dedicated to the Rolling Stones and The Who, which has got to get old after a little while. They don't even play a lot of rare B-sides or live tracks or anything to liven things up...I tuned in to The Who channel today and heard "Substitute." How many times can they just repeat popular Who singles? Is there anyone, even a Sirius employee, who has this station on in the background for more than a few hours at a time?
The repetition patterns are kind of strange, actually. I mainly listen to "Left of Center" (station #26 for Sirius subscribers), the indie/college rock station, and not only do I tend to hear the same songs a bunch, but they come in the same order sometimes. Last night, I was doing some writing and I heard Beirut's "Postcards from Italy" lead right into The Rapture's latest single, "Get Myself Into It," and then I just heard these two songs play back-to-back as I started writing this blog post.
Could be a coincidence, I guess, but I'd expect a bit more variation considering that I'm actually paying to subscribe to a medium that has been provided free of charge to Americans for nearly 100 years now. Still, I'm not going to complain. For the $12 or so this costs a month, I now have a radio that occasionally features Guided by Voices AND Neutral Milk Hotel songs. "Holland, 1945" on the goddamn radio...That shit ain't bad.
I must admit, though, I'm a bit unsettled by the uncanny ability ot "Left of Center" to appeal specifically to my music tastes. I didn't really think of my musical preferences in rock music as being quite so predictable, and yet damned if I don't approve wholeheartedly of about 98% of the channel's actual song line-up. In the past three days, I've heard selections from at least 3/4 of my favorite 2006 albums. Plus, not only did I hear a Jason Molina song, but it was "Farewell Transmission," the first track from my favorite Songs: Ohia album. It's cool that there's now a radio station I can leave on in my room all day, but it sucks to feel so homogenized, obvious and easily categorized. I need to start listen to some Lithuanian death metal or something just to even shit out.
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