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Rock Bottom When it comes to the FCC’s decision earlier this month to further relax its restrictions on how many radio and TV stations a company can own and in what combinations, there is no need to do a case review of media antitrust law. All you really need to do is listen to my local classic rock station for a couple of hours. If you can stand it. Forget about limits on free speech. My entire adolescence has been reduced to a top 40 playlist. You get better rotation in a sock drawer. The chart makes your average truck stop juke box look like the Library of Congress. These folks put out the kind of variety that would make a K-Mart closed-circuit system proud. God forbid they go three deep into an album. Their idea of a rare B-side is “Penny Lane.” The number of times I could physically listen to any track off of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors was used up for life sometime in late October, 1977. Today, in its eternal post-mortem, “Go Your Own Way” can be heard twice an hour. Three times, if you include the crude jingle adaptation for the local Chrysler-Nissan dealer. And no matter how hard I try to forget the past, “Another One Bites The Dust” sucked then, and it sucks now. I actually had to sit my ten-year-old daughter down one day and explain to her that, contrary to the Pavlovian programming, Daddy wasn’t really a big fan of Styx, REO Speedwagon, and Supertramp. Forget about writing or e-mailing the station personnel. They just work there. If anything, you have to feel sorry for the mercenary DJs lucky enough to hang on to a job after several brutal, senseless corporate mergers and takeovers. Mob hitmen have more latitude. When you hear “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” follow “Piano Man,” you can almost see the 42-year-old Jiffy Lube supervisor pushing buttons under duress in the focus group. Only a random statistical sampling of mid-level managers who watch ESPN2 four-and-a-half hours a night could possibly produce programming with less soul than a Sonny Bono solo effort. I mean, you have to be really, really retarded not to know Springsteen’s original version of “Blinded by the Light” is a thousand times more hip than the stillborn, effects-laden version by Manfred Mann. Sad but true: No matter how hard Lou Reed tried to capture the underground scene, he was destined to have his paean to the subculture—“Walk on the Wild Side”—played every 10:51 AM and 3:45 PM for the receptionist at the Coldwell Banker in Hackettstown, New Jersey. On strict orders from the gods at corporate headquarters, the station promotes itself like a broken record. Every eleven minutes, the voiceover guy chants the focus group mantra: “Classic hits without the hard rock.” As if the band that wrote “Stairway to Heaven” now disavows “Black Dog.” You picture some manic-depressive soccer mom on Zoloft clicking on the former and deleting the latter, and you want to barf. The station is dying to come out of the closet as a Lite FM but doesn’t have the guts. They brag that tuning to their frequency “makes your office more productive.” Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Mick and Keith had in mind when they wrote “Sympathy For The Devil.” When the voiceover guy says “and now, ten in a row,” he means commercials. Let’s not kid ourselves. These stations exist for one reason and one reason only: To sell as much Viagra, Avacor, Rogaine, Propecia, and Ginsana as humanly possible to the limp, balding men of America Sure, you say, no one’s forcing me to listen. Guess again. We’re talking about a super-station with a monster transmitter atop a nearby hill. I’m getting Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” eleven times a day on my toaster. Yes, perhaps I am too sensitive about having crossed over to an oldies demographic. I’m getting to the age now where if I hear a block of songs by the same classic rock band on two different classic rock stations on the same day, I think someone in the band has died. Half the time, I’m right. But I don’t care how old I get—you’ll never catch me on one of those classic rock station caravans to a Paul McCartney concert. The smell of Bengay and Gold Bond on the bus would make me light-headed, and I’d keep dreading the detour to an Atlantic City casino, where we’d each get fifteen dollars in chips, a salad bar coupon, and an hour-and-a-half to meet back at the parking deck. And therein lies the point. When the FCC voted on June 2 to allow media conglomerates to own a block of radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in the same market, they were betting that we were too distracted by trying to get all the words right to Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” to care. When they voted on the same day to allow the behemoths to own TV stations covering 45 percent of the US market instead of the old commie-pinko limit of 35 percent, they were hoping our lust for nostalgia somehow skipped over the year 1996, when the Telecommunications Reform Act at least made a half-hearted attempt to balance special and public interests. Though it may seem utterly irrelevant during a free evaluation at the Hair Club for Men, there is a connection between a Republican administration and how many times a day you have to listen to “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers. At the moment, a fool believes there is still fair competition in the media. There’s competition all right—between Clear Channel’s Hot 100 stations and Clear Channel’s urban country stations. The winner is Clear Channel, and the losers are you, me, and anyone with a toaster. Click here to rant back. |