I hate the radio–and it isn’t just because my mom uses it to blare country music at me whenever she’s driving. No…It’s much more personal than that. My passionate hatred travels past country’s 93.7, The Bull. It travels past those sound bites of unknown men that I hear on scan, screaming through my speakers trying to get me to accept Christ as my Lord and Savior. In fact, my hatred of the radio continues with stations that generally play the type of music I like, such as 104.9 or, in general, 1057 The Point, which both play more Alt-Rock stuff. I guess I could say quickly that one of the reasons I hate the radio is because I’ve grown up in a world with Netflix and I’ve gotten used to a complete lack of commercials, but my disdain for the radio is greater than just one issue.

I’ve found that in St. Louis, a very popular radio station is Z107.7, which plays Hits all day long. This is a pretty good example of what causes me such sorrow. Because when I contrast it with a program like MTV back when it first started, which not only may be a little unfair because it is a television show but also because it is before my time, I get frustrated. MTV, back in the day, went out and found musicians who’d had cool videos to pair with their songs and would show them off for the whole world to see. While yes, MTV branded out eventually, as all things do, it was still something. Nowadays, disk-jockeys just play the hits. MTV made hits by finding awesome music that your average Joe could not find on his own; but now it is acceptable for radio stations to not take any risks and just play what most people are already listening to anyway.

One nice little memory I have is that last Fall my carpool to sports after school would always listen to the same station. Since we left almost immediately after school ended, we’d be in the car at the same time. This means that we heard the same Beck song followed by the same semi-new Cage The Elephant track at roughly the same point. That’s right–the DJ, if one even existed for the station, was just playing the same playlist over and over again for at least a week! Even on stations that have their own niches, DJs are only playing the stuff that has been known to work. Staying on the Cage The Elephant route, a really popular song of theirs to be played for a while was “Trouble.” And, don’t get me wrong, I love the band and that’s a wicked song. My problem lies in the fact that the album from which the song debuted, “Tell Me I’m Pretty,” won the 2017 Grammy for Best Rock Album! Not even just subjectively does that album have a ton of great songs, it has one of the biggest award in the industry to prove it. So why did Alt, and some mainstream, DJs just play the one song? Obviously because one guy or gal got a lucky hunch and the audience responded well so all the other disk-jockeys followed suit.

But some stations just play completely incoherent sets anyway. As I’m writing this I’m listening to some “soft rock” station just from my laptop, and, as any reader could probably tell, I’m infuriated. Why is it that Ellie Goulding’s “Love Me Like You Do” is following Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger?” Why? That just doesn’t make any sense!