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The serious moonlight
My rental car has Sirius Satellite radio on board. I give it a mixed review. The technology will need some improvement before I could adopt it. I live on a road with lots of leafy trees. The reception was very spotty while driving down that road. I suppose the target customer is someone who spends most of their time on the highway, but overpasses would also cause an outage - though not every time, and I guess due to the stream buffer, a few seconds after passing under. I remember that with AM radio when I was small, but even AM doesn't do that anymore under a single overpass. But being able to listen to one station for 250 miles straight is nice, but the Audiovox receiver in my rental makes it very difficult to change stations, so it is also good that you are not required to switch stations.
Programming, though, is a different matter. I was on Sirius Stream 22, First Wave. Yes, music from my youth. For the whole four hours, I heard about a handful of songs that had not been in my cassette case or record or CD collection at some point. The first artist to play a second time was The Clash. The second was REM.
One of my first inclinations was that maybe there is something to this whole ClearChannel thing, that the reason why radio sucks is because of a big corporate machine, let's go kick in the windows at Starbucks!!!
But that's just wrong. Radio has always sucked. Even back in the day, I wouldn't hear ABC's "How to be a Zillionaire" on the radio. I heard Journey or Foreigner or some other crap that wasn't what I wanted to listen to mixed in with the few songs I liked. Radio couldn't narrowcast to my tastes even before ClearChannel.
Sirius had several news streams, too, but no talk radio streams. Seems to me that if XM or Sirius signs Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the big talkers, they'll be here to stay for sure.
But back to the First Wave. I think Instapundit had a post a while back pointing to someone else saying that the Boomer lump had worked its way mostly through the snake,and that means that Gen X is now in the marketing driver's suite. I am at the top of the Gen X food chain (I mostly saw it defined starting with people born in 66, though I saw some define it as 64, but noone says Gen X anymore anyway), and I drive a Volvo wagon that I dutifully load up with recyclables, and worry about my retirement accounts and the foundation of my house. The famous Boomer TV show was called "thirtysomething." And I am on the backside of thirtysomething.
At any rate, the point of all that is that the music of the Boomers was a big focus, and while I do actually like Motown, I didn't realize what it was all about until I listened to 10 of my old favorite songs coming out of the radio (commercial free!) the nostalgia that goes along with music. It's very powerful. I found myself remembering things I hadn't thought about for a long time, and just laughing when I heard a song come on. I've seen people who think it is cool that they can listen to Aerosmith with their kids, but I realize now that though they may both like the music, it won't mean the same thing to the children. (Little Blaster, an opinionated 2, likes REM, but will run over and turn off the CD player if something like Depeche Mode is on.)
Maybe these satellite people are on to something, though. I hate hearing my music on an "oldies" station, though I guess in the 80's, 60's music was oldies music, so it is only fair. But I really liked hearing the music played on a living channel. Makes me feel less old. I bet advertisers would kill to get on there.
I think Michele was going to be blogging about nostalgia, etc., during the blogathon, and I didn't go by and see, but I was busy and sick this weekend, so sue me.
 posted by blaster at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)
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