98.1 WCTK FM. Tuesday, April 17, 2007. 2:04 to 3:04 PM.

Reluctantly, I have to admit that I was wrong when I thought that rearranging my furniture had given me more radio stations. I've lost JAM'N 94.5, I haven't gained any stations between 95.5 WBRU and Cat Country 98.1, and the usually pristine Cat Country is having some staticky problems today. Sure, the weather isn't the best, but I've never had trouble with this station before. I mean, you know, not that I want to listen to it often enough that I'm, like, crying over the static, but it's a pain for today's purposes. Which, of course, is to discover how crappy the mysterious Hall Communications's country programming can be. Oh, and to see if our angry-ass friends will come back.

2:04. Alan Jackson, A Woman's Love. C-
Country's one of those rare genres where terrible ballads tend to be less terrible than terrible fast songs. Station ID.
2:06. Jamie O'Neal, Trying to Find Atlantis. B+
Wow. I actually kind of actively like this song. Any song that mentions Roswell in the very first verse is OK by me, and then it goes on to mention archaeology and Elvis sightings and the whole thing uses Atlantis as a metaphor! It's a little catchy, it has a sense of humor that isn't irritating as all hell, O'Neal's voice is restrained for a pop country lady, and the production isn't entirely annoying! I don't think I'd ever seek it out, but I'm enjoying it right now. Station ID.
2:10. Lonestar, I'm Already There. D-
Whoa, this song is supposed to be country? I seriously had no idea. To me it sounds like Nick Lachey and Nickelback's music writers (oh, come on, you know they're the same people) teamed up with Alanis Morissette and her unfortunate lyrical tendency to write "songs" that are just lists of uninspired metaphors. "I'm the beat in your heart/I'm the moonlight shining down/I'm the whisper in the wind," indeed. I guess the dude has a little bit of a southern accent of some kind, which I hadn't noticed and which is apparently the only thing currently distinguishing country as a genre. Station ID.
2:14. Brad Paisley, Ticks. D-
Apparently this song, which uses disgusting blood-sucking parasites as both a metaphor and an excuse for octopus-armed groping and male over-possessiveness is from the Cars soundtrack. Which is simultaneously lame and gross. DJ blah blah.
2:18. Carrie Underwood, Wasted. C
Considering her origins and her genre, this song is surprisingly competent. Dull and uninspired, of course, but competent. Station ID.
2:21. Vince Gill, I Still Believe in You. D+
I might be wrong (but I'm pretty sure I'm not) when I say that the primary instrument in this song is the "vibes" setting on the cheapo Yamaha keyboard I got for Christmas in 1988. Which, considering that this song came out in 1993, means that Mr. Gill's producer was a bit behind the times. (That keyboard also had two different piano settings, and "electric piano" setting, and a harpsichord setting. And when it's about fifteen years old and the batteries have been slowly leaking inside it for the past five years, it makes really amazing avant-garde screeching noises.) DJ blurdy blurd.
2:25. Eric Church, Guys Like Me. F
The full, original title of this song was "Guys Like Me (Like to Think They're Romantically Rough and Tough and That Women Love Them but Really They're Just Douchebags Who Will Probably End Up Beating Anyone They Trick Into Marrying Them)." The record label didn't think that would sell, so they shortened it. Station ID.
2:28. Shedaisy, Don't Worry 'Bout a Thing. C
The best thing I can say about whoever wrote this song is that they clearly know what "enjambment" is, but, unfortunately, they don't know how, why, or when it should be used. Othwerise, lyrically, it's embarrassingly abysmal, but at least it's relatively inoffensive musically. Rascal Flatts give a station ID, which unfortuately means we'll have to hear them.
2:32. Rascal Flatts, Stand. D-
This is the second song in twenty minutes that comes from the Cars soundtrack. Need I say any more? Station ID.
2:35. Reba McEntire, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. C+
And the eardrums are a slightly relieved torture victim. This song is moderately listenable! But great horny toads, I just realized I'm only a little past halfway through this interminable hour.
2:39. Contest caller. Apparently repeating Rascal Flatts's station ID a few songs ago wins you a hundred dollars and entry into a drawing for a trip to Las Vegas. Wheee.
2:40. Ads. So, since I'm pretty unfamiliar with all of these songs, I'm using the station's "what's playing now" feature (at yes.com, with links to buying everything), which is updated frequently and accurately and tells me what the songs are. Which is a nice tool for me. I bring it up now because it apparently also tells you what the ads are. Does that strike anyone else as really weird? Or, like, kind of unacceptable? After the ads, there's the weather, and a couple station IDs.
2:47. Trace Adkins, I Wanna Feel Something. D
Seventeen more minutes. Seventeen more minutes. Oooh, sixteen more minutes. Fifteen! Oooh, and now I've made it to only fourteen minutes left. How exciting!
2:50. The DJ kills time until there's only thirteen minutes left to this torture.
2:51. Ads. One is for "careers" at McDonald's, which tries to make it seem like working there is a really great idea. Which reminds me of how they recently have been trying to sue the Oxford English Dictionary to take the entry for "McJob" out.
2:55. Dixie Chicks, Long Time Gone. B-
Every once in a while there's a Dixie Chicks song I like, and most of the time I think they're pretty OK, which makes them a revolution in quality for contemporary country. This song is OK. Though I have a hard time forgiving them for their smug and unbearable cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," the ladies do seem to know what country music is, for all their concessions to MOR country-pop. Station ID.
3:00. Dierks Bentley, Long Trip Alone. C-
And I am so out of here.

Overall Grade: D+. Which is just as bad as last time, with just about exactly the same distribution of letter grades for each individual song. Was I as much in need of Prozac this time? Only time and comments will (maybe) tell.

What they should have played instead.
Lee Hazlewood, It's Nothing to Me (download)
From his wonderful prehumous album, Cake or Death. Last year the great Hazlewood was diagnosed with renal cancer and given less than a year to live, after which he recorded and released what he called his last album. And it's perfect. He's always been one of the greatest of all country artists, proof that you can be experimental and traditional and entertaining all at once, whether he was mixing country with go-go or psychedelia or just idiosyncrasy. He's a national treasure, and since he's one of the few people I can get really hipstery about and say I liked him before it was cool, I can genuinely say it's nice to see him finally getting his due.

95.5 WBRU FM. Tuesday, April 3, 2007. 8:07 to 9:07 PM.

Good Pesach, everyone! I'm a very bad Jew, but I observed by making a surprisingly delicious dinner that bore only slight relation to the Seder meal (like, for instance, how it was delicious). Matzo brei, yum yum yum.

Whatever magic rearranging my bedroom created that caused more radio stations to come in seems to have also caused JAM'N 94.5's signal to disappear entirely. I just spent fifteen minutes with the antenna and I could only get a vague notion of there being a station there at all. So we're moving right along to Brown University's WBRU. I neglected to mention last time that in the late hours BRU switches over to jazz programming, and that on Sundays there's the 360 Degree Black Experience in Sound, which is the most diverse Black music programming around (and the highest rated day of radio in the Providence market, which is kind of awesome). None of that applies right now (maybe next time around I'll listen to BRU on Sunday), but I felt remiss for not mentioning it last time. Anyway, last time I ended up actually kind of enjoying BRU, so I'm excited to see if they'll manage a repeat.

8:07. Pearl Jam, Jeremy. B-
See March 26. Station ID.
8:08. The Fratellis, Flathead. B+
This song is good in the way that it kind of reminds me of a lot of music I didn't like in the 90s, except in a good way. If that makes any kind of sense.
8:12. DJ. She seems to think that a band using fake names with all the same last name is novel, which I think alone is enough to disqualify her as a rock DJ. She also can't talk.
8:13. The Shims, Phantom Limb. A
It's actually the Shins, I was just pretending I was the DJ. See January 11; as Megan pointed out in comments, the Shins are way up there on Billboard, so I can't say nice things about BRU just for playing them, but it's still a very nice song. Station ID.
8:16. Cat Empire, Sly. F
Jesus.
8:20. The DJ still doesn't know how to talk, but I think she's saying she's into Cat Empire's tour blog. I can't imagine a more ridiculous thing to be into, and I'm personally into some ridiculous things.
8:21. Rage Against the Machine, People of the Sun. C+
BRU seems to still be really in love with Rage Against the Machine these days, which politically is kind of nice but musically is a bit grating. The DJ won't shut up.
8:24. The Bravery, Time Won't Let Me Go. A-
Weird, it's another song I hadn't heard before today that I like because it reminds me of music I didn't like in the 90s, except good. What a weird trend. This song is kind of really nice in a way I can't defend at all. (Except for the catchily tuneless ba-ba's that pop up from time to time; if you don't like those, you're dumb.) Station ID.
8:27. Incubus, Dig. C
This song is boring and irritating and wussy. Shocking, I know, coming from Incubus. Even that really nice submarine radar ping noise that made Kent's "747 (We Ran Out of Time)" and Suzanne Vega's "Priscilla" so pleasant can't help them. Station ID.
8:31. TV on the Radio, Wolf Like Me. A
In general I'm sort of iffy on TV on the Radio, but since one of my big problems with them is that they always seem to want to be poppy but keep themselves from actually being poppy for some unfathomable reason, and this song is really unabashedly poppy, I think I like it. Yeah, I like it. A lot. And whatever's making me sick (I'm sick, y'all!) also seems to be making me write in long complicated unpunctuated sentences. Sorry about that.
8:35. Ads. Including one for hair loss treatment where I swear at one point the voiceover guy goes "Come on! We dare you to call our toll-free automated system to get your free information." Which would be hilarious enough already if he didn't immediately follow up with, "There's no pushy salesman." Station ID.
8:41. 30 Seconds to Mars, From Yesterday. C
Just because you're yelling doesn't mean you're not a wuss, dude. In fact, just because you're Jared Leto doesn't mean you're not a wuss, dude. And just because you have a cool dorky band name doesn't mean I'll like you. Station ID.
8:45. Bush, Comedown. C-
You know what's weird? That Gavin Rossdale has been, and continues to be, married to Gwen Stefani. What do they talk about? Does she say, "I'm gonna make a song where I sample 'The Lonely Goatherd Song' but that otherwise sounds like 'Apollo 9' by Adam Ant, and it's gonna be huge!" And then he says, "That's nice, dear, but I think I'll just keep on clinging to the washed up, dated mix of grunge and metal that made me briefly, irritatingly famous, even though no one cares about it anymore, including me from the sound of it." What a weird couple.
8:49. The DJ thinks it's hilarious to awkwardly talk about how it's hard to google AFI the band because AFI the American Film Institute keeps coming up. Clearly that's Google telling her that what she's googling is dumb and she should be googling something better.
8:50. AFI, The Missing Frame. D+
Do you think he's deliberately trying to sound snively when he says "Put out the fire inside me" in the prechorus? I mean, I know it's hard to say something that snively and not sound snively saying it, but it seems like he put extra effort into it.
8:53. Concert Calendar. Which just means the speech-impeded DJ is going to talk a lot more. I'm not trying to be prejudiced against people with speech impediments, but unless you're Diane Rehm maybe speaking for a living might be something you should think twice about. (NOTE: I don't actually think she has a speech impediment. She just has no idea how to talk on the radio.) Weird, Placebo are playing soon? And My Chemical Romance are playing with Muse at a place I've never heard of? I'd want to see that. Ads, Station ID.
9:02. Modest Mouse, Dashboard. A-
See January 11. Station ID.
9:06. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Satan Said Dance. A-
So this is the beginning of some feature they've implemented some time recently, where at nine o'clock every day they play five new songs and have people vote on their favorite, which will be carried over to the next week. That's a nice thing, I think, though it's not as nice as the Wednesday starting at midnight two hours of new music thing they used to have when I was in high school. It's way better than the nothing they had since then, though. And this song is way better than whatever will probably win.

Unfortunately, the hour's over before any of the other four new songs comes on, so it will be forever a mystery (to you, that is; I'll keep listening as I finish this entry off). So it seems BRU has managed to hold on to its "Not As Bad As They Recently Were" title, and again, overall grade: B-. I think I'm going through a probationary period with them; they could easily convince me to like them again or to hate them again at this point. Firing most of their DJs would be a step in the right direction, and never playing Cat Empire again would be giant leaps in the same direction.

What they should have played instead.
Night Canopy, Boom! It's Spring (download)
Listening to the Night Canopy album is a really pleasant journey, where at first you think it sounds like Fiery Furnaces but poppier, and then you think it sounds like Clientele but folkier, and then you think it sounds like Cat Power but happier, and the whole thing reminds you of Garbage ballads in a way you can't quite place, and all the while you're just overwhelmed with loveliness and never for a second think that any of it sounds derivative, because it doesn't, really. "Boom! It's Spring," which has one of the best song titles of the year so far, is one of the Fiery Furnaces songs. And it's just fucking lovely. I don't think anyone's really heard of Night Canopy, though I'm never sure if anyone listens to some bands and sometimes I'm drastically wrong. I'm hoping I'm drastically wrong, because they are the maximum utmost.

94.1 WHJY FM. Monday, March 26, 2007. 12:51 to 1:51 PM.

Movie blok!

I wanna rock and roll all through the early afternoon, and party every day. Actually, I kind of want to rock and roll all the time, and party only rarely. Clear Channel's 94 HJY is not my first choice for either.

12:51. Led Zeppelin, Candy Store Rock. C-
See, I feel like Led Zeppelin's intentions were always good, but their execution just got way too full of testosterone all the time for my tastes. Outside of the band, I might go so far as to call myself a Jimmy Page fan. He was in the Yardbirds sometimes, and he played on Brenda Lee's "Is It True," and P.P. Arnold's "The First Cut Is the Deepest" (the original and best version), and all kinds of other great music in the 1960s. But then he got his own band, and yeesh with the manliness. Station ID.
12:54. Firehouse, Don't Treat Me Bad. D-
If Led Zeppelin is an overly cock-rocky interpretation of good music, Firehouse is that, too, but minus the good music part.
12:58. DJ. She's incredibly squeaky-voiced. And eww, apparently the now-ending (thank goodness) noon-hour program was called "Hair in Your Lunch." Disgusting. And inaccurate, from what I heard. Ads.
1:00. The Doors, LA Woman. C+
This, I think, is where if the Doors were a television show and I were an even bigger dork than I am, I would say they jumped the shark. It's just self-parody by this point, and Jim Morrison's vocals here are silly. Luckily, it was right at the end, and the album itself isn't all bad ("Love Her Madly" is like the polar opposite of this song, one of their best).
1:08. Tesla, Love Song. D-
Look at this awesome photograph of Nikola Tesla, and then listen to this song. See the difference? Alternatively, if you prefer experiencing good things over experiencing bad things, skip the listening to it part.
1:12. The DJ tries to pawn off Evanescence tickets. Good luck, lady.
1:13. U2, New Years Day. B-
You know, if not for gasbag Bono bloviating all over it, I would really like this song. Or at least like it; that "really" might be pushing it. Did you know that for a while Bono's full stage name was Bono Vox (Latin for "good voice")? It's true. What a blowhard. A do-gooder blowhard, but a blowhard nonetheless.
1:18. Disturbed, Land of Confusion. D+
See January 4.
1:22. Squeaky DJ plugs a contest to make HJY an ad. I can never decide if I approve of contests like that or not. Ads, with a few station IDs sprinkled in for good luck.
1:26. Black Crowes, Twice as Hard. D+
You know, usually there's a bit more variety on this station than this. I feel like I'm listening to a country station and basically hearing the same song, over and over and over and over. What's the difference between this and Tesla and Firehouse and Van Halen?
1:30. Van Halen, Unchained. D+
What did I just say? What did I just say!?!?!? I often complain about how this sort of music doesn't have any sense of humor, but maybe it's worse when it thinks it does.
1:34. Squeaky DJ lady, stop squeaking "Evanescence" at me, please. I mean, I'm glad that you play at least one band with a woman in it, but does it have to be that one? And do you have to keep talking about them and trying to get me to want tickets to see them? Because I don't want to see them, and anyone who does deserves our sympathy and should be in treatment.
1:34. Godsmack, The Enemy. C+
Godsmack never equalled the idiotic fun of their first single, "Whatever," which, though it's not good at all, was one of my favorite bleeped-out songs to sing along with when it was new. It's really really fun to shout, "Better --kin' go away!" Since that song, sadly, they've been dull to the extreme. Hilarious, though, is the fact that I went to college with their lawyer's daughter. We used to call him (the father) "P____ B____, Lawyer to the Stars."
1:38. The DJ manages to give away Evanescence tickets, finally. And here's ads. During them, there's an incongruous station ID which claims they're playing fewer ads. And then there's another bunch of ads! Who do they think they're fooling? Fewer ads than what, Vogue?
1:42. Jimi Hendrix, Fire. B-
I try, but I just can't enjoy listening to Jimi Hendrix. Sorry. Although I do think that, if I can forget that I've heard it many times before, the lyric "Let me stand next to your fire" is pretty clever and awesome.
1:44. Stone Sour, Through Glass. D-
Hilariously awkward transition. I'd definitely take Jimi Hendrix over this wussy crap.
1:48. Squeaky tells me not to worry because she has more Evanescence tickets. Clearly she's not listening to a word I'm saying.
1:49. Billy Idol, White Wedding. B+
Well, at least we'll end on a relatively good note. Billy Idol's one of those people like Pat Benatar who I never liked at all and kind of classified in the "boring fake punk" category until I had friends who sang them at karaoke. I get it now, I think.

All the talk about Evanescence this hour, I'm just glad I didn't actually hear them. Overall grade: D+. And I guess I'm feeling pithy today.

What they should have played instead.
Marnie Stern, Put All Your Eggs in One Basket and Then Watch That Basket!!!. (download)
Marnie Stern is loud.

P.S.: If you have your right speaker across the room behind you, and if you're like me in other ways, you'll flip out for a second, every time, when the tambourines come in at about 0:17, and think someone's behind you jingling keys even though you're alone in the house. Consider yourself warned: abject terror is in your future.