The impending demise of radio is often said to be the fault of the iPod. Personally, I have a hard time understanding how radio could not self-destruct. You can’t blame the poor radios for committing suicide with the content they’re forced to spew. I would rather listen to silence than hear one more commercial radio personality.
Listening to people on the radio drone on endlessly about completely asinine topics, usually celebrities, make my blood pressure rise to dangerous levels. I could not care less about which celebrity was spotted cheating on whichever other celebrity at some stupid bar in downtown Los Angeles. Even if I tried really hard and focused all my energy on doing so, I could not care less about that.
If I bothered to turn on the radio to a station that is supposed to play music, that’s what I want to listen to. As soon as someone starts wasting my time blathering in a tone that is obviously tailor-made to sound “fun” and brainless, I have to change the station so the vein in my forehead doesn’t explode with rage. I sometimes listen through commercials, but radio personalities push me to my breaking point. If scientists ever compared the times radio personalities are on the air to the times road rage is reported, I’m sure they would find a striking correlation.
The worst part is the humor. No, I should really say that the worst part is what they try to pass off as humor and then cackle at in their fun radio laughs. When I am unlucky enough to be listening to a station that has more than one personality on the air at a time, the “witty” banter can sometimes last minutes, full minutes of my life that I can never get back.
No, I thought of something worse than the humor: pranks. For some reason, some radio personalities seem to think that making complete fools of random strangers on the phone and broadcasting it over the air is a good idea. Most people outgrow prank calls before they enter high school. The radio industry must have one or two special tricks up its sleeve to find adults who still think they’re funny. Kudos to you, fellas.
Don’t think I hate the people behind the radio personalities, though. I’m sure most of them are probably good intelligent people who managed to strike it big in their field of choice. What kills me is that all those good intelligent people manage to come up with content, day in and day out, that is so terrible.
The people aren’t the problem; it’s the medium itself. Nothing else has to be as consciously sanitized as does radio. I would challenge anyone to come up with enough clean jokes to fill a radio show every day. I know only one non-dirty joke, and I’m guessing it would get pretty old after awhile.
This mentality is indicative of why radio is dying: It contains content so bad that no other medium dares carry it, and it is forced to do so by the FCC, which has become the evil spawn of Tipper Gore’s self-righteousness. A good example of this in action is Bob Saget (seriously). Bob Saget’s stand-up is funny and dirty – funny because of its dirtiness. When his stand-up is compared to, say, “Full House,” the truth becomes apparent.
Any medium that can’t play the word “monkey” in a song because it happens to be a synonym for vagina in that context is doomed when it comes to humor. I think it’s safe to say that anyone who understands that either knew it before or looked it up on urbandictionary.com. I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting of the corporate board that decided radio couldn’t play “monkey” or risk getting shut down by the FCC’s post-nipplegate sensibilities.
If radio is to avoid becoming the Bob Saget of the media world, it must fight oversanitization. Until then I’ll just listen to my iPod.
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