Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Trying to anesthetize the way that you feel

A few weeks ago I started setting my clock radio to the local "oldies station", WWBB 1001.5 FM, aka B101. (In full disclosure, I do know one of the on-air talent there, and don't mean a lot of this to apply to him.) For reasons I can't easily detail, I thought it would help me rise earlier, especially on weekends.

I'm giving up the experiment now. It's not because the morning DJs subtly and not so subtly work right-wing digs into nearly every mike break. A lot of this goes on at music stations, due to a mixture of consolidation and the lure of following in the footsteps of ex-DJs Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. But no, I knew about that ahead of time and was ready to deal with it.

But most of the oldies now seem to be from the seventies and eighties. And there were a lot of long popular songs at that time. Dire Straits' "The Sultans of Swing" and the Police's "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" are both great songs, but they apparently weren't trimmed at all for single release. Big change from "Light My Fire", where half the running length of the album track was a Manzarek organ freakout that got chopped off for radio. So if I lay there and go "oh, I'll just wait for this song to finish", that's a significant chunk of time.

It's also possible that the DJs said or did something to make me lose any respect for them. If so, I was too groggy to have a conscious memory of it.

2 comments:

susan said...

If you tried to wake up to Innagoddadiva ;-) you'd be at least 20 minutes late to work every day. At our house the wake-up radio was set to an all sports talk show simply because the guys were so annoying.

Ben said...

That's the thing about annoying, though. There's always a 50% chance I'll try to escape it by hitting the snooze button.