mcgees.org

Well, Tavis Smiley has not renewed his contract and his show is going off NPR. I don’t know where I’ll get daily information about the reparations movement now. Or where I’ll get to hear every issue under the sun framed in terms of race, from politics and culture to diet and entertainment. Or hear people justifiably angered by discriminatory assumptions, but who in turn assume everyone listening is a conservative Christian. Or hear Tavis tailor his accent and vocabulary to match each guest’s, giving the impression that he has no real accent or vocabulary of his own. And I’ll miss the experience of feeling racist because I think he and his program are full of shit. But I think I’ll learn to cope.

My choices for radio among my presets on the ride home:

1. KCLU: Pledge drive, and I lose the station as soon as I leave Thousand Oaks.
2. KCRW: Electronica.
3. KPCC: Pledge drive, and as I’ve noted twice before I’ve contributed and I’m tired of being scolded. They alternated this with Tavis Smiley, whose show makes me cringe.
4. KPFK: This is Pacifica.  They had Black Panther women on the program.  More on this after the list.
5. KUSC: Unpleasant flute music.
6. Air America: Today’s it’s launch, but I couldn’t receive the station (1580 AM).

I ended up listening to the Black Panthers. They were highly articulate, but they were espousing really militant stuff, talking about how it was fortunate some of their leaders “didn’t have to kill people” and referring to race riots as “rebellions” (which I’ll admit deserves a bit more thought.) At least one of the women was talking about her expatriation to Cuba and the Soviet Union, which makes perfect sense as both Castro and Brezhnev were African black power enthusiasts with absolutely no ulterior motives in encouraging seditious Americans.

One of my local NPR stations is having a pledge drive, as you might have inferred from a previous post. Good grief, the hosts are annoying in pleading for money. They try every trick, every guilt trip, every manipulation in existence to compel you to give money. I want them to stay on the air as much as anyone, but it gets ridiculous.

One interesting departure, however, was when they delved into the realm of fact. They cited a statistic, presumably calculated by dividing the annual operating budget by the number of minutes in a year, that it costs $18 per minute to run the station. They were proferring this as if it demonstrated the high cost of the radio station. Does it seem to anyone else that this is really cheap? $18 per minute is thirty cents per second; you can drop quarters into a coffee can with a slot cut in the top faster than that. If I can count out an amount of money, in broadcasing, with coins, in real time, I don’t think it can qualify as expensive. I’m not complaining: paying NPR, PRI, and BBC subscription costs, as well as maintaining multiple offices and many hosts and on-site reporters for so little money is admirable. I just don’t think it’s expensive.

I narrowly avoided a traffic ticket yesterday. I was leaving a drive-through restaurant and was making a right turn. I saw a car coming, but it seemed to be adequately far away. I started to pull out, and realized it was coming faster than I had thought. Instead of stopping or backing up, I accelerated and essentially cut the speeder off, forcing a deceleration. As I did it I thought, “Boy, if that’s a cop, he’s going to be pissed.” Sure enough, it was. The cop (I know I said ‘he’ earlier, but it could have been a woman) flashed his lights at me, which was a nice adrenaline rush, and swerved around me to race down the street. I guess he had something more important to do.

In a bit of twisted accounting, I guess that savings pays for last week’s NPR contribution (otherwise known as “At that price it had better be the mug Christ drank out of at the last supper.”)

I’ve been listening to and enjoying KROQ Los Angeles’s “Rock of the 90s” weekend.  There’s a lot of reminiscing.  I’m one of the few people whose entire junior high, high school, and four-years-of-bachelor’s-degree-pursuing all took place in the 1990s (do the math if you’re so inclined — it’s hard to pull off.)

It’s a varied lot.  There have been acts and tracks that the intervening years have turned into classics — Pearl Jam and Nirvana.  There are bands the entire existence of which I’d forgotten — Sponge, King Missile, Dinosaur Jr., The Chemical Brothers.  There are songs that I’m pleased to say I liked when they came out and I found to have aged well — songs by Cowboy Junkies and The Prodigy, for instance — and songs that haven’t aged well at all — Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots (yes, as much as I fondly remember “Wicked Garden”, it sounds really tired.)  There are a few tracks I disliked at their release that I find more impressive now: Marilyn Manson’s “Beautiful People” sounds downright innovative when you consider the hordes of his clones that now clutter the scenes.  There are songs that I would have sworn predated the 90s but turn out to have just sneaked in (Jane’s Addiction, Depeche Mode) and ones I would have sworm postdated them (Incubus, Limp Bizkit).  There’s a lot of stuff I hadn’t heard since high school, a lot of memories.

I’ve also unfortunately been listening to the D.J. — Nicole Alvarez, I think her name is — whom I had never heard before.  She’s not very good.  She might be egosurfing and find this, in which case I’m a bit sorry, but really, she’s not very good.  She went off at one point about the drink absinthe, for instance, and made several errors in her soliloquy, claiming, for instance, that it was legal and that it had to be cooked before consumption.  She also claimed that it caused severe hallucinations and made one shoot one’s gun at “things that aren’t there”.  So I called the radio station.  I’ve never been treated nicely by KROQ when I’ve called — I’ve only done so a couple of times and haven’t done so in years — but I figured “what the hell”, right?  What’s the worst they could do?  Swear at me and hang up on me, I suppose.  I’m a big boy, and I’ve got nothing to prove to a radio station, and Miss Alvarez might appreciate my help.

I called, and the call went through.  Straight to Miss Alvarez.  And then something odd happened, something else that hasn’t happened since high school.  I asked if she would like to know more about absinthe, and she got a very false, very pretentious air, and said — I am not exaggerating — “No, I know all about absinthe, but there’s only so much time, you know.  But it’s good to know that there are other people well-educated about it.”  I was stunned for a split second.  What’s there to say?  I was tempted to respond, “Well, you made a couple of mistakes, would you like to know what they were?”  But I didn’t, I just said “OK, very good.”  After warning me to “stay away from it”, she thanked me and hung up.  Weird, eh?  This presumably adult woman tried to con me.  A complete stranger.  Over the telephone.  When she obviously didn’t know much about the topic.  I’m having trouble guessing what she thinks she had to prove to me.  I don’t think anyone has tried to do this to me since I was 15.  But the experience put a smile on my face for the rest of the drive home, and gave me a good story for mcgees.org, so I suppose it was well worth it.

I am intrigued by the phenomenon of songs edited for broadcast, especially by the inconsistent application of rules.  My examples might best be addressed in a bulleted form:

• Everlast’s What It’s Like discusses at one point the abuse leveled by protesters at a young woman seeking an abortion.  In the line “They call her a killer, they call her a sinner, and they call her a whore,” (only) the word “whore” is deleted.
• A fascinating example for me is Disturbed’s Voices.  In the following passage the italicized words are deleted on MTV X:
  

  Wake up, are you alive?

  Will you listen to me?

  I’m gonna talk about some freaky shit now

  Someone is gonna die

  When you listen to me

  Let the living die, Let the living die

  Yes, only the one “die” is omitted.  I figure that that particular omission is post-Columbine paranoia: “Someone is going to die when they listen to him?  Isn’t he encouraging school shootings?”  The reasoning is sketchy but perhaps tenable.  So why in the world would they allow the following to remain in the song?

  Can’t you imagine how good going through this will make you feel

  I promise, no one will ever know

  There will be no chance of you getting caught

  They never loved you anyway

  So come on, be a man

  And do what you are compelled to do

• This is one that has annoyed me for a long time.  There is a fantastic Candlebox song entitled You that discusses the lyricist’s sadness at the effect of drugs on the world around him.  In the following passage, radio stations play a version that completely omits the section in bold.  This, in my opinion, ruins the point of the entire song:
  

  Come around town

  Steal another dime

  Take another line

  Won’t you feel it blanket your soul

  Out of mind

  Come around town

  Steal another dime

  Do another crime

  Won’t you get it higher and higher

  
  Roll through time

  Come around town

  Steal another dime

  Don’t you push your drugs in my face

  Yes, I’m feeling

  Feeling fine

  Don’t you push your drugs in my face

  Or I’m gonna put you in your place

  Fuck you

  
  I don’t want it no more

  And it’s mine

  Said this pain in my heart is all mine

  Yes, it’s mine all alone

• There is the phenomenon of not deleting lyrics that the censors don’t hear (or expect the audience not to understand.)  Predictably, this has happened more than once with Pearl Jam.  Yes, in Jeremy Ed clearly says “Seemed a harmless little fuck,” and this is duly deleted.  But less-than-perfectly-clear expletives in other songs remain intact: Given To Fly’s “But first he was stripped, and then he was stabbed by faceless men / Well fuckers, he still stands” remains in the broadcast version; Once, discussing how a mother’s abuse has turned her child into a serial killer and rapist, retains the lyric “You think I’ve got my eyes closed but I’ve been looking at you the whole fucking time”; and Not For You keeps “This is not for you. (x3) / Oh, never was for you / Fuck you / This is not for you”
• One of the most interesting is the following.  Kid Rock in Batwitdaba, obviously talking about heroin use, says “And it don’t even matter if your veins are punctured.”  Godsmack in Voodoo, obviously talking about heroin use, say “I’m not the one who’s so far away / When I feel the snakebite enter my veins.”  Godsmack keep their drug reference, Kid Rock loses his.
• When radio stations first began playing Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know, they deleted the predictable word in “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”  Only after the song had been on for six months or so did I hear them also deleting “go down on you” in “Would she go down on you in a theater?”

Are these choices the prerogative of the record companies or are they explicitly enforced through FCC regulations?  I do not know; please write me if you do.