San Diego Radio is the suck

Imagine my excitement, gentle reader, that first time I was driving down to San Diego and was cycling through the FM frequencies and discovered a hard rock station. This is not to disparage the rock radio stations in Orange County, except that KROQ mostly plays music that appeals to seventeen year olds (adolescents, forgive me!) whose musical appreciation does not reach back past Nirvana's Nevermind and, thus, whose opinions of music have been entirely informed by the popular products of the past ten years which are, I can say without reservation, pretty crappy. So I do mean to disparage KROQ. KLOS is not bad, but after listening to that station (and KRTH before it) for years, every single song of the limited setlist was so burned into my brain that I could conjure up a memory of that song from beginning to finish, lyrics and melody and guitar solo and drum line and bass line and all. At some point, even such classics as "Interstate Love Song" and "Sweet Home Alabama" grow tedious for want of a leavening of new material. So, when I stumbled upon KIOZ and heard "Closer" on the radio--"Closer," gentle reader, "Closer!," with half the song being modified into scratchy sounds where all the f-words are supposed to be!--you can imagine my delight. You can also imagine my delight when I found, only .4 up the dial, San Diego's XLNC 1 classical station. Synergy! When I grew tired of the hard rock, I could listen to the Beethoven and Mendelssohn that I have been coming to love, which are not unlike metal in their own rights.

I maintained this enthusiasm for a week. Then went through a phase of pleased acceptance. That gave way to disinterest, which ultimately degenerated into out-and-out disgust.

KIOZ friggin' sucks. As little as I like Korn or the Offspring, I find myself longing for a song by these bands to save me from a spare of uninspired "new" garbage (Saving Abel, Disturbed, Puddle of Mudd, Papa Roach, et cetera). It's a sad day when I actually think that a Slipknot or Linkin park song is the best song I've heard all day, or when I can at least concede that Disturbed has a good sense of rythm even if their melodies are trite and their lyrics are stupid and David Draiman still sounds like a grunting chimpanzee to me ("Ooooh wa-ah-ah-ah! Get up, come on get down with the sickness!"). Every so often, there'll be this weird inclusion of a "L.A. Woman" or "Castles Made of Sand" or "Paranoid," which just serves to highlight how rock has degraded in the present age, weak as men are now. Even the music from the mid 1990s has merit; I enjoy bands like Pearl Jam, Sublime, Alice in Chains, and Rage Against the Machine. But if you are trying to tell me, as KIOZ does, that these songs with lyrics like "I'm so addicted to / All the things you do / When you roll around with me / Inbetween [sic] the sheets" that play over boring acoustic riffs and then play over hyped-up crunchy power chords are real *music*, then dammit, I will call you out. How dare KIOZ play Jimi Hendrix in conjuction with such crap.

That, and the little tags they play between songs are offensively stupid and unfunny. "Sex is like bridge: if you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand (squishing noises)." What, are we all in sixth grade again (no offense to real pre-adolescents intended!)? "Now for a long block of uninterrupted--(cell phone ringing) Hey, dude, I'm going to have to call you back, I'm busy--a long block of uninterrupted rock." "Now for a big stankin' nugget of your music, bud." Does KIOZ think these puerile antics help to sell their station in any way? Ugh.

There are times when I grow disgusted with KIOZ and turn on the local classical station, XLNC 1, but I find it to be very much inferior to Orange County/LA's KUSC. The station seems to be completely automated during the day, such that there's no knowledgeable DJ giving an introduction and context for each piece as there is on KUSC. That, and XLNC 1's selection tends towards the kind of breezy, inoffensive classical music that made me hate classical music for so long and that I've only in the past year been able to overlook in order to find music that has power and depth and drama. I mean, "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" is cute and all, but can we get some Beethoven's Third or Fifth or some Spanish guitar or some Stravinsky or some Gustav Holst all up in here? No? Alright, fine.

O San Diego radio, how you have let me down. I had such high hopes. Our relationship started off so well.