Buying a coffee this morning, the radio in the place was playing some completely unremarkable female vocalist’s cover of Coldplay’s “Yellow”. It didn’t even sound like a cover, but more like a karaoke overdub.
The artist in question successfully added nothing at all to a song that was:
- originally released less than ten years ago, and
- not very good in the first place.
See also, noting that the article in question is both older and better than the song. Mercifully, having completed my coffee-for-cash transaction, I was able to put the headphones back in and insulate myself from this unhinged mediocrity, but it was a near thing.
This is why I don’t ever listen to the radio anymore.
I confess though that some vestigial recess of my primitive lizard brain, long and deeply scarred by a childhood in our cultural sinkhole of a capital city still thinks that the radio is how people find out about music. It’s not, thank-you-jeebus; I hear about music from my friends and, truly, every time I turn on the radio I love my friends just a tiny bit more.
But radio? Mon dieu, non. That’s like wading around in the sewage downstream from an abattoir to try and figure out what you want for dinner tonight. Not just craziness, but extremely low-yield craziness.
Still, I feel this visceral concern that somewhere in my ecosystem of friends there’s one poor sucker doing just that, weeding through endless hours of miserable top-40 detritus to find the occasional song worth hearing twice, or at all. Intellectually I know that just can’t be the case, that even chimpanzees of modest-by-chimpanzee-standards intellect don’t get their music by twiddling bakelite knobs and twisting around rabbit ears anymore.
Right?
I sure hope so. If not, Poor Sucker In My Ecosystem Of Friends, sir or ma’am, I salute you.
But seriously, better you than me.