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Charlie Keeps Getting Worse

August 17, 2009 11:36 PM

've ranted about Charlie, the local "we play everything" random radio station before. In fact, things have gotten so ridiculous over there that I haven't really been listening too much at all anymore. I started getting turned off to the whole thing when they started doing more and more talking and less playing of occasionally awful, seldom amazing, but almost always entertaining songs.

Then they started broadcasting a morning show. My mind warped when they did that. I mean, wasn't the whole point of these no-DJ radio stations that it was just random music and, well, no DJ? The entire reason people should tune in is that they're guaranteed to not hear some asshole talking about some crap that absolutely no one cares about, right? You're guaranteed to hear music; it might not be good, and it has a better than average chance of being terrible, but, goddammit, you're going to hear music. That's the fucking point, right?

No, apparently not. Now the radio geniuses that run Charlie have decided that you're going to have the worst of both worlds: you're going to get crappy songs most of the time, no input on what songs are played, and 50 percent of drive-time hours are going to be taken up by some self-important windbag doing a terrible impression of Michael Phelps or some shit.

But the fucking last straw came the other day. I was driving somewhere in the late morning, and NPR had devolved into a bunch of idiot callers making stupid points followed by the host and the guest trying to pretend that the callers weren't all idiots. So I started flipping around my presets and arrived at Charlie. They were playing "Holiday" by Green Day. Not my favorite song, but it's pretty decent, and I really like the part with the talking ("The Representative from California has the floor . . . .). Well, as the song is building to that part, it suddenly starts to fade out. "What the fuck is fucking going on," I thought. Then Kidd Kraddick starts talking about something completely unrelated to how he just literally turned down the music--the primary reason people would listen to the goddamned radio station--so that we could hear him. As if there had been this influx of calls from irate callers saying "Oh my god, why did you stop the inane babble and replace it with this melodic form of entertainment? Please, Kidd, we want you back! Tell us you're coming back!"

As far as I'm concerned, fading out in the middle of a song so that we can hear some stupid DJ talk is like turning the movie off halfway through so that the theatre can play that intro thing they always play before movies.

Charlie can go fuck himself.


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