I have a beef. Its a fairly major one, and possibly confined to the UK music scene, maybe not. I'm not sure on this one.
As I've stated elsewhere, I'm a collector of obscure bands who play unfashionable or outmoded genres of music. Some of it is old stuff, some of it is new, but to my ears and tastes its all good stuff.
Unfortunately I'm doomed to spend a large part of my life listening to popular music radio stations, and you know what that means.... 24 hours of the same ****e no matter which one you tune into.
If you're lucky enough to be awake in the early hours of a monday morning then there is some escape, but as a rule it's a toss up between the same top 10 singles on heavy rotation with another 30 tracks mixed in occasionally to avoid it sounding like a loop, or a cross section of MOR material from the early seventies to the mid 00's. Even there, given the thousands of songs which have made the charts over that period of time, do you find a small list of artists - Elvis, The Eagles, Rod Stewart, The Beatles, Dan Heggarty, Kylie Minogue, INXS, Human League.... - hammered to death, day in, day out. No sign of the lesser lights of the charts, it's almost like punk (to pick a random style) never happened.. I can't even remember the last time I heard something like Rancid on the new releases station, or The Clash on the other.
Whole genres are completely overlooked... where's the ska, the mod, psychobilly, rock and roll, goth, emo.....? It's almost as if anything even slightly challenging is over looked in an attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
There must be a market out there for an alternative. A radio station that will pump out punk, ska, heavy metal, rockabilly, 'proper' R&B, northern soul, jazz and all the other minority styles that together make up a large proportion of the record buying market.
Loose the obsession with popularity, start to focus on the alternative.
Educate as much as entertain.
Just give me the money to do it, and a licence to broadcast it, and I'll sit behind a pair of decks all day until my ears melt if it enables me to offer an option, an alternative to the anodyne radio of today.
Someone help me, please..... broadcast because you love music. Not because they pay you.
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04-04-2010 08:10 PM