The radio in my car no longer works. I do not have Sirius or XM or my iPod plugged in to my lighter or however you do that. I just have a radio with an antenna. Except it no longer works.
Why am I thinking, much less blogging, about this? Well, obviously, because it's more important that anything else in the world.
The spastic writhings of Wall Street's death dance?
Extrasolar planets?
Where's Waldo? These are the concerns of the superficial.
No, I am blogging about my radio because I think we, as a society and as a world, are losing out on our ability to be surprised. Take my iPod, for example. It learns my preferences so that it's not randomly shuffling. It's giving me what it thinks I want to hear.
I remember a time when I would drive the miles from Westfield to South Bend and I would hit that patch of nothing but static and bad country music somewhere in Pennsylvania and I would just want to swerve into oncoming traffic and explode in a tinkle of horn blaring, brake sounds and tinkling glass. Anything to escape the horribleness of the music.
And then I would be saved. "My Perogative." Something. Something with a hook. And I would remember those bus rides in high school after a basketball game when we'd all be singing "My Perogative." We were, arguably, the least urban and, likely, the least musical of any boys school in New Jersey's history. And as the final, synthesized notes faded into a commercial, I'd be tens of miles beyond where I was and now I was going somewhere.
That was the power of radio, to me. It could control you, in a way, as much as you controlled it. It'd give you those moments of utter perfection, of almost cinematic production values -- think "In Your Eyes" while making out in your Cutlass Supreme in the driving New Jersey Rain.
Calling in to the radio was something that amazed me to no end. Just by getting through to the deejay, I was able to influence the tens of listeners who waited in their bedrooms, their finger poised over their boombox's "record" button, listening for the perfect track. Getting through to that girl (God I loved her voice) who hosted "Mandatory Morrissey" on
WHTG.
My point is that iPod's don't give you that. Satellite doesn't give you that. You lose the community of listeners. You lose the thrill of "
OHMYGODILOVETHISSONG!!!!!" You lose radio days.
Maybe it was too much USA Network or just too damn much 80's nostalgia, but I can't get In Your Eyes out of my mind. "Eyes" is a favorite body system of my daughter's. Likely, because "digestive" gives her trouble on the third syllable. She can, though, say "sheek," "nose," tees" and "ears" just fine, thank you very much.
