In the Void of Radio

Radio has been long abandoned by most people I know as having wasted it's character and quality years ago with the playlists of terrible, overproduced pop schlock, the consolidation of stations, the elimination of human DJs, and the overload of advertising for clubs that serve different varieties of shooters, ladies get in free, and each floor has it's own theme.  I hold an exception for WFMU, NPR, Pacifica, and college stations; only touching the right side of the dial when stuck in a rental car without CDs or an iPod plug. 

I assumed that everybody else had done the same and slowly relegated radio to the dustbin of listening outlets in favor of mp3s, CDs, or satellite radio, but it's still out there and it's affect is strong.  Rush Limbaugh still remains the voice of Republican America, Scott Shannon, the inventor of the Zoo Crew concept is also the voice of the Sean Hannity show, and Glenn Beck has turned his Morning Zoo Crew into a nationalized operatic farce. Not to mention Michael Savage, G. Gordon Liddy, Bill O'Reilly, Alex Jones, Neal Boortz and many more.  The tendency really should be to ignore these people and they'll go away as they survive solely on attention like vampires, but radio iconoclasts have been able to feed on low-level fame and shock-mongering for some time and they've already built an empire without my attention span.  They hold devoted followings to the sort of people that spend their whole lives with talk radio murmuring in the background.  Tiny little cults of personality that rant against anything they can get their hands around.

Beck, in particular, I find fascinating.  Plenty has been said about his overly dramatic pandering, and willingness to say anything for attention, and really, everybody should just avoid giving him a second more of their time, but I can't help but look, particularly at this biography in Salon of his coke-fueled meteoric rise to infamy.  That sense of shameless abandon that can lead someone from dressing up like a banana and diving in a pile of money to speeding down a highway in a Delorean with the doors open and his face covered in coke is endlessly intriguing.  It's the go-go, desperate lifestyle of a local celebrity.  This is the same person who becomes a born-again Mormon and created the non-sensical 9-12 project, who would also sit up at night with a gun in his mouth wondering where it all went wrong.  And by "going wrong" I mean "not having a larger share of the Houston drive-time traffic market".   

—October 5th, 2009

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