"Sex and Violence"--Stone Temple Pilots

Ever since I moved back to North Carolina, I've been listening to a lot more radio. In addition to listening in the car, I also listen at my parents' house. My mom is sort of obsessed with radio, and has a whole system where she listens to only one station at a time until she absolutely can't stand it anymore. She plays this station basically all day at a shockingly high volume in most rooms of the house. As you might imagine, this is a lot of fun for me, at least when I am visiting my parents.

Although I'm always sticking up for pop country music (see earlier posts), several grueling and demoralizing months on Country 94.7 have diminished my enthusiasm slightly. You can imagine how excited I was when my mom finally made the switch to 96 Rock, whose slogan "Everything that rocks" is either genius or dumb.

96 Rock is a locally-owned station, which is actually pretty awesome since most stations around here are owned by ClearChannel, which is the Evil Empire. Wikipedia tells me that the station started in February of 1998, "playing everything from Chumbawumba to Hendrix." They still play a similar mix---in other words, "things that are musically important but boring" and "things that really suck."

There is a lot of angry yelling about girls and a lot of unintelligible mumbling about drug problems. Sometimes people are so upset about girls that they have to do drugs and then smash things, and, in the case of more acoustic groups, possibly cry into a bottle of whiskey afterwards. Often I want to find the name and artist of a song by googling the lyrics, only to realize that I can't hear any of the words distinctly enough to google them.

I'm not being entirely fair, though--every now and then they play some stuff I really like. Although I was not 12 years old or a boy in 1994, for some reason I have always loved both Collective Soul and The Stone Temple Pilots, so there are times when I feel deeply comforted by this station. Other times, like when they play Puddle of Mudd, I am not deeply comforted.

One cool thing about 96 Rock is that the DJs seem to really care about the music. Because it's locally-owned, I think they get more control in picking the songs, and that seems to translate into more personal investment in the station. I just listened to an entire monologue about whether the new singer of Alice in Chains is better than the old one, and before that there was an impassioned speech about how The Red Hot Chili Peppers, in ten years, will be considered legends on the level of The Beatles. You might not agree (and gawwwd, do I not agree on that one) but you gotta appreciate the earnestness with which these people appreciate cock rock.