After several occasions of being stuck with rental cars and loaners that lacked CD players due to my car having been abused by other drivers multiple times over the past year, I have lost all faith in Pittsburgh radio stations. My usual setup in the car is a 160gig iPod jammed into the USB port in the console.
Yes, I still swear by the iPod because streaming music is bullshit. From poor sound quality to AT&T's inability to provide a reliable signal, I find it disrespectful to the artists, producers and engineers that worked so diligently to make music sound the way that it should to listen to their efforts at subpar quality. That and there's something that feels weird to me about tethering my phone to a rental car so that's not going to happen.
The first time I got into one of these rentals I tried putting on the local “Modern Rock” station and there was a guy screaming at me about sports. That was the second time I fell for that dirty trick. Years ago, I had a loaner because of some recall work being done on my car and the same thing happened. It had been years since I tuned in so I thought the station changed formats from music to sports talk because Pittsburgh at large could give fuck all about music and will talk about a football team all year round.
I remember the station used to have a show for a few hours on Sunday mornings where they would break format and play music that came out prior to 1999. They would play Punk, New Wave and Post Punk during this show and it always made me wonder why the music that influenced their usual playlist was relegated to the Sunday morning ghetto when no one is listening. It might just be me but I'd prefer to hear The Clash, DEVO and Buzzcocks on the radio than Limp Bizkit, Incubus and Blink-182.
I tried listening to the oldies station but they were playing pop songs from the nineties. I didn't like those songs when they were new so I'm not going to give them my time now that they're considered old. I always remember the oldies station being the compromise that everyone could agree on when there was a group of people of different ages and backgrounds. Now it sounds like they're playing commercials with a pop song or two thrown in every so often.
The college radio stations were out of the question because of their low signal range. I was out in the suburbs so there was no way those stations were coming in. Hell, if I try to listen to them over the air at my house it all depends on which way the wind is blowing.
One of these cars even had satellite radio and I found that lacking. All of the channels seemed to skim the surface of whatever type of music they were programmed for. I can't believe that Sirius/XM tries to maintain a subscriber base by offering up basic, vanilla programming.
I ended up going with the easy listening station that targets white hipsters because the last thing I need to be doing is driving in silence with nothing but my own thoughts rattling around in my head. That would surely lead to an incident worthy of the evening news. Every so often they'd play something worthwhile but mostly it was mid-tempo singer/songwriter type stuff that drives me up the wall. I don't need music to be all agro all the time but if a station is going to claim some level of eclecticism then maybe try to be eclectic from time to time. I see nothing wrong with going from the Ramones to Miles Davis to the Gun Club to High On Fire.
So instead of complaining, like I have for the past several hundred words, I decided to do something about it by starting The Cazart Chronicles Podcast. The world needs another podcast like I need another hole in the head but if there is one thing that I'm good at it's screaming into a void that no one cares about.
From 2012 to 2014, I put together a podcast called the Out Of Step Music Hour which would max out around ten downloads per episode. I pulled the plug on it because the online storage that I was using to upload the episodes ran out of space and upgrading to the next storage level was stupid expensive.
The basic concept of the program will be for me to provide a mix tape/CD so I can share music with anyone that may be interested. It'll be twenty-five songs with minimal talking because I can't stand the sound of my own voice and the focus should be on the music.
It's not to show that I know more than someone else about music. It's about creating and continuing a conversation about music because that's what music is.
Music is art and not a competition. I will be the first to admit that there is a lot I still need to learn. There are artists that have been around for years that could very well be in my blindspot and I haven't crossed paths with them yet. I'm hoping to use this show as a service to maybe eliminate any blindspots that other people may have and get them into a record store to buy some records.
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