Crumpled Notes

So I listen to XM Radio a lot in the car. It’s got like a thousand stations and they are are all very precisely defined. For example there are something like 5 or 6 country stations that cover alt country, Top40 (Nashville) country, old country like Hank Williams, honky tonk/70’s (Willie & Waylon), another “today’s country,” folk and bluegrass. I guess that actually makes seven. I used country as an example because to use “rock” would’ve required listing out 13 channels, and that’s before including categories like “Hits,” “Urban” and so on.

So anyhow, I was getting tired of listening to my main 5 channels (Lucy, X Country, the Mix, The Loft and XM Cafe) and started browsing around (now that I have my cool new Roady XT, browsing around is easy, plus you can see what’s playing without actually changing to each station) to see what was good. I found a channel that was playing U2, and one of their songs I actually like, always good. I switched to it, and proceeded to listen to six or seven songs in a row that I really liked. I remembered the name of the channel (Top Tracks) and it’s channel number (46) for the future. Well, after listening to it several more times and finding that Top Tracks played more stuff I liked more often than many of the other channels I usually listen to, I added a button for it. All was well and good.

Then, one day at a stoplight, while rummaging in the glovebox, I found the little card XM Radio (the company) sends out to subscribers with a list of all the channels (there’s really 160) and 2-3 word descriptions of their content. I was curious how Top Tracks was described so I looked it up. Classic Rock. Oh my god, I must be Old now.

See, I’ve always kind of made fun of people (principally my husband) who listen to “Classic Rock” stations. And to be fair, the primary one here in Austin plays mostly old CCR and Zeppelin–you know, OLD stuff, not REGULAR stuff like U2, and Billy Joel, and Prince, for god’s sake. Though to be fair, when I went to the website for Top Tracks, it listed the following as what you might hear:

Aerosmith, “Dream On”
Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Def Leppard “Photograph”
Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water” (which, incidentally, my 8-year old daughter can play on the guitar)
Lynyrd Skynyrd “Free Bird”
ZZ Top “Tush”
Van Halen “Jump
Kansas “Carry on Wayward Son”

Most of that list is the kind of thing I’d make fun of Will (my husband) for listening to. “Get out of the past–geez, listen to something more current!” But once I thought about it, U2’s “The Joshua Tree” is nearly 20 years old. That’s 2 - 0.

I feel like the protagonist in that most annoying of songs (”1985,” by Bowling for Soup) who wondered “When did Motley Crue become classic rock?”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.