Yeah, one of those situations where there is at least one radio going on at all times, with the attendant morning radio personalities... I have been thinking and I must say it is even worse than I remember it. Morning radio is like the ugly older sibling of late night television. Radio - not only do they play the same song at least five times a day until you hate it with a more intense passion than you ever loved it (and gain the power of recognizing it immediately even faintly heard from a distance), but they've got the terrible idea of hiring sycophantic dickweeds to blabber excitedly and laugh (at me, the underemployed schlub? Go on talking about your coffee and cream, your wife's ass, why you hate winter) for a 6 - 9 or whatever morning show.
I'm sure there have been radio morning shows that are not completely oppressive and distressing for non-morning people. You know the kind of person I mean: coffee or not they are unlikely to smile, form a coherent sentence, or laugh for the first hour they're awake and working. To some varieties of them (for instance myself) the sounds of morning show hosts going on and on between ads and eerily upbeat music is worse than static, or any aggressively unremarkable or annoying song.
My brain, even when it is still half in the realm of sleep, does not approve of a bunch of modestly personable DJs doing their annoying and useless job while I add value to the region by trading my labour power for a ridiculous and mildly depressing pittance. Cognizant of the fact they earn more than me (and get to laugh out loud all the time, come up with groovy insider jokes, great phone interactions, crazy stunts, far-out contests, and yawn level jokes), I do feel a mild bit of resentment as well as annoyance. Change the station? Why risk it? You'd be surprised at the intensity with which some folk despise public radio, the music of the great canon of composers, and silence (my personal top choice for morning vibes). So what is left to me?
Answer: The annoying squawking of overpaid manchildren, combined with a hellish interplay of blaring advertisements and generally non-morning music. I don't do a line of coke or a bunch of trucker pills when I wake up, so their braying hijinks and high-energy excitedness is completely jarring to me. It is even mildly painful to the very core of my soul. I don't get pumped up by their dreary and doctrinaire choice of songs either. I don't enjoy these audio clowns, and even if they were funny, had material worth listening to, I would be hard-pressed to listen to them. Plainly put, I've only ever heard one or two radio morning shows I didn't hate, and even those were most often kind of boring.
Most stations advertise their appreciable web presence. So I wondered, who in the hell would go to the website of a radio station and check up on the blogs, latest news, and pictures from the morning DJs? I can only come up with a few major sources of traffic: intensely lonely, credible, or bored people, and the mentally ill. Otherwise incomprehensible. Plainly put, it always astounds me how much effort is put into the background of the world, where we while away our mortal hours generally enduring things we don't like. I mean, hell, I write a pretty non-important blog generally about non-topics... I add white noise to the internet. There's at least some difference between me and the morning DJ with laughter in his voice and more energy than anyone needs at that hour.
Generally I turn the radio down to reasonable limits and grit my teeth and do my work quickly so I can move elsewhere and do something else somewhere there is nobody pretending that the morning is a great or funny time (unless you stayed up all night, or are waking up to do something other than be underemployed in a mostly stagnant economy). Even the mildly funny shit, which is scarce, is run into the ground faster and deeper than a solid gold locomotive dropped from orbit. I don't know how people can stand it... you can get used to it, sure, but it is specifically just an unpleasant feature of life to me.
I've been listening to radio for years, when I was really uncritical none of this mattered to me as long as a good song came on, like the one by
Aaliyah or that other one by
L.E.N., or that later RHCP
song about taxis or something. The era-defining hits of yesteryear were also generally overplayed and eventually annoying, and I ought to remember that, but they stuck with me, and some of your old favorites and mine are still being overplayed. I used to spend a lot of time in the company of radio, but have lived without it for many years now in the future, so coming from silence or chosen tracks to the hilarious cacophony of jokes and marketing and grut rock just adds a small element of objection to my day. Gotta blog about those awkward things, unavoidable things, and heartwarming things.
Now, if you're a morning show DJ and you're reading this and you are saying to yourself things like, "
This fussy little internet geekblogger doesn't understand my dedication and verve, or the pain which I know as a morning show host, or that my slightly exaggerated manner is meant to help others deal with the pain of morning workaday life. A venerable and hallowed tradition. The skill of talking too much for minutes at a time was one I inherited from my father, who was himself a morning show DJ." Nah, man, this isn't personal and I'm not a geek... I acknowledge it's my problem I find you annoying. That you dessicate my environment with your wireless sonic depredations is just my perception of it, and I am the wrong kind of judge in this instance. In the end, I keep listening out of apathy, a perverse and ironic joy of laughing at your base shitness, and obviously for a chance to hear myself on the airwaves and win that hundred dollar wacky trivia question. Play those canned sounds again – you know the ones – and teach me how to lose my self-awareness... does your laughter taste like ashes to you?
