No ID Required

Because of the radio station switchover I mentioned the other day, I'm back to listening to the regular dismal radio stations available in Oklahoma City when I drive. Sure, the former Spy has been replaced by a jazz/pop standards station that plays some really good music, but something may have changed about the broadcast signal because it's not as easy to pick up anymore.

So earlier today I had the radio tuned to one of the "classic rock" stations in town -- I can't remember which one and it doesn't really matter -- and the disc jockey followed up a performance of Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" by saying, "That was Fleetwood Mac 'Go Your Own Way' off their album Rumours." That made me laugh.

Really? You play a 34-year-old song that probably gets air on your station at least four or five times a week and you feel like you have to identify it? The whole point of the classic rock format is to never play anything new: Who in the heck is not going to know "Go Your Own Way" when they hear it? I kept listening, and the DJ subsequently identified Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" and the Rolling Stones "Brown Sugar." Good thing, too, because it takes probably a full second of either song before it's obvious what it is.

In the earlier days of radio, DJs often selected the music they played. Bands and artists would send songs to the station and the DJ would pick some, see if people liked them, and keep them in rotation if they won approval. At the very least, the DJ had the role of telling you what song you had heard, because you might not have heard it before. Now they rarely if ever do the former, and it seems like 80 percent of the time, they don't need to do the latter.

Nowadays, DJs seem to do very little beyond yammer, either in the studio or at some remote broadcast with a sponsor. Maybe them yammering is preferable to some car dealer yammering during a commercial, but not by much. When it comes to the classic rock format, disc jockeys are rapidly nearing the screen-door-on-the-Nautilus stage. One more step towards "Radio Nowhere."