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Radio has gone from a once great medium where new and different artists could be heard to a stale, shell of its former self in a very short time. Radio as I knew it as a kid is gone, what we have now is a sad substitute.
As a child, the radio was my best friend. It was where I heard new music, where I found out if school was cancelled on those cold, snowy Pennsylvania winter mornings and more importantly, it was where I nurtured my love of lyrics. Radio in the 1980's was exciting, it was fun and a treat to listen to. We took our portable radios everywhere we went, it was unheard of to not tune in while in the car, most every store in our region played the local station and we enjoyed it. Radio was where I wanted to be when I was a teen. My dream was to become a DJ and be like Wolfman Jack. I anxiously awaited new episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati as a child, Johnny Fever was the coolest of the cool. As I grew older, I discovered college radio. They played the music we just didn't hear on the top-40 stations. It was here that I heard Jesus and Mary Chain and Concrete Blonde for the first time. Thanks largely to the local college station, my lifelong love of The Replacement began one cold February afternoon. At that time, becoming a DJ was relatively simple. You went to college (or not), you developed a good speaking voice, you gathered knowledge of bands and singles and you worked your butt of on shifts nobody else wanted. A person could begin working in the mail room or the front office of a small radio station and work their way to DJ if they tried hard enough. If the DJ liked a group, they got airplay. DJs had personality back then. Their excitement for their favorite groups could be felt thorugh the tubes and wires that made the radio in my room come alive. If an artist wanted some airplay, they made friends with the local DJs. Artists were made on the radio, they didn't have to have a certain look or appeal to certain age group, they just had to be good. As radio progressed, it became a monster. DJs stopped hyping their favorite bands, bands stopped getting airplay because they were good. If they didn't appeal to the MTV set, they had no chance. The true spirit of radio was lost, crushed beneath the giant creature that is corporate greed. Local radio stations went the way of the dodo. They've almost all been replaced by corporate giants with cutesy names like BOB FM and Jim Radio and Froggy. Most of their content now comes from a central location in some place most of us have never been. They try to fool us by claiming to be local, but they're anything but. Forget about taking your demo tape to the local program director, he doesn't exist anymore. He's been replaced with a computer much like Hal in 2001. Radio is dying a slow death these days. Most hard-core music fans who don't consider the latest talent "American Idol" has to offer us good music are turning to internet based radio out of sheer desperation. We're becoming disillusioned with what we're being force-fed by each and every station on our dial. Shoved in between the endless commercials for stuff we don't need are songs that lack any passion or personality. The corporate giants who own the stations see only dollar signs and they make plenty of those by giving us mass-produced fluff recycled and repackaged for the masses. Wolfman Jack passed away before radio began it's death toll. Johnny Fever was never real, but if he were, he'd be angry. The young girl who thought both DJs were the best of the best in her youth shares that anger. Gone are the stations where indie music and real alternative streamed from the airwaves. Gone are the local anchors and personalities. Gone are the things that made radio special and exciting. Gone with them are the times when being a DJ was the greatest job there was. I was proud to be a DJ then. Joey Ramone once sang "We Want the Airwaves," it's high time we echoed his sentiment and took them back.
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