{"id":1969,"date":"2017-05-12T10:09:27","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T15:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/?p=1969"},"modified":"2017-06-05T19:54:10","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T00:54:10","slug":"pop-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/12\/pop-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Pop Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

So the radio in my new car<\/a> is not as good as the one in the old one was. I can’t listen to public radio all the way to the train station in Harvard IL. It fades out around Janesville. For a little while I tried a country station – one Sunday night last December when Belana and I were coming back from seeing Fun Home<\/a> in Chicago, we got some country station that was doing a retrospective show, all songs that had roses in them, that was actually good. That’s what made me look for a country station – but – and I’m not sure if it was the same station – the one that comes in in the daytime is all these songs that are basically let’s get drunk & screw, and they all have heavily auto-tuned voices. Bleech. So I’ve been listening to a commercial rock station, 107.3 WSJY Janesville, and it kind of amuses me what ends up in their playlist. And that they run grocery store ads “chicken is on special this week, skinless boneless, $2.99\/lb. Don’t want to cook? Bags of Tyson boneless tenders for $5.99”. And there’s a community calendar. The first time I tuned them in, they were playing Prince’s Kiss. It was coming in really scratchy – I was still too far from Janesville, but that charmed me enough to make them a saved station button.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday morning when I was driving back, they played everything from Kelly Clarkson (I don’t remember what song of hers; I don’t like her much*<\/a>) to Gnarls Barkley Crazy<\/a> to Adele. On the trip down they played this Chicago song<\/a> that’s stuck in my head now. I thought it was the Bee Gees till I looked it up. Don’t hit play unless you wish to be cursed as well.<\/p>\n

It’s just sort of interesting what happens in terms of uptake of pop songs – that this commercial station is playing Prince, lefty sexy; Kelly Clarkson, who supported Bush and I bet Trump, too; Gnarls Barkley – also sort of underground at least for awhile; and old Chicago – that’ll NEVER go away. Plus local ads and community calendar – old timey radio stuff.<\/p>\n

It reminded me of this song – that I thought was by David Bowie, but it’s a one-hit wonder from the ’80s (1979, really), by a band called “M”. On Wikipedia<\/a> it says that on the album length version, Bowie provided back up handclaps. Maybe that’s where I got the idea of a Bowie connection.<\/p>\n