as discussed previously, i’m bored with my music collection.

i mean, i don’t have a tiny music collection — granted, it’s not huge, and some day when i’m rich and famous (or when i work in a record store) it’ll be much larger, but it’s not tiny. i just feel like i’ve listened to everything so many times.

ordinarily i’d turn to radio for relief, for variety and new stuff. but … chicago radio sucks! oh, it’s awful. there’s just no excuse for it. when i first moved to chicago, i was enthralled with XRT — in no small part due to the fact that the very first time i turned on a radio here, when i was in town for my UIC new student orientation, the tuner had been randomly set to a frequency where it got in XRT. a bit of fine-tuning later and i heard part of the bridge from “head like a hole” played as part of a station id tag, and i was so happy that someone was actually playing nine inch nails on the radio that i declared allegiance to XRT on the spot. i spent the next few hours in my room in commons west, sitting on the windowsill watching cars and the el go by on the congress, listening to XRT and thoroughly enjoying myself. it was the fourth of july and poi dog pondering were doing a live show in grant park that XRT was broadcasting live. then poi dog went off and then the sun went down, and i went off exploring my new city.

i hope you’ll understand why i resent XRT’s massive suck so, so much. i know i wasn’t here for the glory days, but i did get to live some of the pre-westinghouse buyout times and they were good times indeed.

now, every damn time i turn on XRT it’s something boring and adult-contemporary. i’m sorry. john mayer is a good singer and he was pretty funny on “the chapelle show” that one time, but i’m just not as interested in his music as they seem to think i should be. same goes for train and matchbox 20 and all those other damn soundalikes. bah. and there are more tracks by classic rock bands that you could play than you do — okay, it’s not like there are only three great Who songs (“Baba O’Riley,” “My Generation,” “5:15,” … maybe once in a while, for variety, “Pinball Wizard”? come on!) or four great Rolling Stones songs (let’s see. “Satisfaction,” naturally, “Gimme Shelter,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Sympathy for the Devil” sound about right?). so i just don’t turn on XRT anymore, because i end up getting frustrated at what they’re playing, rather than enjoying it.

but enough self-indulgent, “my taste is better than everyone else’s!” bitching. i have found a new love: bbc radio one.

i’ve been listening to radio one for about the past four hours now, and i’ve heard exactly one song that i own (“how to be dead,” by snow patrol). one other song i would expect i could hear on chicago radio (green day, “boulevard of broken dreams”). a dozen songs i could identify a performer by his or her voice, but had never heard the track (including a new eminem single sampling “toy soldiers” by martika, of all things — though, in fairness, i would have heard that one if i had carried through with my plans to buy his new album, but i hadn’t gotten around to it yet). and a whole *pile* of stuff i had no idea about. i’ve bought from iTunes one track i heard already (“galvanize,” chemical brothers), and searched fruitlessly for others.

i am so very happee!

glee! new music for niqui!

it’s unfortunate that i can’t listen to radio one in the car, though, as that’s where i (…would) do most of my radio listening these days. i mean, i’ve always been a very radio-oriented person. i used to have at least a clock-radio anywhere i spent any time, and would switch it on as a matter of course. i never had an allowance or got paid for chores or anything, so i only ever really had money to buy recorded music after i got a job in high school, which was about 11 years ago. before that, and for a long time afterwards, it was all about radio. and it’s been a painful process, not regularly listening to radio for about the past five or six — i always turn it on, find something good, then inevitably get irritated in the next song or two — or the next FIVE MINUTES OF COMMERCIALS (17 minutes per hour; really, XRT! a bit much, isn’t it?), and shut it off again, sort of like running into something in the dark and hitting my shin at least twice a week until finally i just throw the damn footstool out the window for its sins. but i miss it a lot. as the man said, “i can’t live without my radio.” so i’m really pleased with having a new radio station i am not sick and despairing of.

and yes, i’m certain that if i had been listening to radio one for the past twenty-seven years i’d find plenty of faults with it as well. (although at least i couldn’t bitch about the number of commercials. it took me a while to figure out what was missing, this morning.) but, for now, it’s a breath of fresh air.