What ever happened to the radio DJs?
What ever happened to the harbingers of new?
Iconoclasts and rebels, free thinkers and trouble makers
Now they play homogenized corporate brew.
What ever happened to the radio DJs?
What ever happened to purveyors of truth?
Now it's sterilized, compromised, bastardized, all-one-size
Patriotic pablum for anesthetized youth.
I can't swallow the cookie cutter playlists
Don't give a damn about fitting the mold
If you don't tow the line you're gonna be dismissed
So listen to them carefully and do what you're told.
So here's to the long gone radio DJs
Who all got replaced by market research
And your favorite station's now a money grubbing corporation
Kneel down and pray to the pre programmed church.
*
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. Leonard Cohen
12 comments:
You ask the right questions, LM. The music industry has become seriously polluted, which is why I prefer indie music these days and dread the day the innovative musicians are discovered and pulled into the money-making machine.
It sounds like you have some radio connections because you know a lot about the workings of the business these days. My longtime career was as a radio DJ, and it has changed a lot from the old days of "personality" driven radio, where people on the air were actually ad-libing and they had something to say. You could tell one from the other by their personalities--now, they are mostly glorified card readers and all sound the same.
Used to be that radio was run by radio folks--people who had experience in the business. But big corporations took it over, and most had no experience in radio, didn't know what they were doing, so they would hire "consultants," guys who did had some radio experience and thought they knew it all--the consultants developed the one-size-fits-all cookie cutter formats, so that is why radio (on the commercial level at least) sounds the same from city to city.
For the record, I still keep my hand in, playing the tunes at one of the local stations here--and I still have "something to say" every now and then!
Headbangers of new instead.
have to confess, I have spent a lifetime not listening to the radio. So I don't miss what is no more .
But TV has gone the way you describe. Mush and pulp. [a lot of it American import :-)], but ours is no better.
Now it's sterilized, compromised, bastardized, all-one-size
Patriotic pablum for anesthetized youth.
Wish I'd written that! LOL
You are my hero....this has to be said and you did it in the most perfect of manners. I have a hard time listening to radio anymore, even the satellite radio that was supposed to cure that is still the same. Great observation and in turn great illumination. Loved it.
love it. (and big Elvis fan!)
Tom Petty has a song on this topic... The Last DJ. but i bet you know that. :)
I eat lunch in the same little coney five days a week (whenever I work) and they play a radio station there that drives me insane. I am only there for a half hour, but I hear the same tired pre-fab dance pop tunes EVERY day. I even make a game of it. "I wonder how long until they play the one that rips off "Take On Me"? Usually, within ten minutes, it plays. Every day! They must play the same six or eight songs a hundred times a day.
Generica... is it the same in other nations? So sad, to loose local color and flavor.
oh yes! old is gold!
It would be so fine if a real artist sang these lyrics in a song.
EC got it right: you either shut up or get cut up.
I love local AM radio so far down the dial they don't care what gets played.
Mostly I play from Rhapsody - now on: Tom Waits from 1987.
btw - this was bril:
"Now it's sterilized, compromised, bastardized, all-one-size
Patriotic pablum for anesthetized youth."
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