Radio Love Song

Recently, I heard a DJ mention that "Let's Dance To Joy Division" by The Wombats is his favourite song, and it appears on a Spotify playlist from the producers of Guardians of the Galaxy, presumably to remind everyone the franchise still exists while they wait for the next instalment in a couple of years.

I was intrigued, so when I got home, I looked the song up on YouTube (Still no streaming music for me. I listen to music the old fashioned way: files I've bought and downloaded.) The song is very good, though I wouldn't list it as my favourite. On the list of indie songs that name-check indie bands, I'd place it ahead of "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" by CSS, but behind "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" by LCD System.

But then it hit me how weird this whole experience was: A DJ mentioned a good song - but didn't play it - and I looked it up myself to hear if it was any good. That's not how the whole DJ concept is supposed to work; their job is after all to play good music. But in today's radio world, it's just accepted that outside of college radio, the music is pre-approved focus-grouped demographic pablum, and the DJ's have no say in it.

But the DJ's themselves seem reasonably free to express themselves - after all, ads for radio stations usually promote them as much or more than the music. So we have the strange situation where DJ's can express their personality by talking about edgy music, but aren't allowed to play it.

Similarly, big-budget movies are okay with using obscure music in self promotion, even if the movie itself is a safe comic book sequel. So these two media may be restrained by the need to be safe bets, but don't mind acknowledging alternative choices the consumer might make. It's like some kind of weakened dystopia where Big Brother won't show you rebellion, but is okay with everyone talking about it.

Eyeworm

An "earworm" is a song that gets caught on your head and won't go away. For instance, recently I've found the song "Spirits" by The Strumbellas going through my head. That song has the chorus,

I got guns in my head and they won't go
Spirits in my head and they won't go

Of course, that's pretty ironic to have the song in my head and it won't go. I start to wish I also had spirits with guns in there, they might scare the song out.

Well, recently I was listening to Internet radio on my phone. This particular radio app gives the name of the song on the phone's notifications, which is convenient because you can check the name of the song or artist without going to the app itself. Unfortunately, there's a bug: if you close the app, sometimes the name of the song currently playing stays in the notifications list, even though the song is long gone, and the app is closed.

When this happens, there doesn't seem to be any way to remove the song name, short of restarting the phone. So for the next few days, whenever I check messages, texts, or e-mails, somewhere in the list, I see "Hozier - Take Me To Church." That's a pretty earwormy song, and I find that just reading the name makes it go through my head.

But when a song sticks in your head after you've heard it, you can replay that fresh and accurate memory to yourself. When it's triggered by something else, you're singing the song based on faded memories. I find myself with fragments of the song that bleed into other tunes, and suddenly I have three different songs in my head, and they're all out of tune, with the wrong lyrics.  To defeat it, I have to listen to some other music, so I start up the radio app and begin the cycle all over again.

Spirit of Radio

There's an ad on TV for Sportsnet, and it's trying to emphasize what a multi-media sports source it is.  They feature TV, radio, the web, apps, and a dead-tree magazine.  So to do this, they show a radio playing one of their stations, a TV showing sports, a tablet also showing sports etc.

What's weird is the radio they showed.  It's got a big round speaker and a big round dial, and I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be an old-fashioned radio, a modern radio that was trying to look retro, or a modern radio that was trying to be minimalist and accidentally looked retro. 

I guess what I'm getting at is that it's pretty much impossible for a radio to not look retro. No, it's not that radios are out of date, it's just that they no longer look like anything. When I tried asking myself what I would have expected a radio to look like, I didn't have an answer.  I have several radios, but they're just parts of a clock, stereo, car, even an MP3 player.  I don't really have a mental image of a radio.

So radios are now invisible. I wonder what other devices could become invisible in the future by being consumed by other things. Say, an MP3 player, since most people probably just use their phones for that. For a while now, tech pundits have predicted that computers will become invisible as they start to use gestures or voice commands, and start to get incorporated into TVs, appliances, clothes or houses (and as I'm writing this, I see a commercial for Amazon's "Echo" voice-activated thingamajig.) 

So if you're reading this on some big, intrusive device, it's something to think about.  Or, if this is being read-out to you by a computer woven into your shirt, then it's something to look back and laugh at.

I Am Aware Of Too Many Things

I don't normally listen to the music in stores and waiting rooms.  We'll, I guess no one really listens to it; it's intended to be an unconscious, background thing. Saying you listen to it is like saying you look at wallpaper.  I have written about it in the past.  So the fact that I notice it at all shows that I listen to it more than most.

Anyway, the reason I've noticed the background music recently is that twice in the past week, I've heard "What I Am" by Edie Brickell & New Bohemians.  That song is from 1988, and its folky style doesn't make it candidate for 80's nostalgia, so I haven't heard it many times in the quarter-century since it was released.

(For some reason I always associated the song with hearing her perform it on Saturday Night Live, and according to Wikipedia, that was the night she met her husband, Paul Simon.)

So why the sudden popularity of this song?  I've heard that songs can be revived unexpectedly if they test well on focus groups.  Yes, big radio companies do test songs on people before they go into regular rotation, and they'll play even old songs if the guinea pigs like it.  This was a few years ago when Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" suddenly made it onto many radio stations.

But that doesn't explain how they decide which songs get to the focus groups.  I mean, they can't test the entirety of recorded music on those people - someone must make a decision what gets put in front of the test groups, and they are the closest thing we have to the traditional DJ.