Radio Song
In the interest of upholding my make-an-entry-out-of-something-someone-else-actually-said/wrote tradition, today's post contains an email I received in response to my Jann Arden story a few weeks back.
This email is interesting for two reasons. 1. Someone actually reads the blog and is intrigued enough to respond to an update. (Granted, it's one of the spinnwebe cadre who read it mainly to keep on top of any embarrassing events that may be used as fodder against me, but still.) 2. It's well-written, something you all may not be used to in this space. Enjoy!
From: "Craig Myers"
To: alanisw@hotmail.com
Subject: Blog
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 08:08:36 -0600
Another quality entry, even if half of it was poached. Still, if I see this Arden broad's CD in a store, I'll pick it up.
Your entry got me thinking, because this kinda snuck up on us/me: when did morning drive time radio DJs start really sucking? I mean, truly for-real sucking ass?
When did they cross the line from just annoying "awkwardly deliver lame current events joke that Letterman did three weeks ago, only funnier, in response to which co-host laughs like a Hyena on goofballs, followed by slidewhistle/rimshot" not funny at all kind of show to "stick Bic pen into brainpan to let out the evil spirits rather than listen another second to these CHUD-like fucks"?
Just wondering.
CHUD. It was a bad 1980s movie. Cannabalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. No, seriously. You can look it up. CHUD. It sucked.
Your pal,
Craig "Ten Gallon" Myers
(Okay, okay. So, I added the "your pal" bit. And the hilarious Texanism. But the rest is real, though.)
Mr. Myers raises an excellent question, one that I feel deserves further probing. I remember growing up listening to CKLW in Windsor with Dick Purtan in the morning. He was funny. He and his crew wrote sketches and songs and developed characters and was on the cutting edge of the new radio style: quick, short news bits, a little traffic report here, one or two songs, lots of funny chatter, boom, before you know it you're awake and getting ready for the day and laughing to boot.
(I remember one of my favourite bits was him just putting on soft, lite-fm type music in the background, using his best "Lovers, and Other Strangers" deep, romantic voice and just reading the lyrics to popular songs as though it were poetry. Very simple premise, but surprisingly funny, especially since it was the hey-day of Prince and bleeped-for-your-own-good lyrics, etc.)
What was fun about listening to this show was that they were genuinely funny and they actually cracked each other up, and that translated really well to a grumpy, early morning listening audience. People started tuning in. The show became very popular, and Dick was becoming a star in his own right. People loved the morning show and he had a very loyal fan base. Dick and his crew could do no wrong. And that's always when trouble starts.
The thing about entertainment is there is a point, a barely perceptible point, when people transfer their appreciation of the talent to the performer (and now, it seems with morning radio, to the formula). At some point, and this seems especially true for comedy, it no longer matters if the person displays originality or talent (and of course if your job is to be funny/personable every day for a few hours there is going to be a point of creative exhaustion. There has to be). But they were entertaining once and that seems to be enough. The performer only has to show up and say the signature line or do the pratfall or whatever and people will laugh because they know this is the part where they are supposed to laugh.
What happens, then, is that something that started out as a genuinely good thing (like a morning radio crew clicking together and breaking each other up) is clung to and dutifully recreated as much as possible, even long after the original appeal has died. Soon others try to imitate what is already stale and lifeless, and the cycle repeats itself until the poor performers are so desperate for a laugh and scared for their jobs that they get increasingly frantic to generate it, even if they have laugh like braying donkeys four hours a day to do it.
Witness Harvey Corman and Tim Conway, once talented and funny guys (in my opinion). Then that one skit happened. The one where they couldn't keep a straight face, the one skit that everyone loves, mostly because of the genuine emotion of it. Sadly, once they realized how popular that skit had become, uncontrollable laughter seemed to make its way into every Carol Burnette show thereafter. And the funny died a lingering, humiliating death.
(SNL's Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey who do the Weekend Update are a perfect example of this "our laughter will suffice in lieu of humour" strategy. Consequently, I want to rip off each of their own legs and beat them with it every time I watch them. So I try not to watch them.)
But back to radio. When did they cross the line from merely moronically unfunny to pen-jabbingly-in-the-brain unfunny? (See, wasn't it better when Craig wrote it?) About the time that shock-jockery was introduced, I think. Sick and tired of the same ol' same ol', certain djs tried to bring much-needed life to the morning spots. Unfortunately, that struck a chord with the public and many, many mediocre imitations sprang up. The djs who thought they could pull off being an unfunny asshole did just that and the people who could not pull that off cranked it up a few thousand notches on the frenetic barely-funny-warmed-over-interpretations-of-talented people meter, in a bid to compete.
And you and I are the ones that pay. Yessiree, and pay dearly, every morning of our god-forsaken, pathetic lives. Let's face it, unless we want to listen to University or Public Radio as an alternative (and NO one wants that) we are the soulless army of the damned, just trying to find out what the traffic is like on the 401 and if we should wear a thick coat or not.
And it's all that cocksucker Howard Stern's fault. Thanks a lot, asswipe.
Earlier this year Toronto's morning radio landscape was changed by a station with a proper name (a sad, overused ploy to make it seem like the station has a personality, which it does not). A mere eight months later it has morphed into a typical popular format radio station, but man you should have heard it the first couple of months. They had NO DJS AT ALL, no banter, no weather, no time check, no fake laughter. For god sake, for the first two weeks THEY HAD NO COMMERCIALS. Just music.
(Let me tell you, putting up with Canadian content is much easier to do when you haven't got lame jokes and cackling idiots attacking you between old Martha and the Muffins tunes and Rough Trade ditties. Believe me.)
So, what does the future of morning radio hold for us? My guess would be more crank phone calls, and plenty of them (my friend Terry articulated exactly what I hate about these things "look, I've made someone trust me and then I betrayed that trust and made them angry. Isn't that funny?) And lots more X-TREME contests that idiotic people will line up for for the chance to humiliate themselves on air.
And the laughter, the interminable, grating laughter. That will continue, on an on, until the day we mercifully die. And if we're very lucky and have been very good people our reward will be that we won't have to tune into that big Morning Crew Whack-a-teria in the Sky (with your hosts Krazy Kali, Maddog Jehovah Bob and the Thor-Meister) for the rest of eternity.
Here's hoping.
In the interest of upholding my make-an-entry-out-of-something-someone-else-actually-said/wrote tradition, today's post contains an email I received in response to my Jann Arden story a few weeks back.
This email is interesting for two reasons. 1. Someone actually reads the blog and is intrigued enough to respond to an update. (Granted, it's one of the spinnwebe cadre who read it mainly to keep on top of any embarrassing events that may be used as fodder against me, but still.) 2. It's well-written, something you all may not be used to in this space. Enjoy!
From: "Craig Myers"
To: alanisw@hotmail.com
Subject: Blog
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 08:08:36 -0600
Another quality entry, even if half of it was poached. Still, if I see this Arden broad's CD in a store, I'll pick it up.
Your entry got me thinking, because this kinda snuck up on us/me: when did morning drive time radio DJs start really sucking? I mean, truly for-real sucking ass?
When did they cross the line from just annoying "awkwardly deliver lame current events joke that Letterman did three weeks ago, only funnier, in response to which co-host laughs like a Hyena on goofballs, followed by slidewhistle/rimshot" not funny at all kind of show to "stick Bic pen into brainpan to let out the evil spirits rather than listen another second to these CHUD-like fucks"?
Just wondering.
CHUD. It was a bad 1980s movie. Cannabalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. No, seriously. You can look it up. CHUD. It sucked.
Your pal,
Craig "Ten Gallon" Myers
(Okay, okay. So, I added the "your pal" bit. And the hilarious Texanism. But the rest is real, though.)
Mr. Myers raises an excellent question, one that I feel deserves further probing. I remember growing up listening to CKLW in Windsor with Dick Purtan in the morning. He was funny. He and his crew wrote sketches and songs and developed characters and was on the cutting edge of the new radio style: quick, short news bits, a little traffic report here, one or two songs, lots of funny chatter, boom, before you know it you're awake and getting ready for the day and laughing to boot.
(I remember one of my favourite bits was him just putting on soft, lite-fm type music in the background, using his best "Lovers, and Other Strangers" deep, romantic voice and just reading the lyrics to popular songs as though it were poetry. Very simple premise, but surprisingly funny, especially since it was the hey-day of Prince and bleeped-for-your-own-good lyrics, etc.)
What was fun about listening to this show was that they were genuinely funny and they actually cracked each other up, and that translated really well to a grumpy, early morning listening audience. People started tuning in. The show became very popular, and Dick was becoming a star in his own right. People loved the morning show and he had a very loyal fan base. Dick and his crew could do no wrong. And that's always when trouble starts.
The thing about entertainment is there is a point, a barely perceptible point, when people transfer their appreciation of the talent to the performer (and now, it seems with morning radio, to the formula). At some point, and this seems especially true for comedy, it no longer matters if the person displays originality or talent (and of course if your job is to be funny/personable every day for a few hours there is going to be a point of creative exhaustion. There has to be). But they were entertaining once and that seems to be enough. The performer only has to show up and say the signature line or do the pratfall or whatever and people will laugh because they know this is the part where they are supposed to laugh.
What happens, then, is that something that started out as a genuinely good thing (like a morning radio crew clicking together and breaking each other up) is clung to and dutifully recreated as much as possible, even long after the original appeal has died. Soon others try to imitate what is already stale and lifeless, and the cycle repeats itself until the poor performers are so desperate for a laugh and scared for their jobs that they get increasingly frantic to generate it, even if they have laugh like braying donkeys four hours a day to do it.
Witness Harvey Corman and Tim Conway, once talented and funny guys (in my opinion). Then that one skit happened. The one where they couldn't keep a straight face, the one skit that everyone loves, mostly because of the genuine emotion of it. Sadly, once they realized how popular that skit had become, uncontrollable laughter seemed to make its way into every Carol Burnette show thereafter. And the funny died a lingering, humiliating death.
(SNL's Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey who do the Weekend Update are a perfect example of this "our laughter will suffice in lieu of humour" strategy. Consequently, I want to rip off each of their own legs and beat them with it every time I watch them. So I try not to watch them.)
But back to radio. When did they cross the line from merely moronically unfunny to pen-jabbingly-in-the-brain unfunny? (See, wasn't it better when Craig wrote it?) About the time that shock-jockery was introduced, I think. Sick and tired of the same ol' same ol', certain djs tried to bring much-needed life to the morning spots. Unfortunately, that struck a chord with the public and many, many mediocre imitations sprang up. The djs who thought they could pull off being an unfunny asshole did just that and the people who could not pull that off cranked it up a few thousand notches on the frenetic barely-funny-warmed-over-interpretations-of-talented people meter, in a bid to compete.
And you and I are the ones that pay. Yessiree, and pay dearly, every morning of our god-forsaken, pathetic lives. Let's face it, unless we want to listen to University or Public Radio as an alternative (and NO one wants that) we are the soulless army of the damned, just trying to find out what the traffic is like on the 401 and if we should wear a thick coat or not.
And it's all that cocksucker Howard Stern's fault. Thanks a lot, asswipe.
Earlier this year Toronto's morning radio landscape was changed by a station with a proper name (a sad, overused ploy to make it seem like the station has a personality, which it does not). A mere eight months later it has morphed into a typical popular format radio station, but man you should have heard it the first couple of months. They had NO DJS AT ALL, no banter, no weather, no time check, no fake laughter. For god sake, for the first two weeks THEY HAD NO COMMERCIALS. Just music.
(Let me tell you, putting up with Canadian content is much easier to do when you haven't got lame jokes and cackling idiots attacking you between old Martha and the Muffins tunes and Rough Trade ditties. Believe me.)
So, what does the future of morning radio hold for us? My guess would be more crank phone calls, and plenty of them (my friend Terry articulated exactly what I hate about these things "look, I've made someone trust me and then I betrayed that trust and made them angry. Isn't that funny?) And lots more X-TREME contests that idiotic people will line up for for the chance to humiliate themselves on air.
And the laughter, the interminable, grating laughter. That will continue, on an on, until the day we mercifully die. And if we're very lucky and have been very good people our reward will be that we won't have to tune into that big Morning Crew Whack-a-teria in the Sky (with your hosts Krazy Kali, Maddog Jehovah Bob and the Thor-Meister) for the rest of eternity.
Here's hoping.
posted by Alanis at
9:56 PM
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