Public Radio Killed The Radio Star

Public Radio Killed The Radio Star

This past weekend two long time influencal radio shows came to an end. KCRW's night time programing of Metropolis (7:30-10pm) hosted by Jason Bentley and his weekend moonlighting gig at KROQ Saturdays from midnight to 3am both came to an end.

KCRW promoted him to music director when current music director superstar and Morning becomes eclectic host Nic harcourt stepped down from his role at KCRW causing all sorts of schedule changes. Many aren't that pleased with this move. Metropolis was a soundscape that resembles the L.A. evening skyline: angular, futuristic and pulsing with nocturnal energy. Mixed with a rich trance/electronic/club mix. Morning becomes eclectic is good to start your day with. It's mellow and nonthreatening. You'll hear indie bands there but you'll also get your know favorites like Beck, Travis and Moby.



For the past 13 years I've been listening to Jason Bentley on KROQ. I've been a fan of him on KCRW for the past 15 of the 16 years he hosted Metropolis. To say that he hasn't been influential on how my music interest was shaped would be an understatement. It's bittersweet. I don't listen to morning becomes eclectic much. Mainly because I'm far from a morning person. But since it is an entirely different beast, I don't expect to hear Underworld, Chemical brothers or Daft Punk in the morning slot.

This weekend a part of me... I wouldn't say died, but I would say that there's a lot of change coming around the corner. I grasped on to radio for a long time because unlike others, I saw that there was good music still there hiding behind the mainstream pop sound. My avenues are shrinking as to where I can find good music that I enjoy.



It's not the end of the world. I remember my favorite KROQ DJ Doug The Slug/Sluggo/ Roberts packed it up and left for New York leaving Carson Daily to replace him during weekday nights. It was awful. He later came back and does random shifts now. It's the nature of the beast. People move to different towns or different stations to climb the ladder. I fully understand.

The only down fall is that it seems that more and more of my radio attention in the car is now focused on Talk Radio. Perhaps I'm getting old. Perhaps I just don't find 90% of the music played on most radio stations even remotely interesting anymore. It could very well be all those above. Either way, it's hard to see Jason Bentley go to the morning hours but I wish him the best of luck. Hopefully they wont castrate him too much considering I'm already hearing mocking tones from those pretentious ones wanting to change the name to Morning Becomes Monotonous ...

For all endings to have a new beginning.

Rockin' out with your 'Mart out!

Who buys new AC/DC albums these days? It must be people willing to accept slight, diminished variations on the same tired set of songs because they fear change and deny artistic evolution. Also, they like that AC/DC still plays the simplest, dumbest music imaginable, both lyrically and musically -- no challenges, no surprises. So, the band's key consumers are conservative, lazy people looking for something easy, familiar, predictable and stupid. Really, it's a miracle that AC/DC didn't start its partnership with Wal-Mart until its brand new album Black Ice.

Buying music at Wal-Mart is like ordering sushi from a grocery store: You probably had better options, and if you somehow died as a result of the transaction, no one would feel the slightest sympathy for you. Instead of finding space for AC/DC's Black Ice in its CD section, Wal-Mart created a makeshift display in menswear. It's a savvy move, because while Young Men can bypass Wal-Mart's exclusive distribution deal (400,000 people ripped Black Ice from BitTorrent a week before its release), they can't download Freedom Panther T-shirts and jeans with bedazzled skulls on the butt. I can't imagine the olive-capped douchecake pictured in this banner buying Black Ice. He'll get his AC/DC fix at strip clubs, where "You Shook Me All Night Long" plays in perpetuity.

This panoramic view illuminates AC/DC's core fanbase -- old white dudes and gamer kids with weird shit shaved in the back of their heads. The representative from the latter group is playing the Wal-Mart/MTV collaboration "AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack," a desperate attempt to get young people to acknowledge that AC/DC still exists in the present tense. They're preparing to recreate selections such as "Smash 'n' Grab" and "War Machine," which they'll soon discover are much more boring than their titles suggest. The instrumental tedium might render the guitarist and rhythm section comatose, but the singer has the hardest task. I wonder how many forks you would have to swallow in order to replicate Brian Johnson's corroded yowl

Wal-Mart sells AC/DC hats, here contrasted with Chiefs caps: Both once-proud franchises have experienced an embarrassing decline. The placement of the lightning-crotched AC/DC boxers between NASCAR and Budweiser patterns suggests racing-sponsorship possibilities, especially since Black Ice contains a brainless song called "Wheels" that seemingly exists solely for future use in car-related commercials. However, NASCAR morons like fast things, and Black Ice operates at two settings: "School speed limit" and "idling." Some of these sluggardly tracks would need juice from a generator just to qualify as power ballads.

Because it unfurls so slowly, Black Ice continually reminds fans that they're listening to rock and not, say, quiet storm R&B. Four songs contain "rock" in their titles ("Rock 'N' Roll Train," "She Likes Rock 'N' Roll," "Rock 'N' Roll Dream" and "Rocking All The Way"), while five others reference "rock" in lyrics like "rockin' rollin' soldier," "got a taste of a rocking band" and "decibel/that's the story of rock 'n' roll." AC/DC might as well be named Rock at this point, so when they sing about it all the goddamn time, the songs shift into Malkovichian overdrive. Mercifully, AC/DC doesn't perform much fuck talk on this disc, though between the group's inherent sleaziness and its members' burgeoning senility, it's hard to tell how many of these lines are attempted euphemisms:

• "She's like a spinning dynamo."
• "You know she's blowing away all the others."
• "You better razzle dazzle"
• "He's the only one who got a full sack."

AC/DC has been opposed to the online sale of individual tracks for some time, ostensibly in order to preserve the artistic integrity of the initial sequencing. ("Hard As A Rock" must segue into "Cover You in Oil," or else you've ruined the intellectual cohesion of the album Ballbreaker!) Black Ice demonstrates another way to thwart single-track downloading: Make every song so lethargic and indistinct that no one has incentive to differentiate between them. But fuck those computer nerds, anyway. Black Ice is made for the sort of Young Men who buy their music (along with their pants and their pre-faded football jerseys) in person at Wal-Mart.

Unforgiven

Death Magnetic marks Metallica's first decent thrash-infused album since 1988, but this pseudo-resurgence doesn't immediately erase two disgraceful decades of hateful incompetence.

Their eyes glow red behind those sunglasses.

I have some respect for the Kansas City Royals, an organization that last experienced a successful season back in 1985. Despite years of watching incredulously as players turned simple plays into slapstick pratfalls, I still follow their games, and I think of the team in a generally positive light as an easy win for when the Dodgers play them every so often. This is because they haven't fundamentally altered their identity or goals. They attempt to win baseball games, and they even manage to do so, once or twice a week.

In order for them to appear as traitorous as Metallica, thus earning my unwavering enmity, they'd have to completely abandon the framework in which I first appreciated them. For example, if the Royals players started wearing eyeliner instead of eye-black, suing everyone who watched the games on TV instead of purchasing tickets, inflicting Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park on paying fans as nightly "opening acts," and playing golf instead of baseball, I'm sure I would view the Royals as most of the country does, as an entity that should be ignored when it's not serving as a pitiable punchline.

To clarify the specifications of this analogy, the Royals play baseball, under the broader category "sports." Metallica, when listenable, plays metal, under the umbrella term "music." If Metallica had stuck to metal while getting half-assed ideas and lyrical retardation out of its system, no one would be saying "fuck these guys." Slayer fans admit 2006's Christ Illusion wasn't the group's finest record, or they would if they weren't programmed to respond "EVERY SLAYER ALBUM IS TIED FOR BEST ALBUM EVER! SLAY-FUCKING-ER!" Christ Illusion isn't innovative, but it's not embarrassing, and it's not treasonous. At worst, it's a poor man's Reign in Blood. Metallica fans would've killed for a poor man's Master of Puppets during the past decade; in fact, now that they've received exactly that in Death Magnetic, they'll surely celebrate to a degree unwarranted by the album's actual merits. Perhaps all this bullshit was just an elaborate "Prodigal Son" set-up to inspire fans to kill the fatted calf over a mediocre release.

Fans don't mind being sodomized by Metallica, as long as the band uses metal.

Artists occasionally experiment with different approaches during the course of long careers, but Metallica had its genre's name indelibly tattooed to its moniker. Without "metal," there's just "Lica," a 30-year-old woman from the Netherlands whose favorite type of music ("gut-bucket rock 'n' roll with fat choruses") sounds suspiciously like Load and Reload.

I would compare their fanbase to a battered wife. Showing unconditional support with even more insane resilient, like a straight girl sticking with her boyfriend after he sex-changed into a woman. Sane listeners understandably gave castrated post-op transsexual Metallica the boot. Now he/she/it's back, claiming to have experienced a change of heart and sporting surgically restored genitalia, but it's hard not to be haunted by the specter of its phantom vagina, especially when it's right there on the goddamn album cover.

Some argue that Metallica "evolved," displaying the kind of comprehension of Darwin's theories one might expect from a fanbase deeply rooted in "intelligent design" states. Metallica actually devolved several species, until it found itself grunting its way through primordial hard rock like some sort of proto-Neanderthal.

The 'Reload' era: Even gayer than you remember.

Anyway, Metallica's back now, kinda. The drums sound like drums, and the guitar solos actually exist: Only in the wake of St. Anger would it be necessary to make those assurances. "All Nightmare Long" cedes the microphone to Lionel Richie, who recounts his harrowing spousal abuse at the hands of his estranged wife while the band plays a chugging version of his similarly named tune. Or, it's an intensely thrashy original composition. You'll just have to buy the album to find out: Metallica doesn't want you using the Internet, and they don't want me spoiling the surprise. Remember when Metallica songs came wrapped in intriguing sashes such as "Trapped Under Ice" or "The Call of Ktulu"? "All Nightmare Long" sounds like a Halloween-themed Gossip Girl episode.

Never trust an open-mouthed band.

On the downside, "The Judas Kiss" compounds its criminally boring riffs with lines like "bow down/sell your soul to me" and "I've become your new god." A traitorous group should really display more humility, especially during sensitive moments for the betrayed, such as when they're listening to a song with "Judas" in the title.

Metallica devotes ten minutes to the interminable instrumental "Suicide and Redemption," which fails to provide the latter while making listeners ponder the former. This mundane trudge just feels like a makeshift receptacle for all the guitar solos orphaned during the St. Anger sessions. Also, it closes with a fade, adding a terrifying "to be continued" ellipses to this overlong debacle.

Speaking of sequels, Death Magnetic contains "The Unforgiven III." Hetfield sings of a man "pulled off course by the light of golden treasure," a loaded phrase from the most widely alleged sellout in the history of Internet accusations. The group started obsessing over forgiveness back in 1991, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is about the time they first needed mercy from die-hard headbangers. Maybe Metallica wants some kind of official pardon before ending its "Unforgiven" series, but unfortunately it doesn't yet deserve a full reprieve.