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Clear Channel's Silly Springsteen BanBy George Ziemann -- October 30, 2007 Clear Channel has instituted a ban on playing songs from Bruce Springsteen's latest album, Magic, according to Fox News' celebrity gossip reporter, Roger Friedman, relying on unnamed sources. Despite the questionable credibility of anyone identifying themselves as a celebrity gossip reporter, coupled with being on Fox News, we'll talk about this anyway. Magic was released on October 2 and is currently the number one album, having sold 500,000 copies so far. From the Fox story:
From this information, our gossip reporter arrives at the following conclusion:
Don't know where Friedman came up with the "too old" theory. Out of his ass maybe? A clear message? Yeah, it is, but you missed it, pal. Maybe he should have walked down the hall and talked to Bill O'Reilly, who would have told him that Clear Channel won't play Springsteen because he's obviously from the "far left," doesn't support the war, and doesn't like Bush. The "completely absurd notion" is that Springsteen's age has anything to do with it. It's more like what they did to the Dixie Chicks, punishing them on their way to at least five Grammys. The difference is that there isn't really a defining event for them to justify the ban, unless campaigning for Kerry three years ago was enough in and of itself to land on the political blacklist. Or maybe they're still real pissed about losing the payola income and this is their way of feebly fighting back. I agree that refusing to play songs from the number one album "is one of many ways Clear Channel has done more to destroy the music business than downloading over the last 10 years," although I would add that compared to the RIAA, Clear Channel's damage to the music business has been minimal. It took the record labels themselves to actually destroy the music business. Most of what Clear Channel did just hurt radio, really. Realistically, there is an important lesson here about the power of radio, and particularly Clear Channel, in the 21st century. You can sell a half-million albums and have a number one record, without any airplay whatsoever on conventional radio. When I was a teenager, lacking the Internet, radio provided a valuable service for us. A tiny transistor radio with a two-inch speaker brought the sounds of Motown every night on CKLW, broadcasting from Canada, just across the river from Detroit. It was how we found out about new music, from deejays who actually knew something about it. Now Clear Channel won't even play new music. Deejays have been replaced by one-name bots like Jack and Hank, who don't know jack. Service no longer required. You've gotta know that The Boss really doesn't give a shit what Clear Channel does because he obviously doesn't need them. He's got a number one album and a sold-out tour that'll pay him more this year than he'll make off record sales ever. When Did Radio Get So Creepy?by George Ziemann -- June 23, 2007 Took a trip over the last week or so, from Phoenix to an Ozark destination in north-central Arkansas. On the way, we checked out White Sands, Roswell, the Carlsbad Caverns and the Buddy Holly museum in Lubbock. The return trip was pretty much I-40 all the way. I don't listen to the radio much, and when I do, it's almost always KCDX (103.1 FM, in central Arizona). They're commercial-free and have no disc jockey whatsoever but at least you can check their website and find out the name of that song that just played and who the artist was. Here's a link to a very good article about the station from 2003. From what I can tell by listening, nothing much has changed there. Not that I would have noticed. I've made every effort to stay home since 2003 and have been pretty damn successful at it, except for a week in Ohio but that was an airplane thing so I didn't have to listen to the radio all the way. But the 2500 mile drive (give or take -- I didn't really check) to Arkansas and back had us hitting the "Scan" button on the radio. A lot. We heard "Bob FM" and "Mix FM". Bob played classic rock and "Mix" seemed to be 80s and 90s. Then we heard Mike FM, followed by Jack, Hank and maybe Jake, except he could have been Jack with a Texas accent. We didn't find Sam until the trip back and, after we had determined that Sam only liked early 70s tunes, that was when my wife said, "This Bob, Jack and Sam thing is really creepy." And we didn't even hear the half of it. There's also Fred, Dave, Bill, Max, Steve, Doug, Ted, Simon, Earl, Jill, Louie, Charlie, Kim, Joe, Alice, and Pirate Radio. Apparently, Jack first appeared in the U.S. in 2005 and, like all bad ideas, has now become widely adopted. This means you can listen to the same radio show in New York as the people in Dallas and Seattle are hearing. Because we all like exactly the same thing, don't we? The creepy part isn't really how insidious it is, although it does have an Orwellian feel to it and seems to spit in the face of the FCC's purported ideal of localism, not to mention acting as a neon sign to all local musicians: "We'll Never Play Your Music." The fact that a hell of a lot of radio deejays are on the street? Still not the kind of thing that spooks me. What seems creepy is that it's almost better without them, even though Bob, Mike, Sam and the rest of the bunch all have "assistants" to help them with the local ads. The real deejays left the airwaves decades ago. They did not scream and yell. They did not make prank calls, tell dirty jokes or try to see how far they could go before the FCC would fine them. They played music and knew something about it. As they cued up ELP's "Lucky Man," they might let you know that the synth lead at the end was a rehearsal take by Keith Emerson and Greg Lake pushed the "record" button anyway. They would know if it was Billy Preston or Nicky Hopkins playing piano on that Rolling Stones' track. They cared about the music. We learned from the good ones. They seemed to be our friends. Now we've got Jack. Jack doesn't seem to know jack. |
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