left of the dial

GOAL FOR THIS WEEK: get involved with the radio station, which I was going to do last year but didn't. My new roommate this year has her own show, in a fantastic time slot too (6-8 on Wednesday nights), and her life goal is to write for Rolling Stone. She's good at keeping up with music in the way I'm not - she's always finding new bands, she knows all these musicians who are truly obscure and just playing little folk festivals in Providence or Boston or Philadelphia or wherever. I listened to her show the other night and I dug a lot of it.

But I've never been good about keeping up with new music. Of the 11 most played artists on my last.fm, 7 are still together, which is more than I expected before I counted just now, but that counts the Foos who are on indefinite hiatus (I think? I've lost track); more notably, the "newest" band on there is the White Stripes, who started out in the early 2000s. Everyone else is from the 90s or earlier. I'm perpetually late to the party, for one reason or another - I guess my mindset is that there are so many awesome bands who already have two or three albums I could buy that I can't be bothered keeping track of, or checking out, every new group that releases a single. Essentially, when I'm looking for "new" music, I tend to look for older music.

Hopefully I'm allowed to just be all the fuck over the place on my (hypothetical/potential) show, because I thought about doing just punk (which would involve pretty much anything that would have "punk" in the description, whether prefaced with "ska" or "pop" or "folk" or "80s" or whatever) but then I was all shit, what if I want to play Frankie Valli? Because very often, I want to play Frankie Valli. I hope it's cool if I play Frankie followed by the Replacements followed by Run-DMC, Elvis Costello, the Kinks, the Beastie Boys, Dropkick Murphys, and Ray Charles. Because that's what I do. That's just about what I've done today, actually.