Friday, March 09, 2007

The angelic lips of feeling too damn good

I recently had to listen to a lot of commercial FM radio.

There wasn't much choice: when the two of us are in the car, I don't have control over the radio and we were staying at Boycat's Mum's sister's place in Melbourne and she listens to a station called "Mix 101". A mix of all the same old crap, I guess.

In country New South Wales, there is a series of stations called Star FM. They are interchangeable - they all play the same music and their announcers all sound the same. Unfortunately, they don't play the same music at the same time which means that when you drive too far from one transmitter and have to find the next station, you get to hear all of the same songs all over again.

And boy, even different bands are starting to sound the same. There is a song around at the moment called (I think) "The Lips of an Angel". Because FM radio doesn't back-announce you don't get to hear the name of the band, but I was pretty sure it was Nickelback. It took a week and a half to discover that it wasn't. (I can't remember the name of the band now, it's something like "Fester". [I've just checked online and it's 'Hinder'; I knew it had six letters.] I know their album has -- get this, how novel -- a chick in a bikini on the cover because I saw an ad for them on TV within about, I don't know, 10 seconds of getting home.)

Although at one stage - between Goulburn and Yass, I think, there wasn't much on the radio that we could pick up, so Boycat's Mum let me listen to Matthew Sweet. She must have listened to about 8 out of 15 songs on Girlfriend, plus Sick of Myself (twice - she likes it) and Scooby-Doo Where Are You. That's pretty good, as she tends to be a Nova girl. (We did try listening to Vega in Sydney, but there were a few too many '70s songs for her liking, so we'd changed that to Nova before we'd even made it into the city.)

Random Comments on current "Popular" music.
  • I hate Nickelback, all of their songs are sub-grunge garbage. And get the damn frog out of your throat and sing, Chad.
  • When I was an ASO3, supervising the ASO1s, they used to listen to the radio. I had a rule that they could listen to commercial radio until one of several bands came on - guaranteed to be within an hour or so. Barnesy or Chisel, Billy Joel, Dire Straits. These days I'd have a new list. These are songs I'm very sick of after the past few weeks. I don't know the proper names, because there's no back-announcing:
  • - "The Light Surrounding You" (Evermore?)
  • - "How to Save A Life"
  • - "Lips of an Angel"
  • - anything by Nickelback
  • - The new Avril Lasagne song. Avril must have worked out that "I'm With You" was a big hit so now her new song "Keep Holding On" is just a remake. Is this what the kids today call Emo?
  • -I'm sure there's more I just can't think of them at the moment.
  • I notice the trend of people just singing over other people's songs and calling it their own continues unabated, although I do like that "Falling in Love Again" song, even though they break into "Head Over Heels" by Tears for Fears in the middle.
  • I don't mind the current Gwen Stefani song, it kind of has a 50s feel; but, I'm sure I'll be sick of it soon.
  • Who are these "Fall Out Boy" people?

...well my batch job is coming to an end, so I'll finish now...

[END]

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