News

Radio Daze

Continued from page 6

KPFT On Democracy Now!, Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, is at a rally tearing into the Bush administration. "While these people party, there will be more bloodshed," she says. "Millions of people are in harm's way." Just another example of Savage's pathetic, broken human refuse, I guess.

10:02 a.m.

Oldies 107.5 At last, Oldies is spinning something I like: the Captain and Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together." I will! I will! I wiii-iilllll be done with this in 15 minutes!

10:09 a.m.

The Mix "Save me from this prison, Lord help me get away." So runs the first line of Los Lonely Boys' "Heaven." What better broadcast to end on than this? I quit. So it was eight minutes early. Sue me.

So Houston radio -- does it suck or what? Well, yes and no. The Anglo-oriented rock stations -- the Arrow when it's not in a promotion, the Buzz, Oldies 107.5 and the Point -- are all terrible, it's true. And so are Q Country and KILT.

One reason why is that our city is so huge and so scattered. If you own a radio station, where do you put your transmitter? Unless yours is one of the precious few powerful blowtorch signals, you can't cover the city. Put it on the far northwest side and you lose Clear Lake; put it down south and you lose the northern suburbs. And if you cater too much to the burbs, you lose the sophisticates inside the Loop.

And make no mistake, Houston radio is all about the burbs. National radio consultants come down here, host their focus groups and determine that we are a bunch of rustic SUV-driving simpletons begging to hear more Sting, more Sade, more Chesney, more Yes and more Nickleback clones. We don't want to be challenged by new music -- leave that to the cool kids in Austin and L.A. We don't want to hear rap and rock side by side. What we want is radio that looks like our neighborhood: a deed-restricted, master-planned, cul-de-sac'd purgatory where nothing bad happens but nothing much else does either. Meanwhile, satellite radios positively fly off the shelves back here as people walk away from the whole mess.

Focus groups don't work for radio. People don't know what they like until they hear it a few times. Sure, you can test new music on them in a focus group, but that's no way to hear new stuff. You need to hear it at home, in your car or in a club. And relying on focus groups over a period of years -- as big radio has done recently -- is going to ensure that fewer and fewer new artists get on the air.

So, yeah, most big Houston radio sucks. I think KRBE does a decent job, with pop, and the Party, Mega and the Box are exciting to listen to, mainly because mainstream hip-hop is in a far better place right now than mainstream rock, if such can even be said to exist right now.

But if you look elsewhere, there's plenty of stuff on there that doesn't suck. There's lots of good ethnic stuff: In the afternoons, not one but two AM stations (1180 and 1560) play East Indian music, and the Spanish-language AM 850 has a fun tropical feel, not to mention the ranchera on 1230 AM and the Spanish Top 40 on XO FM 107.9. As for rock, Alvin Community College's Gulf Coast Rocker is a better mix of classic and new rock than KLOL ever was, KTRU spins the edgy modern stuff, and KPFT's overnight shows are dynamite. KCOH is one of the last real community-oriented stations in America, not to mention of the last black-run blues stations around, and KTSU's mix of hard and smooth jazz and specialty shows is a winner. Gospel 1360 plays wonderful gospel and stirring sermons, one of which comes back to me now as I write this. "The essence of freedom is choice -- we are free so that we can choose. To be a slave is to have the ultimate lack of choice. We are free people so we can choose, so as free people we must choose."

So choose. Give some of these small and ethnic stations a chance. Reprogram your presets. And if you still think it sucks, there's always satellite radio.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7