All labor-day weekend, KROQ was playing from a list of five! hundred! 90s rock songs, as selected online by their listeners, in order. While driving back north I listened to a few in the thirties and then maybe 15 through eight or seven or something. (The snippet missing in the middle corresponds to the period when I was listening to Le Show, which this time involved a parody of a Garrison Keillor monologue, on the theme of Sen. Craig, and a jazz singer who set words to Miles Davis' "All Blues"; seven through one are unrepresented because I finally got definitively out of range of the station and into the range of a spanish-language station, which momentarily confused me, because I didn't think a song not in English would have been voted into the top ten.) For the latter segment I was mostly north of LA proper and got a lot of static. Radio static is a lovely thing. Any goon with some pedals, or really just an amp and a mic, can create distortion, but some things just sound better when gently obscured by some radio static. And some things still sound good even when almost entirely obscured by radio static, like the song that was 11 or 12 or some such on the list, the Offspring's "Come Out and Play". Sometimes the pitch would get really wobbly; sometimes the song would get almost entirely overwhelmed by static until, for some reason completely unaffected, the line "gotta keep 'em separated" would come punching through… it was pretty cool. Also unsuspected was Sublime's "Date Rape" at nine on the list.
While listening I reflected that it was too bad I hadn't thought to rig the vote some how (er, I mean, engage in some culture jamming ... that's right), though I suspect it would have been much more difficult to swing this vote than to get some already widely-acknowledged hotties elected hottest media types in DC. Still, while the presence of "Closer" somewhere in the top ten was neat, how much neater would it have been for something from 90s rock album Tilt to have been broadcast? (Consider what this guy has to say about it—that review, differently formatted, was the first place I heard about the album.) It would have been pretty awesome. Maybe "Face on Breast" (first song from the album I heard, back in the old days of Napster!) or "The Cockfighter".
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