On my way to Charlotte to pick up Mara from work. We'll pick up the truck from Hickory on the way home. My PTA is set for tomorrow morning, which is kind of a relief. While I'm not excited about leaving, it'll be nice to get back to work and know that our bills are going to be paid. At this point a lot is up in the air.

I tried to listen to WRFX on my drive up, but couldn't bear it. Egads. They've been playing the same thirty or forty songs for the last twenty years. Sometimes listening to WRFX is like replaying an old CD that you've heard a million times before. I realize that in some circles this is considers a “classic rock” format, and that maybe some people like to hear the same handful of songs over and over. But geez. This is so predictable that one of the best laughs Mara and I ever had was one time when we were listening to WRFX and in between songs I said “Well, it's about time for ‘Alright Now’ and that's what came on. That was just a coincidence, of course, but it underscores my point about WRFX and other radio stations with the “classic rock” format.

There are a lot of people who consider “rock ‘n’ roll” to be a dead artform. It's irrelevant. It belongs to a certain era. I think radio stations such as WRFX are one of the reasons. At some point they decided that they were a Classic Rock radio station and largely stopped playing new music. I didn't discover until much later that there was a lot of great new rock music out there. That was when Mara and I bought our XM satellite radio.

That's when I discovered that while Classic Rock radio stations had stopped playing new music after Dirty Laundry by Don Henley came out, there had in fact been a quiet evolution of rock music under the banner of the so-called “jam bands.” There was a lot of great music out there that I had missed because I had no access to it.

Long story short, that's what's so criminal about radio stations like WRFX. All “classic rock” means to radio stations with this format is that the people who have money now are the ones who grew up listening to this handful of artists (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Rush, etc). So it's easier to get the people to take their advertising medicine if it's coated in comfy music that these people grew up with. In the case of WRFX it seems like they play about four songs an hour. The rest of their content is advertising.