Just when I thought that Christmas couldn’t get any worse, Clear Channel Communications, the massive media conglomerate hell-bent on cramming crappy Top 40’s songs directly into our heads, has recently come under fire, again, this time for a contest aired in four cities during the Holiday season entitled “Breast Christmas Ever.”
No, that’s not a typo. The prize for the contest was breast augmentation surgery for 13 women. As I know that this is a rather “touchy” subject, I’ll do my best to stay away from the incidental humor so commonly associated with mammary glands.
Clear Channel has come under fire from women’s health and rights advocacy groups for the promotion, and, in typical Clear Channel style, has completely disavowed all control of the issue and passed on the responsibility to the local station managers, because, after all, nothing is ever Clear Channel’s doing, unless it involves profit.
Of course, they could start by playing good music for a change, instead of the equivalent of aural diarrhea, then maybe we wouldn’t have to find the most outlandish, awe-inspiring DJ’s to provide disturbingly dark humor and potentially health-risking contests just to entertain us on our commutes to and fro, since obviously, we’re not going to be entertained by the music.
In Stillwater, we’re actually quite lucky, as Clear Channel has yet to invade our humble abode with spewing the same old sonic garbage at us, and we actually have the opportunity to listen to a song that is meritoriously good, instead of being labeled as such because it’ll market well to ten-year-olds with no personal identity and the beginnings of a false sense of disestablishmentarianism.
For examples of what I mean, tune your radio in the mornings to Jack and Ron of 98.9 KYIS FM in Oklahoma City. Not only do they provide nearly constant chatter, they even acknowledge the fact that they are only meeting the bare minimum of FCC regulations by calling their one song played every half-hour “Mandatory Pop Music.”
I’ve even heard radio stations in Oklahoma City and Tulsa use phrases similar to “We’re not proud, we pay you to listen to us,” while promising dreams of financial lucre. Or, really, since it’s only a couple hundred bucks at most, “not-poverty”.
Since we don’t care about the asinine jokes, rehashed news, inaccurate road conditions about areas not anywhere near us, and dregs-of-society callers who seem to coagulate around the phones during these times to spew their inanity into the airwaves, interspersed with a surreal number of depressingly idiotic used-car advertisements, I suppose the only thing left they have for us is to give us a salary to be further drawn into radio-presented mediocrity, because, let’s face it, if it isn’t entertaining to us, and we don’t really enjoy it all that much, it must be considered a job.
I’m glad to say that I’ve finally installed a CD player in my car, and my rather short commute to work every morning is filled with the awakening beats of music that I actually want to listen to, in the order I want it in. And if, for some reason, it isn’t, the eject button is always there. I can listen to music that is not only beautiful in its complexity but also interesting because it has value in its creation. If I want to listen to chatter, I can slip in a CD of my favorite comedian railing against the idiocy of the world, and if I want to listen to car dealerships making stupid parodies to tell me that everything must go or they’ll lose money, well… okay, I think I could die happy if I never had to listen to another one of those again.
Sorry Clear Channel, but you’ve forever lost a listener. Here’s to hoping your business model suffers some “augmentation” of its own.
Originally printed in the Daily O’Collegian, January 10th, 2005
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