radio

After Too Short’s underappreciated Chase the Cat album got its fair share of burn in the ride, I flipped on the radio for a few minutes before the next red light’s routine CD swap.

As I hit eject, my favorite flannel-clad rappa-turnt-sanga, Andre 3000, was wailing away on his bubblegum hit, “Hey Ya.” Since I was by my lonesome and in a good mood, I dropped my guard and sang along. When Dre’s vocal chords ran out, Gnarls Barkley made a probable appearance and followed with their radio hit, “Crazy.”

Even though I felt like I was at a thirteen-year-old’s karaoke birthday party, I keep the carefree vibe alive and kept jammin’.

At this point, since I was looking and feeling quite Chris Bridges, I hadn’t even bothered to check which radio station was playing these pop-tarts back to back. It obviously wasn’t either one of Detroit’s rap/hip-hop channels, because they’d surely be playing “Low,” that song I used to like by Flo-Rida. When Gnarls Barkley ended and my chances of getting into a car accident stabilized, the DJ cut in and said the station was ‘96.3, “…The home of your favorite hits from the 80s, 90s and now, without all the rap.”

For the visual, imagine your favorite whiteboy Beware in his best Tyra Banks impersonation, replying out loud to the naive DJ, “Oh no you did not just call out my music!”

Well, it might not have been that drastic, but I was pissed enough to the point where my breezy attitude was looking pretty overcast. Call me easily aggravated, which my girlfriend does, but this wannabe, piece-of-shit radio station for middle-aged moms and men in mid-life crises apparently thinks it can just diss our favorite art form in order to bring in more blissfully ignorant listeners.

Not only that, but immediately after it plays back-to-back songs by rappers.

I don’t know if 96.3 got the memo, but “Crazy” and “Hey Ya” are rap songs. Hate it or love it, these mega-popular pop songs are performed by artists who, if you asked them right now, would unquestionably call themselves rappers over anything else. Just because they’re purposely dumbing down their music for an incoherent radio audience on these particular songs, shouldn’t mean they now fit into the hypocritical station’s ambiguously gay playlist of played-out bullshit.

Actually, when I put it that way, I guess it does.

But they could at least give respect where respect is due, instead of berating the root of the music before and after every commercial break. Whether it be rap, hip-hop or that bullshit chant rap the radio cranks 23-7, the grind is all the same. By ineptly calling out just ‘rap music,’ they’re doing much more than sounding naive. On top of acting pompous, they’re stereotyping all forms of hip-hop in one sentence and calling out all those die-hard-working souls who put their lives into the music.

And for what?

So that 96.3, the former alternative station that yours truly lived for in the sixth grade, can struggle find it’s niche in a world where it’s apparent mortal enemy, ‘rap music,’ is becoming more mainstream by the second.

With their demise inevitably at the doorstep anyways, the title of this piece almost seems like an afterthought.

Fuck ‘em, I’ll leave it anyway.

Dead Prez – Turn Off The Radio

Loosies

AZ-Undeniable

Estelle Ft. Kanye West – American Boy

Ne-Yo – Dream

Lil Wayne Ft. Sizzla – 10 Years

Lil Wayne And Junior Reid – Pam Pam (Remix)

Faith Evans-Maybe(Unreleased)

Fat Joe – 300

Wiz Khalifa – Say Yeah

Mysonne-Gun Shots

Plies – Buss It Baby

Loosies