Wednesday, January 18, 2006
to am, or not to am. this is me kvetching.
It’s been fun listening to AM radio again. I actually remember when I was a kid and my family relied on AM radio as the primary mode of infotainment. Then FM had become king by the time I was old enough to get a clock radio; I still remember lying on my bed and listening to my brand new grown-up radio reproducing Glen Campbell’s “Southern Nights” with such clarity and fidelity that I remain infuriatingly fond of that song to this day.
By the time I got to high school I’d passed through a brief 8-track phase and was wallowing in cassette tapes and LPs. This collection grew while I was in college, trading tapes and cashing out at the Princeton Record Exchange’s annual vinyl extravaganza. I hand-colored labels for my favorite cassettes. But somewhere after college the LP collection stopped growing, and somewhere around law school, I got with the program and obtained a modest single-disk cd player. We ran parallel collections for a long while, slowly building up more CDs with an occasional tape or two showing up from the discard pile of some techie freak going all-digital, but over time the number of CDs inexorably grew and that of viable tapes declined by attrition; and then everybody got CD burners and suddenly the number of CDs eclipsed tapes by such a great margin that, faced with a choice of scuttling a VCR or a dual audio tapedeck when TiVo needed to find a home in our media cabinet, we kept the VCR. (The turntable had long since been relegated to a box, and more recently actually donated to a charity. It was an archaic 20 years old, though it had not been much used in that time.)
Tapes now have next to no role in my music collection, but CDs have been additionally supplemented with an MP3 player that brings my entire collection of music with me and enables me to expand my musical horizons more easily and more selectively than ever before. It’s a mindblower. I can select the most eclectic, offbeat item in my library, and chair-dance to it all the way to work. Technology has taken me from the shackles of a weak car radio to the absolute freedom of the digital world.
This necessarily means that the cycle is getting ready to run backwards - the pendulum is poised for a return trip. I find now that I rely on FM bands when I play the ‘pod in the car through my dashboard rebroadcaster. Sometimes that means my music fuzzes out when I hit interference from competing stations or metal structures like bridges. There’s usually a work-around for these glitches, though - a free frequency somewhere. And if I miss something, I can just back the track up and hear it all again. The digital empowerment still triumphs.
More of a throwback is my revived love affair with the pig - KPIG radio, now broadcasting in my locality via a low-power AM band (and on line too, for subscribers - I recommend it to the entire tri-state region). This station seems to take my whole music library - blues, jazz, country, jam, funk, comedy and etc. - as a jumping-off point. They play a great variety of great music, much of it live or obscure, and more often than not they radically enlarge my tastes and interests, or even sometimes powerfully confirm them. And, as you might surmise, I’m all about confirming the powerful enlargement.
So now I am seeking out KPIG on radios all over my little world, bu they’ve got too small a signal for me to get them anywhere but in my car. Therefore, I have made AM 1510 my default automotive listening option, even over and above the ‘pod.
They payoff in a seemingly endless variety of great music, but there is a price: static. Half the time, they’re washed out by stronger competing signals, stomping my gospel and indie rock with sportstalk and commercials and the other dreck that’s standard fare on the AM dial. Even when they’re coming in well and without interference, overhead wires and tunnels often kill the signal. Once again I find myself praying that I don’t miss an awesome chorus or jam when I drive under an overpass and get stuck at a redlight, or behind an electric bus.
The irony, at such times, has a specific sound - a rising, whining rush of static with unctious, smarmy voices beneath it talking self-indulgently about sports when they’re not actively trying to sell me something. It’s a tiresome station under the best of circumstances, but to have them come in stepping on my pig - that’s unacceptable. So anyway, I hold them in great disdain, in a way that recalls for me my earliest years, when my mom could take me on a trip to the grocery store and leave me in the car with the keys so I could listen to the radio while she shopped, but wound up parking in the one place in the lot where there was no signal, leaving me straining to listen through static for 40 minutes till she returned. It’s a clean, ancient disdain for me. I can’t say that makes it any more palatable, but it does mean I’ve got some practice putting up with it. Somehow it feels like I’ve come home, only to realize that nobody cleaned the place up while I was gone.
