you're just wasting my time

When I was in my middle teens, I had difficulties sleeping at night (for reasons I still don't quite comprehend). I eventually discovered that leaving the radio on when I went to bed made it easier to nod off, the background noise serving as an effective lullaby.

My initial choice of listening was the local classic rock station, as the comfortable familiarity of the playlist was tailor-made to doze off to. That changed after a fever-dream plagued night when I woke up to the rock-disco crossover nightmare known as David Bowie's "Fame," the one song capable of forcing me to reassess my otherwise high levels of respect for both The Thin White Duke and John Lennon. I eventually settled on WBZ's evening-through-morning lineup of call in talk radio programs, tuning in at night to Larry Glick and waking up to Dave Maynard.

The overall tone of these shows was light and more than a little corny -- a open community chat format peppered with novelty songs, interviews with local celebrities, trivia contests, and the "blind calls to random payphones" gimmick. The focus was heavily local, with quintessentially parochial discussions involving Bill Buckner's bow-leggedness and nostalgia for landmarks and stomping grounds past, but because WBZ's 50,000-watt signal carried far during the dark hours, there was also a good chance of hearing a caller from Appalachia engage an impromptu spoon-playing performance or demonstration of proper hog-calling techniques.

Jovial and bizarre, though still rather sedate -- the warm conversational tone of these shows made a better sleep aid than a glass of warm milk (which I've found makes for a better ipecac than narcotic). Then 1988 came and irrevocably screwed it all up. Larry Glick, the host who best personified the anarchic coziness of the format, left WBZ (to land at WHDH the following year) and was eventually replaced by the more politically-focused petit conservative snobbery of David Brudnoy. Bob Raleigh, who covered the graveyard shift between Glick's and Maynard's, shifted in style from being Glick-lite towards a more dittohead-friendly approach. It was a transition in keeping with the times, when the Lee Atwater-directed coarsening of public discourse truly came into its ugly own, but my personal reasons for tuning in each evening was not to hear an endless stream of lumpen-ignoramus rants directed at Michael Dukakis and the "libural eleet."

The problem with sensationalistic confrontation as a means of grabbing market share is that the process feeds on itself and pushes the practitioners to escalate the rhetoric to sate the symbiotic hunger of the audience. This hunger, in turn, only grows greater with each successive escalation, causing a perpetual feedback loop of faux populist rage, in nearly every case directed at a conveniently demonized other -- gays, minorities, feminists, liberals, Democrats, and so forth -- to a point where the crassness of the dialogue exceeds anything that would be countenanced otherwise. It reaches, or rather has long since reached, a point where the ringmasters of this pathetic circus feel emboldened enough to indulge in sub-sophomoric jests about hate crimes and "nappy headed ho's", or engage in this sort of inexcusably disgusting behavior without any prior notion of consequence or contrition...until the outrage affects their employer's revenue stream, that is.

Even then, odds are more likely than not that the offending party will blame "political correctness" for the backlash, and not, say, their own persistent disregard for basic concepts of respect and common courtesy in favor of antics that would make a junior high school student blush in shame.

I prefer to sleep in complete silence these days.

Talk Talk - Talk Talk (from The Party's Over, 1982) - I know the critical consensus is that the band's later work represents some revolutionary leap forward in the development of the so-called "post-rock" genre, but I still prefer Talk Talk's earlier, overtly Duranist output.