The good old days of "alternative" radio, back again

When I was in college, and for many years after, we had a radio station in Cleveland called "The End" (it was at 107.9), and it was what the industry described as modern rock or alternative. That station was the tits. I was still working in radio at the time, at the big top 40 station across town, and I wanted nothing more than to jump ship and go play Nine Inch Nails, Garbage, Depeche Mode and Luscious Jackson.

There was another station in town that was playing stuff called modern rock, the Cleveland rock radio legend WMMS, but what they did was too well packaged, and it lacked the integrity and diversity that The End had. They sounded like the rock version of the awful station I was working at. To give you some perspective on how awful that might be, that was when "Macarena" was popular.

What I loved about The End was that they seemed to take chances and not get too wrapped up in genres and labeling. It was fantastic that you could hear Nirvana and Pearl Jam one moment, and the next you were hearing Fiona Apple or Morcheeba. For someone like me who soundtracks his life with music, it was really a dream come true. That station introduced me to so many favorites I cling to today... James, Material Issue, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Garbage, Alanis, Radiohead, Matthew Sweet, Weezer, Tracy Bonham and countless one-hit wonders.

I didn't stay in that business for very long, but that radio station took everything I loved about radio in the 80's, in terms of personalities and production, and applied it to a sweeping range of music. Sadly, the format was ditched, and as the post-deregulation consolidation continued, the format started to disappear all over the place.

About two years ago I bought a new car with an XM radio in it. At the time, my commute along a beautiful road along Lake Sammamish outside of Seattle was barely 20 minutes, but I got so hooked on their AltNation channel that I immediately signed up after the trial subscription ended. It is The End, only with the music of the day. It has jocks that are genuinely into the music. Their morning guy in particular (well, technically he was mid-day when I lived out there) has a lot of depth and knowledge about the stuff they play. And there are zero commercials!

That's the interesting thing about satellite radio that trumps terrestrial radio. You can be pretty broad, or focused, in every format, because the audience is still yours regardless. I mean, they have four or five variations on country stations. Some have jocks, some don't. When I listen to their Lithium channel, it's like hearing The End, circa 1998.

The thing that's really helping out the channel now is that there is a lot of diverse music being published that doesn't neatly fit into a specific genre. It feels like radio from 15 years ago, even if it sounds different. I've noticed on Facebook that several friends share the enthusiasm for it, too.

Music listening habits have changed so dramatically since then, thanks to the iPod and the MP3 format, but the thing that I still value is people choosing music for me. This works both in the historic sense, for channels like Lithium, as well as the discovery sense, like AltNation. Every once in awhile, something like Pandora finds a nut, playing something I didn't know about, but you know, so did a random preview kiosk at a Borders back in the day (that's how I discovered Supreme Beings of Leisure, and I'm more sexy for it). I don't have the time or energy to be a hipster listening through mountains of shit to discover something I'm really into.

I do have one problem now... I work from home. I don't commute anywhere, so I don't listen to XM very often. We'll see if I'm too cheap to spend the extra few bucks to use their streaming service.