Detouring again…
I have toyed with creating a “Things That Make Me Feel Old” category for the blog, and this fits right in along with that: Cumulus has changed multiple stations including KJJY into “Nash Icon,” which “favors country music released from a 25-year ‘classic’ period.”
I remember well — don’t even have to remember, it still happens — when people would say their favorite music was “anything but country.” That happened even when country music of the 1990s was viewed as too pop-ish (Hi, Faith Hill!). Today’s radio-country is close enough to pop to be swapping spit. Taylor Swift says her next album is “pure pop”. Its title? “1989” — the year of her birth but also the year Garth Brooks released his first album. And that is why that country cutoff is where it is.
It’s a seismic shift that at least one website says “needs to happen to country radio”. The “country” buttons nowadays are full of songs about nothing but drinking and trucks and partying*, and if I never hear BABY YOU A SONG again it will be too soon. What I haven’t been hearing are the songs from (cough) my adolescence, and that’s because playing a song from 1996 today is like being in 1996 playing a song from…1978.**
Thus, I become someone who says the kids these days listen to noise that should not be called “music.”*** If this change means a home for those songs that are only available on my iPod, more power to it.
*Of course the ’90s had “Pickup Man,” but there was also “Two Sparrows in a Hurricane”. The decade was at least more diverse in what songs were about.
**Not my youth, because I wasn’t in control of the radio then, and it was oldies ahoy. But now KIOA plays Van Halen’s “Jump”, which for someone who associates that station more with the Righteous Brothers and Chuck Berry is quite discombobulating.