I’ve greatly enjoyed the Olympics. I think I’ve enjoyed them more because the coverage is more focused on the action itself instead of all the hoopla around it. I haven’t seen one story about sex in the Olympic Village and I’m really happy about that. Which brings me to this:

Trigger Alert: Old Man Rant

What The Fuck ever happened to “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”?

I understand that we live in a different world than the one that I grew up in, but I think a big part of society changed for the worst when cell phones became cameras with the ability to make a phone call.

God forbid you actually make a phone call on your cell phone these days, though. The only people I’ve seen talking on cell phones are businesspeople and old farts. These kids today use them as entertainment centers and messaging vehicles. Whether they message each other through the text app or through Whatsapp or Snapchat or whatever other social media thing that exists out there for people to communicate, no one ever uses the phone as, you know, a PHONE.

I was thinking about getting old when I read an article in Variety this week (oh, you don’t read Variety? You must not know anyone in the biz…) about the demise of what was once the most influential radio station in the US: KROQ.

I may be writing this directly to SonOfSpam as he is the only one among us that I know of that grew up in Southern California. And I know he grew up listening to KROQ.

It’s become almost cliché (or as some pretentious assholes would call it, a parlor game) to figure out at what point “KROQ died” for different people. I started listening to KROQ in the very early 80s. I want to say 1981 or 1982. The station at the time was located across the street from the Pasadena Hilton on Los Robles Avenue in beautiful Pasadena. Back then, the DJs would pronounce it as Passa-Duhna. I remember DJs like Dusty Street, Freddy Snakeskin, Jed The Fish, Ramondo, and Richard Blade. If you never listened to KROQ in those years, think Johnny Fever from WKRP but playing New Wave and loving being weird on the air. That was every KROQ DJ in those years except they all had their own special brand of weirdness.

Richard Blade’s autobiography, “The World In My Eyes”, tells the story of early KROQ really well. It was a groundbreaking station playing music that no one was playing. It broke New Wave in the US as well as several other styles of music that came out in the 80s. It got to the point that “KROQ music” was its own genre.

And, of course, as time tends to, it rolled on and things changed. First the morning show changed from Ramondo and the Blade to Richard Blade and Poorman and then Poorman left and then eventually Kevin and Bean came in and then Bean left and then Kevin left and I don’t even know what exists in that time slot.

You can also point to changes in ownership. When the station started its revolution, it was privately owned. Somewhere in the mid-80s, it got bought by a corporation. Then that corporation got bought by another corporation and then that got bought by another corporation. At what point did the station lose its soul due to increasing corporate influence? That’s another debate.

At the end of the 80s, the music changed too. Instead of going in the electronic/dance direction as Richard Blade and others wanted, KROQ went with grunge. New DJs came in, new music arrived and time rolled on. Eventually, we got to the 2000s and there was no more grunge and there was no more new wave and there was only “alternative” except no one knew what “alternative” was anymore.

When “alternative” is the mainstream, it’s not alternative.

I discovered satellite radio at some point and never looked back.

I honestly can’t tell you when I stopped listening to KROQ but I’m thinking it had to be sometime in the 2000s. It’s a very weird experience to have something that meant so much to you in your youth become something you ignore.

The program director of KROQ said in the Variety article that they made a conscious decision to let their listeners “age out” and to focus on attracting younger listeners.

That strategy makes sense on paper but it completely ignores the history of the station and what made it great in the first place. The people that grew up on that station loved it because they loved discovering new music. You don’t “age out” of that.

I listen to Sirius XM and, as I shared with you last week, I get excited when I hear a new song I like. The quest to discover cool new shit doesn’t “age”.

What happened with KROQ is that the music they played got progressively worse.

New is not necessarily good.

So, I write this with a bit of saudade.

I also write this as a message to all of you: Nothing, good or bad, lasts forever. The best we can do is enjoy the good things we have for as long as we can and as fully as we can.

That way, when you look back, you can look back with a smile and say, “Man, I lived through some cool shit!”

No sexy today. Instead, I want to focus on music. I’ll provide you some videos with lots of music in them that I hope you will like.

Hopefully, Anthony in TX will come along and share with us another one of his cool playlists with new music. The last time he shared one, I didn’t know a single artist on it and yet I really liked some of the songs.

Discover something new. See the world with fresh eyes. Be open to new experiences.

Jesus, I turned into tWBS so gradually I didn’t even notice…

As Dusty used to say when she signed off, “Fly low and avoid the radar!”