How You Remind Me of Someday

Can you mash-up yourself? NPR recently checked in with Mikey Smith, a young man who has been on a tear to expose the similarities of songs by such popular radio artists as fellow-Canadians Nickelback and Avril Lavigne. Reporter Sean Cole observed that the trend suggests "an insidious and increasing homogeneity in the North American songbook," but one music historian shrugged it off, saying "Hey, it's three-chord rock" -- a genre with a "long tradition" of copycatting.

Part of the phenomenon was explained by Jacob Slichter, a former member of the band Semisonic and author of So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer's Life. In an interview last summer with NPR morning host Steve Inskeep, Slichter explained that his band's chart-topper "Closing Time" was reworked into three different mixes for various types of radio stations, each focused on a different audience. On Top 40 formats, for example, there were muted guitars, prominent vocals, and more tamborine versus drums.

While I'm no hipster -- after all I went to see the Scissor Sisters again last night-- all of this helps explain why I can nevertheless barely listen to the radio any longer. Payola may be verboten, but everyone from media conglomerates to independent radio promoters have exhalted market research and demographics to the point where only tracks that appeal to the least common denominator can make it. But the ironic thing is -- once you remove anything interesting to afficianados or fans of narrower genres, the resulting pablum ends up sounding dull even to the masses. Eventually, they stop listening.

And that brings me to the late, lamented WHFS. Once one of this country's premiere "alternative rock" stations, it had in recent years descended into a hellish monotony of "angry young man rock" and Emo. Now, after languishing in a persistent vegetative state, the corporate muckety-mucks have pulled the plug. Bienvenidos El Zol.