Steve’s Manifesto

Steve Simpsonized

I had it all figured out by ninth grade. I was done listening to radio, except for shows that highlighted new “independent” music. It was a genre that didn’t exist yet, and in my opinion is still too vague to be a genre. It’s more vague than “jazz”, which is saying a lot.

Why did I “quit radio,” you ask? The cheap and easy answer is that radio is for suckers. I felt that way until only recently for one main reason (and a bunch of little ones). Radio, by its nature, is bound to disappoint. I don’t care how good the program director or DJ is, there is no way they can play more than 4 or 5 songs without hitting one I don’t like. There really is only one person who can consistently do that. Me. Throughout the eighties, I made myself countless mix tapes. I surrounded myself with them. I didn’t care that some songs showed up on multiple tapes. My goal was to have so many mix tapes, I couldn’t remember what was on them. This would give me the element of surprise, the one thing I missed about radio.

Now we have things like Pandora and Rhapsody, where you make a few selections and let the “machine” choose tracks for you. So excuse me while I pull my pants up to my nipples and rant, “Back in my day, we didn’t have iPods that you could set to shuffle. We made mix tapes, and we liked that way… We loved it!”