From: ebm@corvair.almaden.ibm.com (Eli Messinger)
Newsgroups: alt.music.alternative
Subject: Re: Alternative radio stations
Date: 7 Apr 92 04:31:48 GMT
Organization: Pandora's Box

Clayton Glad...

> -" You're free to ignore history and base your views on your few years of
> -" listening to a small handful of radio stations, but in that case you
> -" ought to qualify the claims you've been making...

M. COOPER / B. McQUAID...

> 	Why do I need broadcasting experience to suggest that
> alternative/underground radio stick to airing more obscure music?

Thank God Milo's back from Spring Break with his incredible reading
comprehension still intact.

Milo, Clay suggests that your ahistorical views about this supposed
"Alternative" radio format are based on an apparent complete lack of
exposure to any radio outside of the San Diego market.  The same San
Diego radio market that we've already seen is completely devoid, save
for one not very alternative cable station at UCSD, of any alternative
radio.  He's said nothing of your lack of broadcast experience -- he's
suggested that it's your lack of experience as a listener that leaves
you without a clue as to the U.S. radio scene, and the implications of
your suggested (at least, since you've declined to name any station
in the history of broadcasting that programs an "Alternative" format,
I'm going to have to assume you are speaking hypothetically) format.

> Are you saying that the process which worked historically should
> work today, regardless of the growth of pop music?  But you would
> then be ignoring history, as you claim I am.

What growth of pop music?  Have you supplied us with anything to show
that "pop" music is any more prevalent today than it was 10, 20 or 50
years ago?

> ... I never claimed that I've listened to truly alternative
> radio; I claimed that I'm tired of the lack of it with relation to
> pop, and I blame pop's intrusion into what some people like to think
> is an underground radio station...

Ahhh, now you are claiming that "some people" think of -- 91X? -- as
an "underground" radio station?  Is that by your new ahistorical definition
of the term "underground radio"?  Do you have any clue as to what underground
radio was?  It's *never* been 91X, even before the "intrusion" of "pop"
music.  Your tiredness is of your puny, undernourished radio market.  As
I've suggested before, you should either move to a better market, or you
should lay down your pen and get over to one of the few outlets in (insert
your town here) that will let you program something better.

> I'd like to hear something different and I've heard radio which
> comes close to my idea of alternative.  Such radio isn't subject
> to some steady defintion as you imply by raising the "experience"
> issue because that which is alternative is defined by that which is
> common, meaning that the definition will ever alter, and that
> "experience" is irrelevant.

You are the one who has supplied us with the unvarying definition of
"Alternative Radio", and that is radio that never plays anything that is
popular on other commercial radio.  Are you suggesting that 91X was at
some point in time such a station?  Is this another myopic "they were
playing music that no one else in San Diego was playing" viewpoint?

> 	Well, I didn't use the word "genre," but here I must bow to
> your remark that absolutely formatless stations truly exist in the
> present, simply because I haven't heard any.  Please _do_ provide
> examples, so that I may hear them (if possible) and judge for
> myself.

I have offered several times now to send you tapes of stations that
program a free format.  Provide an address.
--
	      "Phish is good."  --James Treworgy, March 18, 1992
       CSNET: ebm@almaden.ibm.com / UUNET: ...!uunet!almaden.ibm.com!ebm