What I Succumb To Is Making Me Numb

This post will be the second post in a series of posts on Southern California radio stations. The first post of this series was on classic rock station KLOS, and is posted here.

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You may not like classic rock: "It's stuck in the past" and "It plays the same small set of songs over and over again" you might say, and these would be fair criticisms. Accordingly, today we'll check in with KPRI, a radio station that musically casts a much wider net than does KLOS or New Orleans' WKBU.

Format-wise, Wikipedia classifies KPRI as an adult album alternative station. You can't read too much into these format labels, so let's just get to the music, shall we? Two weeks ago Tuesday (11 November) I tuned in to http://www.kprifm.com/ and did some live listening for almost an hour and a half. Here's a list of the songs that I heard, in chronological order:

David Bowie: "Young Americans"
James Bay: "Let It Go"
Smashing Pumpkins: "Tonight, Tonight"
Elvis Costello: "Pump It Up"
INXS: "New Sensation"
Dido: "White Flag"
George Ezra: "Budapest"
Jackson Browne: "Running on Empty"
Bastille: "Pompeii"
Gavin DeGraw: "I Don't Want to Be"
Sam Smith: "Stay with Me"
No Doubt: "Just a Girl"
O.A.R.: "Favorite Song"
Men at Work: "Down Under"
The Head and the Heart: "Another Story"
The Doors: "Love Her Madly"
U2: "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"
Third Eye Blind: "How's It Going to Be"
Muse: "Madness"
John Mayer: "No Such Thing"

Some of this music was completely new to me - I had never heard of James Bay, O.A.R. ("Of a Revolution"), and The Head and the Heart before, for example - and that's a good thing: we wouldn't want to know it all by heart, would we?

Overlap with other formats

I can imagine the late Casey Kasem playing any of these songs on American Top 40: there are no deep cuts here but it's a nice mix nonetheless.

A number of these songs could fit on a classic rock station playlist: definitely the David Bowie, Jackson Browne, The Doors, and U2 songs, maybe the INXS, Elvis Costello, and Men at Work songs depending on the station.

The songs by Smashing Pumpkins, Bastille, No Doubt, The Head and the Heart, Third Eye Blind, Muse, and possibly Elvis Costello* and O.A.R. could fit on the playlist of a modern rock station like ("The World Famous") KROQ, whom we'll visit in a future entry. (*Musically "Pump It Up" is a match for a modern rock station, but this song is 36 years old.)

The songs by The Doors and Men at Work and possibly Jackson Browne** could fit on the playlist of an oldies station like New Orleans' WTIX (**I know that 'TIX-FM plays "Doctor My Eyes" but I'm not sure about "Running on Empty").

With its lo-fi indie sound, the song by The Head and the Heart could even be sneaked onto a college radio station playlist.

Playlist interface

KPRI maintains an On Air Playlist that
(a) logs the songs KPRI has played over the last 24 hours,
(b) provides lyrics (when available) for those songs, and
(c-g) provides brief bios, (not always complete) album discographies, lists of top tracks, videos, and any concert announcements for the songs' artists.
Ah, now that's what I call user-friendly radio!

Sin of commission

I cannot refrain from taking DJ Mookie to task for playing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", the most white-bread song in U2's catalog. If you're gonna go back to The Joshua Tree - and not reach for Songs of Innocence, as you should be doing - can you grow a pair and play "Bullet the Blue Sky", please? (On second thought, the quiet "Running to Stand Still" might be an even ballsier choice.)

Sin of omission

You may have noticed that the song list features a lot of singer-songwriter material. The male/female ratio of that material is conspicuously lopsided, Dido being the only female. Can we get cuts from Chrissie Hynde's Stockholm, Juliana Hatfield's Wild Animals, and Alanis Morissette's Havoc and Bright Lights on the air, please?

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We may or may not turn the spotlight on KFMB-FM, Jack FM's San Diego station, in the following entry.