You Can Say Yes If You Do It Right

As a sort of backhanded tribute to Robin Williams, who tragically committed suicide this past August and who struggled with alcoholism, I thought I would write a brief post in which I share some of the things I've learned about having a healthy relationship with alcohol.

Having a healthy relationship with alcohol is not rocket science. Just follow two simple rules:
(1) Always pay for it yourself.
(2) Always put an emphasis on quality over quantity.

Show me someone who follows these rules and I'll show you someone who can be trusted with alcohol. Show me someone who won't follow these rules and I'll show you someone who really shouldn't be drinking in the first place.

Let me flesh out these rules a bit more. Don't wait around for others to ply you with alcohol. (This is a very easy trap for college students to fall into, speaking from personal experience.) Don't let others make your alcohol choices for you. Go to a store, pick out a good product that you genuinely enjoy, take it home, and drink it responsibly.

There's a lot to be said for drinking at home vis-à-vis drinking in a bar.
(a) It's way cheaper. I don't know what the average bar price for a bottle of Heineken is these days, but whatever it is, I don't want to pay it.
(b) You're not hostage to a bar's alcohol selection.
(c) There won't be any waiting in line to go to the bathroom.
(d) If you end up overindulging, you don't need to worry about getting home, because you are at home. Relatedly, you don't need to worry about being a nuisance in public, because you're not in public.

You don't have to drink alone: by all means, invite one or two friends over, supplement your drinks with some music and food, and have a good time. (I myself like to drink by myself. I think of those lyrics in Billy Joel's "Piano Man": Yes they're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone. What a crock. When drinking in bars I have never felt any sort of camaraderie with the other people around me.)

Here are some more suggestions to chew on:

• Don't drink every night: get your drinking down to one or (at most) two nights a week.

• Don't have more than two drinks in one sitting, especially if you're drinking on an empty stomach. After having those two drinks, have something to eat.

• Beer drinkers, don't drink your beer from the bottle: go get a proper solid-glass pint glass (not some cheap plastic glass) to drink it from. Here's a Photo Booth photo of my venerable "New Orleans Bourbon Street" pint glass that I bought from the NOLA Walgreens at the corner of St. Charles and Felicity for $4 back in 2002:



The quality over quantity thing

As I am a beer drinker, let me conclude this entry with some specific beer recommendations.

Lager: Don't settle for a mass-produced American light lager. Get an import like Pilsner Urquell or St. Pauli Girl; alternatively, seek out Full Sail's Session Lager if you're a "buy American" sort of person. FYI: My lager of choice is Nicaragua's Toña.

Pale ale: Reach for Anchor Steam Beer or, if you can find it, Samuel Smith's Old Brewery Pale Ale.

Stout: I highly recommend Samuel Adams' Cream Stout, which is every bit as good as (if not better than) Guinness.

Bitter: If you've never had bitter before, Sierra Nevada's Torpedo will bring you up to speed.

A final word:
Don't be afraid to experiment. Trying a variety of beers (or wines or whatever) will give you a better understanding of what you like and what to avoid.

I Lost the Feeling but I Try to Hold On

As you may know, there is more than one type of Top 40 radio station. Two entries ago we visited KFMB, an Adult Top 40 station. In today's post we'll visit KEGY (a.k.a. "Energy 103.7"), a Mainstream Top 40 station. For those of you keeping score on the format label front, Mainstream Top 40 is also known as Contemporary Hit Radio. For those of you with a connection to the Big Easy, KEGY is musically pretty similar to B97.

I check in with Mainstream Top 40 radio on occasion: I'll admit that this isn't the sort of music I usually listen to, but that's not gonna stop me from putting on my archivist's hat and giving you a sample KEGY playlist and chatting about it a bit. Let's get to it then, shall we? On 16 December I tuned in to http://energy1037.cbslocal.com/ and did some live listening for just over an hour and a half; like KROQ, KEGY is owned by CBS Radio, and the KEGY Listen Live widget has the same interface that the KROQ Listen Live widget has. Here's a list of the songs that I heard, in chronological order:

Jeremih (with YG): "Don't Tell 'Em [DaaHype Remix]"
Calvin Harris (with Haim): "Pray to God"
Ariana Grande (with The Weeknd): "Love Me Harder"
Pitbull: "Give Me Everything"
Selena Gomez: "The Heart Wants What It Wants"
Paramore: "Ain't It Fun"
Sam Smith: "I'm Not the Only One"
Calvin Harris (with John Newman): "Blame"
Milky Chance: "Stolen Dance"
Hoodie Allen (with Ed Sheeran): "All About It"
Alesso (with Tove Lo): "Heroes (We Could Be)"
J. Cole: "Work Out"
James Newton Howard (with Jennifer Lawrence): "The Hanging Tree [DJ Mike D Mix]"
Jessie J (with Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj): "Bang Bang"
Don Omar (with Lucenzo): "Danza Kuduro"
Disclosure (with Sam Smith): "Latch"
OneRepublic: "I Lived [Arty Remix]"
Mr Probz: "Waves [Robin Schulz Remix]"
Meghan Trainor: "All About That Bass"
Mark Ronson (with Bruno Mars): "Uptown Funk!"
Taylor Swift: "Blank Space"

Random commentary

• It's a bit odd that Paramore shows up here but not on any of the playlists of the other radio stations we've visited. "Ain't It Fun" is as close to rock and roll as we get, and it's my favorite song in the list: funky, hard-edged, really good.

• Taking us closer to real funk is Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk!", on which Bruno Mars sings; if you enjoy the classic hits by Morris Day and the Time, this song is for you.

• Mainstream Top 40 clearly owes a great deal to the dance remix culture that got under way in the 1980s. I may not listen to much Top 40 today, but once upon a time I spent a lot of time listening to New Order and Dead or Alive, and a hop, skip, and a jump is all that separates a song like "Blue Monday" from Calvin Harris' "Pray to God".

• Some of this music is not so easy to classify. Jeremih's "Don't Tell 'Em [DaaHype Remix]" is a case in point: it's too slow to be a funk or house song, and would be a challenge to dance to; it doesn't have the swing or warmth of R&B; it's percussive and skeletal in the way that Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" is but it lacks the latter's pop sensibility; it's not straightforwardly hip-hop in the way that J. Cole's "Work Out" is, although maybe we could call it a hip-hop song via process of elimination - I guess we'll have to let the real critics out there sort this matter out, eh?

• Hoodie Allen's "All About It" and Jessie J's "Bang Bang" have an R&B vibe. The Top 40 music I listened to in the mid-1970s borrowed a lot from R&B and soul; as you would expect, these influences have largely fallen by the wayside, but it's gratifying to know that they haven't died out completely.

• Released in 2010 and the oldest song in the list, Don Omar's "Danza Kuduro" is a lively Latin house track whose lyrics are in Spanish and Portuguese; Pitbull's "Give Me Everything" sports just a tad of Latin influence but is no less energetic. BTW, Pitbull has released more studio albums than any of the other artists in the list.

• Hmmm, what else? We've got a couple of ballads in the list, they being Ariana Grande's "Love Me Harder" and Selena Gomez' "The Heart Wants What It Wants"; Sam Smith's "I'm Not the Only One" can perhaps also be classified as such. Calvin Harris' "Blame", Alesso's "Heroes (We Could Be)", and Disclosure's "Latch" fly us into full-fledged electronica. OneRepublic's "I Lived [Arty Remix]" is anthem pop (if this isn't a recognized term, I'm coining it now) in the vein of U2. Mr Probz' "Waves [Robin Schulz Remix]" is a quiet house track: do check out the original (non-remix) version, which is even more subdued.

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I think that's enough 'radio anthropology' for the time being - we'll do something completely different next time.

A Conversation Only We Could Make

We continue today our tour of Southern California pop/rock music radio stations. Short of a college station, a modern rock station is as adventurous as you're going to get on the airwaves, and in this post we'll check in with KROQ, the 'godfather' of modern rock stations. KROQ has been in the modern rock business for almost 40 years, more specifically, since 1976, perhaps not coincidentally the year that the Ramones released their debut album.

By the way, there are at present no modern rock stations serving the New Orleans metropolitan area. I was around during the WZRH and KKND years and listened to those stations from time to time but they are long gone.

Modern rock stations are also termed alternative rock stations. I was going to say that the alternative rock moniker was more appropriate back in the day whereas the modern rock moniker is more apt today, but on second thought I'm not so sure about that. I don't recall listening to KROQ in the late 1970s - in fact, I don't think I was even aware of KROQ back then - so I can't tell you how cutting-edge it really was at the time. (I mean, I'm sure it didn't play anything by, say, The Doobie Brothers or the Eagles, but this is setting the bar pretty low, yes?) Meanwhile, The Police's "Roxanne", The Clash's "London Calling", and Blondie's "One Way or Another" had trickled onto the playlists of many AOR stations by the end of the 1970s. I've noted previously that radio format labels have to be taken with a grain of salt, and the modern/alternative rock label is no exception.

Suppose a radio station limited its playlist to songs by classic artists on albums released in 2000 or later - e.g., The Rolling Stones' A Bigger Bang, The Who's Endless Wire, Bruce Springsteen's High Hopes - wouldn't that playlist be a "modern rock" playlist? Given that such a station would be clearly different than the typical classic rock station, wouldn't that make the station an "alternative rock" station? Inquiring minds would like to know!

Anyway, let me get down to brass tacks here... Four weeks ago Thursday (13 November) I tuned in to http://kroq.cbslocal.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:

The Black Keys: "Tighten Up"
The Smashing Pumpkins: "One and All"
311: "Love Song"
Imagine Dragons: "Demons"
Green Day: "Welcome to Paradise"
Hozier: "Take Me to Church"
Muse: "Supermassive Black Hole"
Lorde: "Yellow Flicker Beat"
Sublime: "Santeria"
Arctic Monkeys: "Do I Wanna Know?"
Keane: "Somewhere Only We Know"
Foo Fighters: "Something from Nothing"
Franz Ferdinand: "Take Me Out"
The Neighbourhood: "Afraid"
U2: "Song for Someone"
The White Stripes: "Seven Nation Army"
Walk the Moon: "Shut Up and Dance"
Jane's Addiction: "Jane Says"
Vance Joy: "Riptide"

The KROQ Listen Live widget offers lyrics for the songs that it plays but otherwise doesn't provide anything (bios, album discographies, etc.) for the songs' artists.

The above list is broadly consistent with the modern rock designation although there is some room for improvement, as discussed below.

Random commentary

• For better or for worse, I think of bands like The Black Keys and The White Stripes as being less raw versions of The Stooges; some people call such bands "garage rock" but I prefer to call them "dirty blues". "Tighten Up" and "Seven Nation Army" go back to 2010 and 2003, respectively. FYI: The White Stripes broke up in 2011.

• The Smashing Pumpkins' "One and All" is brand new, and is satisfyingly grungy à la "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" vis-à-vis "1979".

• 311's "Love Song" is actually a cover of The Cure's "Lovesong"; a reggae styling gives 311's version a warmth that the original lacks. (Admittedly, of all the adjectives one might use to describe The Cure, "warm" is not one of them.)

• Green Day's "Welcome to Paradise" goes back to 1994 and appears on the band's Dookie album. Green Day has released 8 studio albums since then: why not play something from 2012's ¡Tré!?

• Hozier, who is from Ireland, is one of three singer-songwriters in the list (Lorde and Vance Joy are the other two). "Take Me to Church" has some soul, a bit of gospel, and a dash of the blues in its sound, but is still very much a pop song - definitely different.

• Granted that you can dance to pretty much anything, Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole" is very much a dance track, and it's a very good dance track.

• Sublime's "Santeria" is our second reggae-pop entry. As you may know, Sublime ended when vocalist/guitarist Brad Nowell tragically died from a heroin overdose in 1996.

• I had never heard of Keane before, I have to confess. "Somewhere Only We Know" is a pretty piano-based balled, and is wistful in a "The Long and Winding Road" kind of way; it also reminded me a bit of Queen: "Freddie Mercury should be singing this," I thought as I was listening.

• You may count me among those who hold that Foo Fighters is a better band than Nirvana ever was. "Something from Nothing" is a well-written, structured song that starts slowly and builds to a charging hard-rock attack - definitely one of the high points of the set.

• Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out", which appears on the band's eponymous 2004 debut album, is as edgy and noisy a track as you could hope to hear on a commercial radio station. All right, KROQ! That said, Franz Ferdinand has released 3 studio albums since then, and 2013's Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action finds the band in altogether more rhythmic territory - why not play something from that?

• Re the U2 selection: At last, something from Songs of Innocence! And it was a good song!

• I hadn't heard of Walk the Moon before, either. Per its title, "Shut Up and Dance" is a dance-pop song; I didn't care for it so I decided to check out some of the band's other Popular Songs, specifically, "Anna Sun", "Tightrope", and "Quesadilla", all of which I thought were better than "Shut Up and Dance". There's just no accounting for musical tastes, is there?

• "Jane Says" appears on Jane's Addiction's first proper studio album, 1988's Nothing's Shocking, and is the oldest song in the list. I understand that a song like "Jane Says" serves as a bone to throw to the casual listener, but be that as it may, most of us have heard "Jane Says" and "Been Caught Stealing" enough times, so why not play something from 2003's Strays (which has a great title track) or 2011's The Great Escape Artist?

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Barring unforeseen circumstances, we'll visit KEGY in the following entry.

We Can Dance Until We Die

I began my popular music education in the mid-1970s with KCBQ, a San Diego-based Top 40 AM radio station. The hits on the air at the time included Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony's "The Hustle", Redbone's "Come and Get Your Love", Ace's "How Long", and the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'" - good stuff! (Admittedly, Morris Albert's "Feelings" was not such good stuff.) In due course I graduated to FM rock radio and left KCBQ behind. KCBQ is at present a talk radio station, although it hasn't abandoned music completely, namely, it broadcasts a "Sock Hop" program (some of whose past shows are archived here) on Saturday night and a "Moldie Oldies Radio" program on Sunday night.

In today's post we'll check in with KFMB-FM, which is part of the Jack FM family of radio stations and is a Top 40 station for all intents and purposes. Wikipedia variously describes the KFMB format as adult hits, variety hits, or modern adult contemporary - whatever. Vis-à-vis the radio stations I used to listen to in New Orleans, KFMB is somewhat similar to B97 and Magic 101.9 but is more straightforwardly grounded in pop music than those stations are, more specifically, it doesn't have B97's urban feel and it doesn't play nearly as many ballads as Magic 101.9 does.

The music

Three weeks ago Wednesday (12 November) I tuned in to http://www.sandiegojack.com/ and did some live listening for almost an hour and a half. KFMB says that its online streaming is unable to be heard outside of the San Diego area, regardless of device: although I live in North San Diego County and not in San Diego itself, I was able to use the KFMB Online Player without any problems. Here's a list of the songs that I heard, in chronological order:

The Neighbourhood: "Sweater Weather"
One Direction: "Story of My Life"
U2: "Pride (in the Name of Love)"
Katy Perry: "Teenage Dream"
Maroon 5: "Animals"
Ella Henderson: "Ghost"
Ed Sheeran: "Sing"
Sam Smith: "Stay with Me"
Vance Joy: "Riptide"
The Cranberries: "Dreams"
Tove Lo: "Habits (Stay High)"
Switchfoot: "Meant to Live"
Meghan Trainor: "Lips Are Movin'"
Echosmith: "Cool Kids"
Lorde: "Royals"
Phillip Phillips: "Raging Fire"
Gwen Stefani: "Baby Don't Lie"
Taylor Swift: "Blank Space"

The KFMB Online Player also provides brief bios, album discographies, and photos for the songs' artists.

History

The oldest song is U2's "Pride (in the Name of Love)", which dates to 1984.
The Cranberries' "Dreams" goes back to 1992.
Switchfoot's "Meant to Live" goes back to 2003.
Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" was released in 2010.
The remaining 14 songs have all been released within the last two years.

Solo artist commentary

• As for our KPRI visit the list contains a lot of singer-songwriter material but this time we've got a 7:4 female/male ratio. Vance Joy is from Oz, Tove Lo is Swedish, and Lorde is a Kiwi; the rest of these artists are either American or English.

• Ella Henderson's "Ghost", with its muscular R&B sound, is the song in this category I like best. Honorable mention goes to Meghan Trainor's "Lips Are Movin'", which is noteworthy in that it has one foot in vintage (circa 1960) rock and roll.

• Sam Smith's "Stay with Me" is the one point of overlap with the KPRI song list. Smith was recently profiled by the Associated Press.

• BTW, Magic 101.9 plays a version of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" that removes the song's in my skin-tight jeans lines; there was no bowdlerization on KFMB's part.

Band commentary

• Interestingly, there's a hard rock song in the list, that being Switchfoot's "Meant to Live": as Switchfoot is from San Diego, perhaps this is a "they're local boys" thing.

• I'm glad that The Neighbourhood's "Sweater Weather" is a hit because it's kind of a dark track musically.

• Echosmith's "Cool Kids" has a vaguely retro-1980s pop-rock sound, which is OK, I'd much rather hear that than a empty dance track.

The spice of radio

The Jack FM brand has a semi-smug Playing What We Want slogan. If Jack FM stations are content to play Top 40 hits with a few 'oldies' mixed in, then fair enough, I suppose, but the slogan implies that those stations should go off the beaten track some of the time, and that clearly doesn't happen at KFMB, or at least it didn't during my listening session; if a varied playlist is what you're after, KPRI is a better choice.

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We'll go after KROQ in the next post.