our
five
cents Road Trip Radio Allison “Truj” Trujillo
The first thing my suitemates and I asked when we planned our spring break road trip to South Carolina was, “Will there be a place to plug in an iPod in the car?” When there wasn’t, it seemed the next 2,000 miles would be grim and music-less unless we resorted to the terrors of multiregional, ever-changing radio. I will be the first person to admit, even with the huge and thriving radio scene at Emerson, I’m not a regular radio listener. I occasionally listen to WECB or WERS, but, for the most part when I want to listen to music, I have an artist, album, or song in mind. For that, I will go to Spotify or iTunes and listen to exactly what I want, rather than listen to the radio, where somebody else chooses for me. But that’s the problem for most of us, right? The vast majority of us—people in our 20’s—did not grow up listening to the radio like
our parents did. Where their only options were radio or vinyl, modern listeners have immediate access to any song imaginable with a few clicks or touches. We have Grooveshark, iTunes, YouTube, and countless other vehicles for listening to exactly what song we want, whenever we want. I’ll also admit, however, there’s something cathartic about listening to the radio. You’re never sure what you’re going to hear next, unlike listening to an iPod on shuffle. And all of the songs are picked by real humans, unlike Pandora or Slacker, where your musical taste is analyzed formulaically by a program to decide what you want to listen to (admission: I am afraid of total robot takeover). When I learned that there was no iPod cable, I got a small amount of pleasure thinking I would be able to listen to new music on the 1,015mile stretch between Boston and
South Carolina. I looked forward to widening my musical horizons past my own iTunes library. The reality was pretty depressing. Do you know that feeling where you’ve heard T Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” so many times that you can recite the lyrics backwards while also cleaning your own self-hatred-induced vomit from the car floor? Yeah, I couldn’t say that either until spring break. But inevitably, it happened. As we went down I-95, it seemed that every radio station we turned to was playing that song at alarming intervals. Like, at least once every hour. Usually more. Why is this? A quick internet search shows, from Boston to Georgia, there are exactly 512 radio stations we could have tuned into over the course of our trip. Is it even possible that there are so many stations with exactly the same playlists? 23