The Anti-Radio Songs

I quit listening to any sort of Pop or Modern Rock radio somewhere around 10 years ago (some occasional public access Classical on short trips is about all I allow myself anymore).  I had gotten one of those new-fangled ipods for Christmas, and was playing it through the cassette-tape adapter in my car at college.  When I then promptly lost said ipod and was forced to return to the radio, it was with a sort of revulsion that I realized how utterly irritating it is to have someone else to decide what music I should be listening to!

I mean, seriously, why on earth do we put up with that?   Why do so many of us allow some payola'd curator to control this one small part our lives--and that interspersed with long, obnoxious commercials that tell us in turn what to buy?  I had been away from radio for scarcely anytime at all, yet when I returned the patent ridiculousness of it became immediately obvious to me.  And when I recovered my ipod, it was with a sigh of relief, with a real feeling of freedom, that I realized how easily I would never have to listen to the radio again.

(And I think that part of my resistance to streaming services nowadays isn't just the unethical way they screw over the artists, but the simple principle of the fact that, once again, someone else gets to control which music I have access to--even if it is in the most uber-generous set-up possible, yet still am I paying some corporation to access all the music that they control, without ever letting me lay claim to it for myself, independent of all their counters, trackers, data plans, wifi connections, and marketing.  Oh, and if you think their algorithms don't wield some influence over which songs you get steered towards, then you're more naive than you'd like to think).

It's not like you even need the radio anyways--you make the right friends, read the right books, check out the right websites, you'll uncover all the hidden music you will ever need anyways.  For all these reasons and more, I've taken a keen interest in what I term the Anti-Radio Songs--for of course I was never alone in being weary of the dull, homogenizing mediocrity of the radio.

Ground zero of this surprisingly robust sub-genre is of course Elvis Costello's "Radio, Radio":

Lest you consider all this Anti-Radio nonsense to be a tad too paranoid for your tastes, remember that Costello was banned from Saturday Night Live for over 10 years when he abruptly performed this instead of "Less Than Zero"--it had been explicitly proscribed by the TV execs.

He anticipates any lecturing that hating on radio is really biting the hand that feeds aspiring pop artists with that killer bridge: "I wanna bite the hand that feeds me/I wanna bite that hand so badly/I wanna make them wish they'd never seen me."  And biting he is indeed: radio "doesn't give you any choice because they think that it's treason," radio says "you had better do as you are told," radio "is in the hands of such a lot of fools/tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel."  When the Sex Pistols couldn't get U.S. visas to New York, SNL doubtless thought that Elvis Costello was the safe replacement--but he may in fact have provided the most Punk show of all.

Honestly, Elvis Costello is a hard act to follow on this theme, and very few people have tried to (wisely)--besides, if your goal is to become free from the radio, the way to express that liberation is not by constantly attacking the radio (thus revealing you to still be in its thrall--just as disgust is actually sublimated attraction) but by continuing as though it didn't exist at all (for the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference).  Nevertheless, it does occasionally help to have a little extra cheer-leading available to help you make the choice to shut it off once and for all, and within a generation of Costello other artists were rising to join his ranks.

There is for starters '90s mainstay (and Middle School t-shirt) Rage Against the Machine's "Vietnow" that, with characteristic bluntness and lack of nuance, expresses the disgust that young radio-resisters feel upon turning the radio back on, only to then immediately turn it back off:

With a little more texture (though still lacking the flair of Elvis Costello), with an adolescent angst that makes the songs on the radio seem like a source of profound emotional misery (as only Emo could ever sell), Jimmy Eat World on 1999's Clarity makes a similar kiss-off with "Your New Aesthetic":

Then just a few years later on So Long, Astoria, the Ataris take a similar stand against radio with "Radio #2", albeit with a little more joie de vivre than Rage or Jimmy--they actually sound happy for a change to be switching off the radio for good--they sound not just childish but childlike in their infectious energy, rather than merely whiny:

Curious: what other Anti-Radio songs are out there?  Is this list exhaustive, or did I at some point simply no longer need the extra encouragement to keep me off the dial, so I've missed out on all the other radio songs abroad in the land?  It is a sub-genre with the serious potential to get real insufferable real fast--not to mention hypocritical, given how all the artists listed above have had massive radio hits over the years.  It's like a multi-millionaire singing "Imagine"--you kinda just go "the nerve!"  It's a tricky balance to strike--you either come off as sour grapes, or entitled and lacking in self-awareness.  Maybe that's what makes Costello's still the best after all these years: he at least acknowledges that he "bites the hand that feeds me."  May we go and do likewise.