Relevant Radio

DC is a radio wasteland.

What does it say that in the 7+ years I've lived here, the only regular radio show that I truly loved* was on a Baltimore station?

I can't pick up even local FM radio stations in my apartment building, so about the only listening I do is in the car. Even then I'm always switching around stations because they play more stuff I hate than I like. When I moved here in 1998, there was a very good "hot hits"-type station that leaned heavily towards dance tracks (you know, techno, trance, etc.). I liked that station a lot. Tragically (oh, the humanity!) they sort of changed formats around 1999-2000 to mainstream Top 40. That was the end of my like-affair with DC commercial radio.

Cut to 2005. April. The 16th. I'm sitting in the chair in my local hair salon (it's not a "barbershop", mind ye) for my monthly chop-chop, and lo and behold I hear some kind of radio station with some really cool trancey tracks. (Well, it is more or less a gay salon -- it's the kind of music that you always hear in those salons, but I never thought to inquire where exactly the stuff comes from.) So I asked Bill, the 1/2-owner & my stylist, what we were listening to -- was it a digital cable music channel, or satellite radio, perhaps? He answered that it was an Internet station, "Radio 1".

Cool! So it wouldn't cost me anything to listen to elsewhere...

A little while ago this eve I managed to locate it and it turns out it's a service of the Beeb. Yep, the Queen's royal BBC. There's actually a ton of online live radio broadcasts from the Beeb, with all sorts of music genres, talk, etc. Check out the choices just from Radio 1. For the hot dance tracks, select 1Xtra as the station, and "Radio 1's Dance Anthems - Dave Pearce with club bangers and dance floor faves" as the program. Cool! Even works nicely with my lameass 56Kbps dialup at home.

(By the way, my haircut is really cute. You should see it.)

* That amazing show was "The '80s Wave" hosted by a total dude, Scott Davies. It ran on 106.5 FM from 10 to midnite on Sundays and featured the coolest of new wave, Brit-synth-pop, early MTV, and disco. It wasn't your typical '80s show where you've heard everything a million times in the last five years. They played a lot of more-obscure and almost-forgotten tracks that were a real blast to remember. I can't find anything on the web about it, so I'm not sure when it ended. I think it was around 2001. I've heard nothing like it since.