Goodbye forever, satellite radio

Nope, not going to start another week of music blogging, especially since I didn't use XM (now SiriusXM) for much music listening in the first place. This is about how I've grown progressively displeased with XM since they merged with Sirius, and will most likely lead to some comedy-blogging tomorrow, since that's a subject near and dear to my heart, and rare in today's comedy environment. (And don't write off tomorrow's rant as just an old codger longing for the days of "Fibber McGee and Molly." There's lots of old, "classic" comedy that I don't find all that classic.)

I got XM radio two Christmases ago. I'm a male, ergo I'm a gadget freak, and I may have a more serious case of that affliction than most males. If I had the bucks, my entire house would be a series of switches, relays, displays, receivers, etc. This is how badly I'm afflicted: I get a warm feeling when I look at the big external hard drives sitting on my computer desk. And that warm feeling continues when I look at the other, unattached hard drives that back up the attached hard drives. Help. Please?

But I digress. As if that surprises anyone.

I loved XM from the start. I loathe 99% of what is played on "terrestrial" radio. I'm not a music snob, either. Okay, I'm not a complete music snob. The popularity of a group doesn't turn me off. I don't lose interest in a group as soon as they're discovered by the general public. I'm on record as defending both Hootie and Blowfish and the Gin Blossoms, for crying out loud. I just don't like what I hear from commercial, "American Idol"-influenced music.

Other than music, I'll listen to a little sports talk during college football season, but for the rest of the year, it's dead to me. Don't care much for political talk, either, since I get a full dose from the blogs in my Google Reader.

So satellite radio was a wonder from the start. I could tune in rebroadcasts of Casey Kasem/Shaggy doing his Top 40 thing from the seventies. I could actually hear country artists like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, as well as Webb Wilder and Southern Culture on the Skids. I could experiment with other, newer stuff, although I rarely did.

Strangely, where I spent the majority of my time was on the comedy and old radio channels. I've been a comedy fan since I was a wee future blogger listening to my parents' Jerry Clower and Brother Dave Gardner LPs. I still consider a truly great comedy performance to be the purest art imaginable. (More on that tomorrow.)

Although, as I expected, most of the comedy wasn't all that great, there were some gems. Old Stan Freberg and Bob and Ray routines, Demetri Martin (hey, some of this you can Google for yourself), Mitch Hedberg, Steven Wright, and George Carlin before he turned into the cranky old guy. (More on that tomorrow, too.)

Over on the classic radio channel, I discovered Frank Sinatra as "Rocky Fortune" and Jack Webb as "Pat Novak, For Hire." If you don't like lines like, "Some mornings you can't trust yourself with a razor," and "She sauntered in, moving slowly from side to side like 118 pounds of warm smoke," then you're no child of mine.

But that was then, this is now. When the merger hit, my music channels received an overabundance of disk jockeyness. I don't know what's hard to understand about not paying $12.95 a month to NOT hear DJs talk over the intro or outro of a song I like, but evidently, the folks at SiriusXM still don't get it. And I'm talking about DJs like Alan Hunter and Nina Blackwood, people I love for the warm, golden-era MTV memories they inspire in me. But even they shouldn't talk over the beginning to "Electric Avenue." I'm not paying to hear SOME Eddy Grant, I'm paying to hear ALL the Eddy Grant.

Not only that, but the stupid practice of giving the time as "4 east, 1 west" continued. Because the coolness is all about the abbreviationness, I guess.

Over on the comedy channels, they transmogrified everything, and all for the worse. Now, I get "Blue Collar Comedy," which is about 95% Jeff Foxworthy, Ron White, Bill Engvall, and Larry the Cable Guy. I was a Foxworthy fan before it was cool to be one, and, while he still has his moments, he's mostly played out, in my estimation. White has his moments, too, but I don't think he's going to prove to be a comedy mother lode, and appears to be a tad on the jerkish side. (Side note: White was the grand marshal for what was then a Busch race at Talladega Superspeedway a few years ago. He came into the media center at the track and stood in the doorway, as if to say, "I'm here. Let the worship commence." The only problem was, he came in a few minutes after Will Ferrell, who was there promoting "Talladega Nights," had come in and held a press conference. Nobody, and I mean not one soul in a media center full of writers with gobs of column inches to fill, said anything to White.)

Engvall's okay, but not great, and Larry, well, I like to keep this a mostly upbeat blog, so let's just not go there. The rest of that channel is mostly forgettable second-raters.

I also get "Raw Dog" comedy, which--brace yourself--plays cuts with cuss words in them. And that's about all you can say about it, because there's precious little in the way of good comedy bits to be heard there.

Look, I can listen to rough language and laugh. Maybe even more than I should. When I was but a teen, I bought Richard Pryor's double LP, and flat wore the grooves off that thing. (And if my mother had only known what I was listening to...) I've since outgrown a fascination with cuss words, but I can listen to some rough language without getting the vapors, is what I'm saying.

But Raw Dog, or maybe Rawdog, since I don't know and don't care which, just glories in cuss words like an intergalactic Beavis and Butthead. Their promos don't feature quick, funny clips, just people cussing or being mocking. And that's nothing. Anybody can cuss, and anyone can be a smart-aleck. You have to produce the funny to get my admiration, and Raw Dog doesn't do much of that.

The old radio show channel stayed pretty much the same, but I can download literally hundreds of hours of that programming for free at Archive.org and other sites, then put it on an MP3 player or MP3 disc, either of which could keep me entertained from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, and with none of the shows I don't like. Sorry, classic fans, but I don't think much of quite a bit of those "classic" shows, especially the comedy ones. I know that as a rule, humor doesn't age all that well, but even grading things like "The Great Gildersleeve" on a curve doesn't produce a passing grade, in my estimation.

Of course, I can also fill up an MP3 player or CD with hundreds of hours of what I have stored on all my hard drives (my lovely, wonderful hard drives), so the upshot is that, between what I've got and what satellite radio doesn't provide, there's absolutely no reason for me to pay $12.95 a month to mine an occasional gem from mountains of garbage. See you, satellite radio. It was good while it lasted, but it's gone.

Update: The promised Dexateens review will be posted this afternoon. Stay tuned.
Update to the Update: No, it won't. Instead, my review will be published in next Friday's City Scene section of the Birmingham News. Which is way better than being published here. So stay tuned, just stay tuned at a different station, as it were.