Do, do you got a first aid kit handy?

The Station: 92.3 FM, WPRO.
The Format: Top 40.
The Hour: 10:18 to 11:18 PM, Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Word of the Day: Abrasive, apparently. You'll see.

I haven't really listened to the radio since last April, when I last did this. Living radiolessly has been both good and bad, where I don't have to sit through, y'know, crappy radio, but also I've been feeling very disconnected from my own culture. So I'm gonna try it again. If you're wondering why it seems like this is the first time I'm hearing most of these songs, it's because it is.

92 PRO FM's claim to fame is that it was the Citadel Broadcasting Corporation's flagship station. The fact that Citadel is based in Las Vegas, has offices in New York, and launched with a Providence station, tells you something about how shitty the ways of the world are. Or at least it tells me; I can't speak for you. Oh, Citadel is also tangled up in some ineffable way with Radio Disney, the corporation best known to me as being the one that took over a decades-old real country station in Pawtucket and didn't tell anyone until they marched in at midnight and fired everyone. Er...anyway. Moral of the story is: Corporations suck. But can they provide good radio programming?

10:18. Natasha Bedingfield, Pocketful of Sunshine. C-
When her first album came out, I quite liked Natasha Bedingfield. "Unwritten" was massively overplayed, but not actually terrible, as vapidly inspirational teen pop goes, and "These Words" and "Single" were both pretty adorable and underrated. Now, with no change in her sound, I suddenly find her bland. Is she a victim of overexposure, my maturing musical tastes, my own caprice, or boring songwriting? Who can say? Station identification.
10:17. Boys Like Girls, Thunder. D
So apparently one of my closest friends (and by closest I mean what it usually means and also that I don't have to cross any streets to get to his house) has had someone from Boys Like Girls at his house several times because one of his roommates is good friends with him. When he was describing this to me, I didn't realize that Boys Like Girls were, like, big on the radio. Discovering this has not made the fact any more exciting.
10:21. Weird, overlong, abrasive beachy advertising Dunkin Donuts Wendy's station ID interlude that I don't even know how to describe.
10:22. Ads, followed by a station ID telling me to keep listening to hear music like Duffy, Katy Perry, and Chris Brown. Thankfully (SPOILER ALERT), only one third of that prediction will come true this hour.
10:27. Duffy, Mercy. C
Duffy is to, say, Etta James as Vampire Weekend is to Fela Kuti. OK, maybe not that dramatic, but I don't see any reason to listen to her instead of actually good soul music, especially since that other British white lady did it better first. I'm perfectly comfortable with you interpreting that to mean either Amy Winehouse or Dusty Springfield.
10:30. Danity Kane, Damaged. C
If I were grading songs based on how good they were relative to other songs by the same artist, this song would skyrocket off the charts and get like an A+++++, because it's so very much better than that awful "We in the caaaaaaaaarrrrah! We drive sloooooooowah!" song that I hated to death a few years back and still talk about almost daily. But I'm not grading that way, and this song is still only mildly acceptable.
10:34. DJ, talking about Mohegan Sun and someone named Ace Young who I've never heard of.
10:34. September, Cry for You. C
I didn't know Swedes were on the radio! Sadly, this is the dullest Swede I've ever heard. Station ID.
10:37. David Cook, The Time of My Life. D-
When are people going to get sick of this awful Lifehouse-Nick Lachey-Nickelback style power ballad nonsense? How long has it been now, ten years? Quit it!
10:40. Contest for a week's vacation in Newport, promoted by saying that if you spend a weekend staying still you don't need to pay for gas. Also, I swear they said something about a meet and greet with the Big Blue Bug. They're calling the whole thing a "staycation".
10:41. Ads, starting out with that abrasive Geico nonsense. A station ID takes us back.
10:45. Fergie, Clumsy. A
Oh dear. This is the first time I'm hearing this. When it started, my roommate yelled from the other room "Am I a bad person for liking this song?" And I said "No, I really like it so far! Who is it?" And then I found out the horrible truth. This is definitely by far the best thing she's ever done, with the possible exception of getting her head hollowed out by a zombie in Planet Terror. It's catchy, she's actually singing and not being abrasive, I like the way her voice is distorted in the chorus, and she can even handle the spoken bridge. And the bloopy Dee-Lite sample is pretty nice, as is the stompy percussiony sample thing.
10:48. DJ, talking about a "caption contest" that I don't want to know anything about and so won't look into.
10:49. Coldplay, Viva La Vida. C
I guess it makes sense for Coldplay to have sought out Brian Eno, because they clearly want to be U2 Mark II. I still don't get what Brian Eno gets out of working with overinflated boring bands like that, though (except of course for a gigantic paycheck, but you'd think he'd be set enough already). I bet they never needed to break out the Oblique Strategies during those sessions, because I bet they never encountered a problem that needed to be solved or a surprising situation.
10:52. Station ID with a promo for the website. A very, very long promo.
10:53. Ads. This Wendy's ad claiming that pizza at night is scary is the most horrible thing I've ever heard. Station ID, but it's a false alarm, because here's more ads.
10:57. Daughtry, Over You. D-
Because it's been a whole twenty minutes since David Cook, we need to hear himthis kind of thing again. And because we don't have enough of these bands, we have to turn to people who came in fourth place on American Idol two years ago. Station ID.
11:00. 3 Doors Down, It's Not My Time. D-
After eight years, I have absolutely nothing left to say about 3 Doors Down. Station ID: "Music for everybody."
11:04. Leona Lewis, Bleeding Love. B
I'm told this is the most popular song of the year so far, but this it's the first time I'm hearing it. When it started, I thought it was someone who wanted to be Sinead O'Connor but didn't realize that she had to be breathy. My roommate, who's very chatty right now, corrected me and pointed out that she's like Mariah Carey but gothy. I like the junky-sounding slowdancy beats (so does my roommate, if you're keeping track). I'm actually tempted to give it more than a B, but I'm hedging my bets here on how I'll feel about if if I hear it twenty million more times. When the song ends, the DJ comes on and confirms the popularity of the song.
11:08. Pink, Who Knew. C+
The continued hugeness of this song baffles me, because it's probably my least favorite Pink single of all, not to mention that the album it's on came out over two years ago and no one bought it, the single was released a few months later and no one listened to it, and then like a year later (which is still a year ago) it suddenly became huge. What a strange phenomenon. Also strange: the radio station's "what's playing now" thing claims that this song features The Indigo Girls, which it doesn't, although the very dull song three tracks after it on the album does. Station ID.
11:11. Gavin Rossdale, Love Remains the Same. D
Because it's been a whole fourteen minutes since Daughtry. Although I guess it's slightly impressive (ha ha, just kidding, it's not impressive) that he hasn't changed what he sounds like one tiny little bit since 1994 and he still fits in perfectly on pop radio. I wonder what the hell he and Gwen Stefani still have to talk about. DJ, promising new stuff from the Pussycat Dolls, which I won't hear because the next song will round out the hour.
11:15. Jesse McCartney, Leavin'. C
It's not saying much, but this is by far the best Jesse McCartney song I've ever heard. I think it's entirely because of that high-pitched, tremelo-y fifey sample, because Jesse McCartney's personal charms are, shall we say, limited.

And that's it. Coming to the end of this hour, I'm reminded of one of the reasons I stopped doing the last blog. This hour was truly awful. There were only two songs I actively liked, and I'm hesitant about both of them, one because it's by the pants-peeing antichrist, and the other because it sounds like the kind of thing I'll like the first ten times or so and then will be forced to listen to over and over and over again until I never want to hear any music by anyone ever again. Considering the abysmal quality of the music, I don't know whether to complain about or give thanks for the fact that nearly a third (over seventeen minutes) of the hour was taken up with ads, station IDs, and contest promos. Overall grade: D+. That's not based on any mathematical system, so don't go averaging the letter grades I gave each song and tell me that I did it wrong.

What they should have played instead:
Alizee, Fifty Sixty (David Rubato remix). Download
So it's not in English, which is a major obstacle to American airplay, but it's probably my favorite pure pop song of the year so far (aside, of course, from Girls Aloud's epic "Can't Speak French", which has the unfair advantage of being one of the very best pure pop songs of all time). Alizee started almost exactly eight years ago (her first big single was released in early July of 2000) as kind of the French answer to Britney Spears (that first big single was "Moi...Lolita"), and while she's still pretty damn charming, she hasn't progressed much since. The original version of this song is OK, I guess, but kind of blandly dancy and unexciting (and with a truly terrible video). The remix, on the other hand, is near-perfect: breezy, atmospheric, with that nice touch of the Ennio Morricone-style western sound that's always so pleasant. Alizee's vocals plus David Rubato's awesome production equals what the world should sound like.

[PS: Does anyone know how to use html on stupid Vox? I've grudgingly accepted using a button to turn on bold and italics, but Alizee is supposed to have an acute accent on the first e in her name, and I can't figure out how to do it in this silly interface.]