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Thursday, June 23, 2005 |
Jack FM: Bane Or Menace?
In case you missed the huge space ad campaign going on all over town, the former Arrow 93.1 in the LA Metroplex is now Jack FM. What is Jack FM? Jesse Walker at Reason gives us the skinny based on their Baltimore affiliate's website:
Jack in Baltimore is a dramatic change from traditional radio formats. You told us that you are tired of stations that play the same 300 songs over...and over...and over.Thanks to centralized programming and congealing ownership, you can get Jack FM damn near everywhere in these here fifty states and Canada. Jack FM is, we learn, broadcast's answer to the iPod: semi-random (not really, but engineered to sound that way) music, with ads but without DJs. Walker is not amused, though, and not just because it's iPod lite: he slams it for its lack of actual interesting and thoughtful musical collisions:102.7 Jack FM is playing what we want...the best songs from the '70s, '80s, '90s, right up through today no matter where you first heard them.
Join Jack as we blast away the traditional rules of radio with something different....
It's fun, it's fresh, it's what Baltimore has been looking for.
You don't have to be a freeform snob to think the format isn't as adventurous as advertised: BusinessWeek's Burt Helm reports that, as he listened to Denver's Jack outfit, "most often a vaguely familiar '80s pop song would collide with a sort-of-familiar '70s rock ballad. Somewhere, surely, a standard-format programming executive was going into a cataleptic fit. To my ears it was neither that jarring nor interesting." Indeed, "It often felt like I was listening to the soundtracks of several car commercials in a row."The usual suspects at Hit And Run fire off a few cranky mortar rounds at Jack, too, but it seems to me they're protesting too much. This is exactly the sort of thing KROQ used to do so well when it was a greasy spot on the dial out of a Pasadena hotel room. What's really weird is to listen to anyone at Reason bag on pop culture with any kind of pretense; this is pop music we're talking about here, not Bach. As Calvin observed, with modern art it's hard to tell who's putting on who, and if some of us want a little thoughtless diversion, what's wrong with letting someone else randomize the program? I mean, really: I tried -- several times, earnestly, trying to imagine I was an impressionable adolescent again -- listening to indy heartthrob 103.1, but I could never get past their addiction to crap I couldn't stand the first time. At least when I listen to Jack FM, about 50-60% of the time I'll get a song or three that's worth my time -- and then I'm changing the channel back to KFWB for traffic or whatever.
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