In the words of Pat Summeral..."Something happened."

Mancow on the Loop feels like the natural conclusion of something or other, but boy, I really hope Mancow doesn't come back.

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Cow can do a better or different type of show than he used to do. The whole outrageous group of societal shit can be removed. he can talk about real stuff.

Of course he did go from city dwelling hipster to Dad living in Wilmette, the edge might not be there.

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

As real as McNeil is, that's how fucking phony Mancow is. He makes North and bernstein seem genuine.

I still love the story when he claimed he sent Mancow Mobile One with Turd out to Steve Dahl's house to check the garbage for "extra" cocaine. Dahl happened to hear Turd supposedly going through Dahl's garbage on air and walked outside to tell him to get lost. Of course, he wasn't there. "Theater of the mind."

And as far as being a hipster goes, Mancow is nothing but a rube from Kansas City. I knew that when I heard him refer to North Avenue as "North Street".

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Don't take it personally.

Mancow calling into the J Hood show once as Eric , to talk Bears.

J Hood asks "is this Mancow?"

Eric says 'No way man, it cant be mancow, that would be a clear violation of his contract!"

And yes, I agree about the made up bullshit. Its what his whole show was. I have posted here about a couple guys I know being on the show as characters doing some sick stuff.

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

This station is garbage. I'm not sure why anyone would want to work for it. Then again, if no one else will hire you, I guess you need to take a shit-job.

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Some people are more then happy to take on the challenge of buiding something up, if all the tools are provided.

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

Yeah, I don't think the Loop is a lost cause. It doesn't have to be. It's a brand with a lot of heritage in this market (Agencyspeak!), and classic rock is a hard format to get wrong. At the moment, they are getting it wrong by trying to copy the Drive song for song and by voice-tracking almost the entire station. Put music fans in the chair, let them work with a solid library, and you'll have a rock station that can rise back to the top, or at least out of the dregs where they are now. A personality-oriented morning show wouldn't hurt, either. Lin Brehmer and Steve Downes are already doing the Serious Music Fans show. I don't know what WLS-FM and K-Hits are doing. Mac being Mac could be all it takes to make inroads in mornings.

Cumulus is experiencing great success with KQX, but I can't tell whether they set out to make a good radio station or if they just stumbled into it and knew better than to fuck with it too much.

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They've been getting it wrong for about the last 10 years.

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Yeah, true. I loved the Loop from 2000-2003, though. Plenty of album cuts, and never so much butt rock that I had to change the station. That the only Zeppelin they seem to play now is "Rock and Roll" three times a day, if true, is disappointing. I guess it hasn't been a long time at all.

Come to think of it, my FM radio sequence of The Loop --> The Drive --> XRT --> CHIRP is sort of like the classic Evolution of Man picture.

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Great job then for someone, cant fuck it up more and they have a name in this city, even f they think putting one word named guys on the air is cool. FISH, PYKE, BIRD, RIDER. We wll know its fake BS DJ crap....kinda like Bernstein....I would easily wager putting Mac on the air in the Afternoon gets them the highest rated numbers they have had in 10 years. It is possible to play full songs as well as talk.

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

Agreed. Now how do we get Dolphin in on this?

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Maya Gavin
Connor McKnight

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Maybe that's what's going on. Mac isn't in the running for mornings. But he's gonna do a week to see if they want him for afternoons. Cuz that's what Mac wants. Afternoon drive. He said as much when he was on the Score. Now he can take on Bernstein again.

I used to date a girl who was a frequent fake guest on his show. $50 an appearance.

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Soccer 1,2,3
Spanish Honor Society 1,2,3,4
Forensics 1,2,3,4

"Smiles with Nostrils"

"...no Hmong, go find some blacks"

I would be hugely disappointed if they went with Mancow. I to flip around, but they'd definitely be out of the rotation if he were on.

there's a bunch of teenagers who grew up in the 90s when q101 was "a thing" and now that they're in their 30s-40s there's something comforting to turning on the same ol station and getting the modernized version of the same schlock that had THE brand name back in the day.

i think they did that lunch hour 80s/early-90s throwback stuff before the station went away the first time, but i bet you something like that would kill now. there's a lot of young/ish family rubes driving around with nothing better to do than to try to relive the glory of their youth, so hey reel them in with the comfort zone stuff and keep em around for the new stuff. they'll be going to church in no time!

so yeah it's likely #2 because of my reason, i think.

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so how much do you think b&b pays for stuff like the anti-vaxxer crap last night? or does dan just write that himself?

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I didn't listen to Q101 in its heyday (I was busy pumping up the jams, pumping them up on Party Radio B96), but they have a lot of early '90s alternative in the playlist: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, STP, Foo Fighters, Jane's Addiction, the obligatory Smashing Pumpkins, but generally nothing from the '80s. Stylistically, the grunge doesn't really fit with their bipolar playlist of electronic-tinged indie (BANKS, Broods, Bear Hands, Wild Cub, Foster the People, and of course Lorde) nor the banjo-ukelele-trust-fund-hoedown shit (Mumfords, Lumineers, Head and the Heart, Lone Bellow, fucking Vance Joy). So yeah, it's a pretty bald-faced attempt to reel in heritage Q101 listeners, and not a very deft one.

Incidentally, I will be happy if I never hear "Take Me to Church" again in my life. Shame, too, because I really liked it, but good god, y'all, the stations around here overplayed it so hard you'd think it was a Foo Fighters song making perfunctory references to Chicago (that's the place where we live! and Dave Grohl sang about it!).

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it's cashing in on that 90s brand recognition to reel in a bunch of soulless suburbanites who want a twinge of hipster cred without having to leave the friendly confines of a pre-established brand in their head. i think they stumbled onto the pre-existing brand recognition but making a radio station for aging white people who want their pre-existing blankey with that touch of "now" isn't exactly rocket science.

that said, they'll never come up with anything as cool as bringing back the alternative beat/industrial zone or even that half-assed late 90s attempt to exploit the rise of techno/IDM with q101' ELECTRIC TRIP or whatever. i remember them playing aphex twin's yellow calx over q101 airwaves althought it was proclaimed to be called YELLOW CLAX, and i couldnt figure out if that was a good or a bad thing in the big picture. it didnt matter becuase within a year or so they were just doing post-b96 type pop dance techno shit and that washed away the last vestages of trying t have an even somewhat eclectric electronic music show, which of course started with zoltar the brother frm another planet's "alternative beat" --- man CH, if you made it to the last ~2hrs of that show when he played the deep cuts.... idk if you're an industrial/EBM head but that was some great music listening back in the day. and i don't think this w101 is capable of it, especially now that's tainted by success and that's by and large a success built from familiarity.

it remains to be seem if anyone recognizes this and tries to incorporate more of that 90s q101 type avant garde/ism to say "hey we got you hooked with 20 times/day pop crap will you stick around to listen to some real shit?" market research is never gonna show that playing spahn ranch - heretic's fork is going to bring in more listeners than having a robot/ic-person play you she's out back counting stars at 11:30pm on a saturday night. c'est la vie no?

and holy fuck i'm going to steal banjo-ukelele-trust-fund-hoedown for someday. that very well could come in handy, although i just bluntly narrow it down to "music with a soul"

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I remember Sonic Boom on weekend overnights. I never heard Zoltar.

I feel pretty safe in saying that KQX won't stray from easily digestible modern alternative. Basically what they want to be is a top 40 station if it were programmed by indie bloggers, with enough old stuff sprinkled in to call themselves "alternative."

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The Lumineers give me, if I may quote Don Tiny, the "anger shits."

I liked "Submarines," but "Ho Hey" is a bacterial infection in song form.

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Regarding Mancow, I think the "Mancow Militia" bumper stickers of the 90s were the equivalent of the ICP Juggalo stickers of the 2000s. Seemed that similar people had them.

There's a clip on Fuzzy-Memories of a Sox game on channel 44 from just days before Disco Demolition Night. Jimmy does a read for an upcoming "disco demolition featuring Steve Dahl of WLUP," at which point he and Harry struggle mightily to understand the local relevance of the "WLUP" callsign. "What a weird name for a radio station. Wuhloop. Hey, why would you call a station 'wuhloop'?" Mr. Chicago!

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Who did the show this morning? Did they say when Dan McNeil's week will be?

Some guy named Abe Kanan, and Mac doesn't have a week scheduled.

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Pretty sure he was on one of the Sirius Howard stations on the weekends doing a sports show a few years back.

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You know me like that.

Has anyone been listening?

I heard a little bit of Abe Kannan. He was OK. I'm not a big fan of 3, 4, or 5 different people being part of a broadcast. Everyone has to chime in with a comment and/or try to be funny and it 1) takes forever for the person talking to get to the point because of all the side comments and 2) most of the comments made don't add much.

Shadoe Stevens is on this week. Rob Hart did what I'm guessing was supposed to be a funny breaking news bit where he read several stories in a somewhat old-timey voice, but dozens of people dying at an Egyptian soccer game doesn't lend itself well to comedy.

I like Rob Hart, but the WLUP 20/20 News bit he's doing is not good.