Vance Joy, James Bay, George Ezra, what is this wallpaper shit? music for people who think cuts off The Joshua Tree might make office workers stop and enjoy the music? Good God, these guys have less edge than a butter knife. You could replace every single instance of their songs with "Back on the Chain Gang" and only "Back on the Chain Gang" and somehow it would make the station less repetitive.

Death Cab For Cutie, a/k/a Baby's First Indie Band, can go away forever too.

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Hey! I like...wait...no I don't, screw that white noise.

I don't love the Grateful Dead, certainly don't hate them like Terry Boers, but it was damn cool how they went all in on the Dead leading up to Fare Thee Well. It actually felt like a risk-taking station and not a jukebox of earnest fresh-faced white kids in between Talking Heads and Stones songs.

Oh and Hozier sucks too. Yes, you make the Bible sexy, or something. Enough.

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That George Ezra "Budapest" song is particularly fucking awful.
The names Vance Joy and James Bay seem familiar in the sense
that I probably only know their names because I have a habit of Shazam'ing
terrible songs I hear in my local grocery store.

I still don't get Hozier.

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Just chillin' like Garret Quillin.

Justin Bieber for girls who think they're too sophisticated for Justin Bieber, presumably. You don't have a house in Budapest with a bunch of expensive shit in it!

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And play David Bowie 12 times a fucking day

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https://www.backroadspubandgrill.com

yesterday morning I turned on XRT during a break on Relevant Radio and thought to myself. "this has got to be the most boring station in Chicago."

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

David Bowie should be played 120 times a day as long as you keep it to stuff between Space Oddity and Scary Monsters. Someone played the entire "Station to Station" late one night and I was giddy with delight.

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Holy shit. I just assumed that he was some dude in his 40s who finally got himself a hit. This makes the song even worse - if that's possible.

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Then I suppose that makes him Rick Astley for people who are tired of memes involving Rick Astley.

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I put the stream on this morning; the new music director was sitting in for whoever does Sunday mornings (Norm? maybe it's just her shift?). I heard two of my favorite songs of all time back-to-back: "You Get What You Give" by New Radicals and "This Must Be The Place" by Talking Heads. It was great.

The next song was "Budapest." No one's safe.

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I imagine all of the songs mentioned in this thread, along with "Ho Hey" by The Lumineers, "Take a Walk" by Passion Pit, and "From A Window Seat" by Dawes, all being played for the crowd waiting to get in to see The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.

"How amazing would it be to see Jimmy and Lena Dunham sing 'From a Window Seat' together!?!?!"

Maybe he's in town for someone's birthday...

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

XRT has a new music director?

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

that song always puts me in mind of laurel park in portland, oregon, with guys in straw hats, olde timey mustaches drinking moscow mules from tin cups, playing fiddles in suspenders next to their unicycles. followed by a spontaneous combustion of the entire lot.

But haven't those songs you like been on the XRT playlist since they were released? And is the new music director, Kelly Ransford, really all that new? Hasn't she been at the station since early January?

Someone needs to clean house at that station. Frankly, I'm surprised XRT didn't offer a management position to James Van Osdol. Surely they pay more than what he's earning in his current position at Rivet Radio, where he basically creates insipid podcasting material for monumental morons. Then again, it looks like Van Osdol is trying to position himself for a talk radio spot rather than something in music radio. Still, the guy would probably do a much better job of restoring the station to relevance than Ransford will. The only problem is that he's largely an insufferable egomaniac.

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I don't mind any of this.

Listen to something else.

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Rick Hahn is the best GM in baseball.

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Is that the real life version of Eric Cartman? J/K, God bless Terri. She's been on the radio since I was in grade school.
P.S. - Dawes and Passion Pit are both pretty great, The Lumineers can go fuck off somewhere with that fat fuck from Of Monsters And Men.

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Just chillin' like Garret Quillin.

if anything, CH should just get Sirius/XM.

It's funny you mention that! I just got off a flight from Boston-via-WPB, where I listened to SiriusXM most of the way up. There's a channel called The Spectrum which overlaps a good portion of the XRT library/rotation. They play all the same good stuff, but sure enough, all the same George Ezra/James Bay/Vance Joy white-boy slop that makes XRT boring. It's either comforting or not comforting that it's not just them: Really Smart People somewhere are deciding that what album-alternative radio all across America needs is Vance Joy by the barrelful. I wish the program director and jocks who have all been at this station for 20 to 30 years could be trusted to think for themselves on this, but thaaaaaaaaaaat's radio. The good thing is that when you hit a bump like that on The Spectrum, you can just flip to 1st Wave and be guaranteed good '80s alternative.

Oh and whoever Amos Lee is, he can fuck off too.



Yeah, I like Dawes too, though I totally get why it's fun to poke fun at them and their sweet Laurel Canyon sound. I think the Coldplayification of Mumford & Sons has left the Lumineers in the dust.

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yep that's exactly what i mean. i have the spectrum on my fav's in my car. that, 1st wave, alt nation, lithium, the bridge, 80's on 8, 90's on 9, it's all great to be able to just flip around when the channel starts sucking. programmed music is always bound to suck at some point. Sirius does provide a lot of variety. i even have some stuff like Chill--mostly ambient/electronica/trip hop/trance--on my dial as well. i haven't listened to terrestrial radio outside of sports AM since having it.

In general, I find Sirius pretty bad. No decent alt country channel. The 1st wave channel seems to have a playlist of fewer than 150 songs. And the alt rock channels are more miss than hit. That said, my main problem with Sirius is its irrelevance as a source of community. That used to be the strength of broadcast radio before Clinton destroyed the industry in the mid-1990s. People say the internet killed FM radio and most of the formerly great rock stations across the country, but it was really deregulation and monopoly capitalism that did them in.

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Tall Midget is a country fan?

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2018
#ExtendLafleur
10 More Wins

Outlaw Country is solid at times. I agree on that Alt-Rock Channels, lots of misses there.

I'm a bigfan of Underground Garage. It's a great assortment of music from 50's to Present Day, and features styles like Rock & Roll, Punk, Soul, Garage Rock, Rockabilly, etc... The only thing I don't like on the station is that they plug new music from Little Steven's record label from time to time, which is mostly garbage.

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I know he likes alternative country. Who doesn't like alternative country? It's a damn solid genre.

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Grateful Dead channel is my favorite. I never start there, because I know I am going to end up there.

JamOn is good when they are playing my favorite bands. I don't care much for the new generation of jam bands (I hate that term, but it is what it is).

I have been listening to Underground Garage a lot lately. I like Little Steven's stories, and history about artists. He is a good host.

Outlaw Country is a good channel.

Others in my rotation are:

90's on 9
Classic Rewind
Classic Vinyl
Deep Tracks
The Spectrum
1st Wave
Lithium
Willie's Roadhouse
Bluegrass Junction

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Good people drink good beer - Hunter S. Thompson

<º)))><

Waiting for the time when I can finally say
That this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way

To Tall Midget's point about how the whole station needs to be cleaned out, yes and no. They've hit big on all their young-ish hires (Jason Thomas, Ryan Arnold, Lara Mondae, Emma Mac), but if they lost the connection to the audience that grew up with the same voices, they might never recover. Still, it's pretty clear which DJs bother to dig through the library and which don't. I mean, poor Johnny Mars sounds half-dead now. Maybe he always did; I missed peak Mars.

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Outlaw Country is pretty good, unless they are running some special show.
I agree, 1st Wave is normally terrible.
Alt Nation is unlistenable That crap is 99.9% terrible.

XMU is normally VERY good.

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