Ugh.

She didn’t have the foggiest notion what I was talking about and looked at me like I was a dinosaur.

Now, if I serve up on a silver platter a straight line like that and you guys can’t do something useful with it…I truly will begin to lose faith in humanity.

Simplesmente desrespeito.

But MTV was running Real World, Road Rules, and about 8 hours of MTV Beach Party daily back when I was swapping mp3s with FTP clients (the original P2P).

Limiting one’s drunken “woooo”s to every three or four minutes rather than every 40 seconds would go a long way toward repairing relations in one’s seating row.  Have fun, knock yourself out.  It’s not the opera, after all.  But do please remember that you’re not the only one in the audience, and you’re not the act we paid to see.

You were right to be miffed at the dude, wys.  If someone thinks their concert experience isn’t complete if they haven’t felt up all the girls and explosively vomited over someone’s back, are we to shrug and say, “Hey, it’s a rock show.  Let that freak flag fly, my brother”?

I do want to mention that when I started getting into AC/DC in the mid-80s, I started collecting all their old stuff as well.  It was kinda weird seeing Bon Scott era concert footage of them.  It’s not like the act or their energy ever changed very much, but the audience sure did.  This right here is an AC/DC show from 1977.  Look at the kids in the front few rows.  One might be tempted to think that their energy is low. Like maybe the act sucks.  Hell, maybe they’re all on Quaaludes.  But more likely, it’s a generational thing.  Rock shows hadn’t imported the “slam dancing” moshpit from the punk shows yet.  Who’d have thunk it?  Rock fans used to be more civil.

Anyway, KNAC turned to Spanish-language programming around 1995, 100.3 Pirate Radio (KQLZ) bailed in 1993, KLOS became “Classic Rock” and by 1997 was playing nothing but REM and the first album by The Pretenders, and KLSX became talk radio.  I gave up completely on commercial radio in L.A. when I got my first iPod.  I certainly don’t miss the 26 minutes of commercials they’d play every hour, but I do kinda miss being exposed to new and unfamiliar songs every week without any effort on my part.  Kinda.  Now I gotta go looking for it.  And I drive a lot.

Back in 1998 I was working for a start-up music company founded by Chris Blackwell, Les Garland and Ted Waitt (Discovered Marley, MTV’s 1st music programmer and founder of Gateway computers) who’s goal it was to create website to kill MTV because they didn’t show music videos anymore. That was 14 years ago and it was a valiant attempt to capitalise on the new-fandangled technology called he World Wide Web. We were too early, the technology wasn’t quite ready, even by the time we folded and the site’s now a porn only url (Seriously, from Webby Award winning cutting edge video streaming website to pornography host – Cory Doctorow, won’t you please write that story?), but the complaint was the same back then as it is now.

It seems to me that the desire to watch music videos is still alive and well, but finding them has become a fractured quest. I find myself buying videos in iTunes just to be able to watch a nice clear version.