The radio has been dead to me since shortly after the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold,” but on very rare occasions, it still has the ability to surprise me. 999 times out of 1000, of course, I hate it. If it’s not busy accosting me with the sick familiarity of classic rock (which includes 80s/90s stuff, natch), commercial radio buzzes exactly like the refrigerator Thom Yorke refers to in “Karma Police.” Whether it’s ringtone-rap or compressed-to-death guitar rock, all the new stuff on commercial radio clamors exactly like the ads it’s squeezed between. Like cleavage on a billboard, it’s 100% lowest-common-denominator stuff–structurally and sonically designed to shout and keep shouting and not stop shouting.
College, pirate, internet or otherwise independent radio are of course excluded from this discussion. And here in Chicago, to some of my friends at least, so is 93XRT. I’m a little on the fence about that, but a few weeks ago WXRT did jump into my good graces with only a song. I was still jobless, and Amy and I were rushing up the Kennedy at night. I forget why, but the traffic was light, and the drive was as pretty as ever, the buildings downtown towering and sparkling to our right. As we sped north, this song came on the radio with minimal but insistent drums, some fast tambourine, and a one-string downward strum that sounded more like a bass line being played on a six-string by accident. It was comparatively clean, uncluttered and unstarved for attention, reminding me of 1988, when I first heard The Church’s “Under the Milky Way” sandwiched between Janet Jackson and Poison on Cleveland’s main top 40 station. (!!!)
But it was all on the bass drum, that guitar string locked in with it, just one note on the 1 and 3, over and over. The singing came in for a couple bars, then the note climbed a few times, dipped once, and on to the chorus, its syllable-clusters tucked tightly behind the established rhythm: “Hold on / to what you’ve / been given / lately.” I don’t know what my chemical levels were at the time, but Amy turned it up, and I think she even started to drive just a hair recklessly. I wanted to move, too–wanted to be in a club, hit more loudly with the song, the roots of it. Again, all this being relative, there was true grit in what I was hearing, a swing and sweat that I didn’t think was possible from the same general machine that’s responsible for, say, Kid Rock.
KT Tunstall is Scottish, I think, and it seems like she’s out to be the next Cheryl Crow. Accordingly, there is nothing new about “Hold On,” nothing revolutionary or revelatory. But in that moment on the expressway, it seemed to be telling me something. It seemed like a rhyming slice of advice, a small tear in the fabric of my humdrum, a fresh view that can’t be had through plain language, minus melody. It still sounds that way to me–the way music is supposed to work, the way radio used to.
