This past summer I signed up for Sirius satellite radio so that I could have nonstop music in the car. I hate talk radio, and commercials, and so on. First let me say that I was completely misled by the Sirius ads; the music channels are NOT talk-free, but "commercial-free." There are DJs blabbing away on there all the time. But that is not my complaint for today. (That was my complaint of June 25, when I emailed Sirius to register my annoyance – both my annoyance at the blabbing DJs and my annoyance at having been misled into thinking it was a talk-free radio situation.)
My complaint for today is the programming on the Sirius 80s channel. I spend, and I calculated this, about 16-20 minutes each morning driving Alex to school and then coming back home. Sometimes this is a little longer if I need to run errands, but generally 45 minutes is the top amount of time I spend in the car each morning. Occasionally I go out in the afternoon for a little while.
Before I get to the actual complaint, let’s do some math to find out how many songs were recorded in the 80s. We’ll use an extremely conservative estimate and say that only one album was released per week, which anyone who lived through the 1980s knows is ridiculous. Duran Duran and R.E.M. alone seemed to release an album every week! So…
Number of years in the 1980s: 10
Therefore, number of weeks in the 1980s: 520, which means 520 albums, going by our estimate.
Let’s say 10 songs per album…which means 5200 songs.
Estimate 3 minutes per song…which means 15,600 minutes’ worth of songs.
Divide that by 60 and you get 260 hours.
Conservatively, therefore, two hundred and sixty hours of discrete 1980s songs would need to be played before coming to a repeat. (Not necessarily, but could also be, discreet songs!)
And yet, EVERY DAY I hear
- an REO Speedwagon song
- Tears for Fears’ "Shout"
- Thompson Twins’ "Lies"
Seriously (ha ha), I’m so tired of the Thompson Twins (whom I never even liked much DURING the 1980s) that I’d like to quit my Sirius subscription. Because I have a convertible, I can’t read the display on the radio properly to select a different channel – not while driving, anyway. The 80s channel is the least offensive of all the early-in-the-list channels; for example, the 1950s channel may have one song in ten that I know, the sixties maybe 3 out of 10, but on the 80s channel, I know them all, and I sing them all (except "Shout" and "Lies" because I’m too busy yelling at the radio).
Please, please…take these out of rotation for a while? At least in the morning?
On the positive side, it’s nice to hear Nina and Martha and everybody from the old days on MTV.
This card is obviously not an anagram card. I just whipped it up out of nostalgia.
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