I have been saying it here for months - satellite radio and the iPod are the future of music - primarily because they give you what you want, while FM radio gives you nothing but the same five songs and 29 minutes of commercials every hour. Today, I found out something that told me to abandon almost all hope that FM radio will ever return to something even close to its glory days...
For me, those glory days were experienced on Washington/Baltimore's 99.1 WHFS in the late 80s and early 90s. On most stations in that part of the country at that time, all you heard on the radio was bad hair metal (Poison, Lita Ford, Bad English) and bad top-40 pop (Milli Vanilli, MC Hammer, Nelson). The only place a skinny-white-preppy-high-school-kid-from-the-suburbs could go for sonic salvation was WHFS. There I learned a whole new world of cool music that kept me sheltered from the corporate pop and redneck rock that filled the airwaves in those years, and formed the foundation for most of the music and artists I listen to today.
It was at WHFS that I first heard and became a fan of New Order, Jellyfish, Michael Penn, A Man Called E (who later formed the Eels), Siouxsie and the Banshees, Charlatans, Happy Mondays, Lou Reed, Jeff Buckley, The Sundays, Squeeze, Nirvana, Jane's Addiction, Stereo MCs, The Cure and so many more.
I just found out today that, at the beginning of this year, WHFS was killed off by its corporate parent, and replaced by a Spanish-language Latino pop station (the fastest growing format in the U.S.). The first feeling I had was an immediate sense of loss - like one you would have if you lost the photo album that holds all the pictures taken of you with friends and family during your high school and college years. Or like the time in June of 1998 when I read that singer Jeff Buckley had died two weeks prior - it came out of nowhere, and you knew right away that something special was gone forever.
WHFS was there with me through high school and college, providing the soundtrack for the most memorable years of my life. And, like the smell of my first girlfriend's perfume or the taste of Steinlager beer, the music I first heard on WHFS still brings me back to some of the best times of my life. And now it's gone.
In all truth, WHFS was gone several years ago, when alternative music became mainstream music. When groups like Blink 182, Finger 11, Maroon 5 (what's with the numbers?!) and Creed evovled from being minor nuisances riding alterna-rock's coat tails into major-label acts that all the kids liked, and all the stations played. WHFS abandoned their free-form alternative format - and the DJs that brought it to us - for a more profitable format that ensured you could hear the same dreadful Limp Bizkit song at least three times a day, and that HFS would sound like every other rock station on the dial. Oh, and don't even get me started on the addition of teen-hormone talk show "Love Line." Please. In the end, HFS probably needed to be put out of its misery.
Still, after I moved to Denver in 1999, every time I went back home to the East Coast to visit friends and family I would instinctively turn the dial to 99.1. And every now and then they would slip in a classic tune that showed me that some hint of the old HFS was still there, and the spirit was still alive. Today, I now know it has been taken away, and a small part of my past is gone with it.
In a VERY fitting gesture, and one last sign that the old HFS spirit was with them right up until the final broadcast minute, the very last song WHFS played was "Last Goodbye" by Jeff Buckley - one of my favorite songs of all time, from an artist that, like WHFS, left this world when we weren't looking.
On April 17, Michael Penn's first ever "Best of" CD will be released to the masses. And it only took 18 years.