- by Fish

"The world's on fire, how 'bout yours?" I sing along in my car. Is it wrong to like the new Smash Mouth song?

Of course, in the very asking of that question, I acknowledge that I've bought into the notion of musical taste as social identity. Sure, as a teenager, I vested a good part of my self-image in what I listened to (a sub-genre which then hadn't yet been labeled "alternative", and hadn't yet consumed the mainstream until the term "alternative" was no longer accurate.) Music-as-self is hardly unusual for teenagers; just as the willowly MacLachlan devotee turns burgeoning adolescent angst into a pattern of CD purchases, the rebellious post-metalhead with the Limp Bizkit shirt is showing the world that he's the kind of guy who doesn't listen to any of that wussy Lilith Fair crap. (And I leave you to draw your own conclusions about the statement made by the boys who are really into show tunes.) While I'm long since out of my teens, some of that teenage mainstream-rejection remains, lurking deep in the brain, the brain that still balks when the ear likes any song that's grown too popular. I can't deny that the Smash Mouth single is musically catchy, lyrically quite clever, and interestingly arranged -- but it's by the same guys who wrote "Walking On the Sun," another catchy, lyrically clever song that I sort of liked the first two million times I heard it. Too popular a band, my teenaged brain protests. Can't like 'em.

Smash Mouth fall into a category lucky for them, but unlucky for me, in which all the major local rock stations happily play their music. They're fortunate "crossover" artists who get played by the "alternative" station and the "hard rock" station and the "best of the 80's and 90's" stations all. This is the same category occupied by the Verve, whose "Bittersweet Symphony" was, at its height, completely inescapable, which would have been great if I didn't prefer listening to the sound of someone squeaking their hand across a balloon. This is the same category occupied by Third Eye Blind, who are still milking their two-year-old debut for singles, singles I once liked, singles since drilled into my head like a musical version of Chinese water torture. The same category as Sugar Ray, who I confess I wrote off as a one-hit wonder when "Fly" came out. And really, Sugar Ray are the best example of the radio industry gone awry: one day about six months into that single's relentless overexposure, I caught a local DJ spinning the tune, following it with a voiceover entreating the band to come up with a new catchy single. "C'mon, guys, time for a new one," he implored. THE DJ SAID THIS! THE DAMNED DJ! "You asshole!" I screamed at my car's innocent dashboard. "You have the damned album! You could be playing any other track on the CD! It's you who has the power to bring the world 'a new one'! It's you who has that one single locked on auto-repeat!"

Sadly, even this is not true. Contrary to the image that television gave me (mainly, WKRP DJs bringing stacks of LPs into the air studio), most major stations have their playlists set not by the DJs but by the program manager. Which isn't inherently an awful thing, until you realize that ever since the government deregulated radio, our country's radio stations have slid increasingly into the hands of a very small number of corporations, to whom those program managers are beholden. And the corporations have a very specific agenda when it comes to setting playlists. Corporations don't care that you've heard the watered-down radio mix of Everclear's "Father of Mine" enough times that you can spout the lyrics back like they were your Social Security number. They don't care that Lenny Kravitz's cover of "American Woman" is awful, awful, awful, awful, AWFUL, that it strips out all the aggressive energy from the original and renders it sterile. (And I'm sure they're missing the irony that it's taking an angry anthem against American imperialism, and turning it into a derivative American shill singing about... a blonde American actress in a skintight outfit.) If you're pardon me a little dead-horse-flogging, all they care about is the money, and the big record labels sure do love the radio corporations when the corporations overplay their hit singles. Endless reiterations of Kravitz's gelded cover let the labels "move" more "units" of that big-movie soundtrack tie-in. The big labels' monolithic influence does more than just irritate your eardums -- it nudges out the little labels, too. Those that remain (after an equally troublesome series of takeovers and mergers in the record industry) can't compete, can't bring the kind of big muscle to bear to get their songs played. So the radio stations only seize upon the major-label singles, and the little-label bands... well, it's off to college radio for you, kids. Unless you have the misfortune of not making noisy, underproduced neo-punk, in which case you'll be shunned as a "sellout" by college radio, which (like Robespierre chopping the heads off of peasants just because they look aristocratic) is generally too far radical to be sensible. Our saving grace, it would seem, would be the low-power stations, the little independent or community-owned ones. The ones that are neither record-industry mouthpieces nor experiments by college kids with chips on their shoulder. What about them? Naah, the FCC's been shutting them down. Many of them aren't licensed, because the licensing process costs tens of thousands of dollars, and that means the big radio companies have been whining their rich little mouths off to the Feds about wavelength interference -- even if the little local stations aren't sharing any frequencies with a big station. They're a dangerous threat to the airwaves; we need to clear them out so that you can hear Everlast's "What It's Like" simultaneously on six different stations at any point in time.

"We could all use a little change." In my car, I sing along to the unintentionally appropriate lyric. I've decided it's ok to like the new Smash Mouth song. It's not their fault they're overplayed. They're not trying to be big-media "product"; hell, they're not really all that attractive. They just wanted to cut a record and make some music. And just because they've crossed over doesn't give me cause to be cross.