OMG this was my favorite song in high school!

What I'm Listening To: Repetition Kills You by the Black Ghosts

I love music. And what I love the most about making it to this decade is all the various wonderful and wacktackular ways you can get your music delivered to your eardrums. I mean, when I was a kid there was just vinyl. Very boring and limited. Then there were tapes, but you could only play them on some clunky stereoriffic machine that was anything but portable. (Remind me to tell you how I made my own version of the Walkman in the 4th grade...no kidding!) Then there were boom boxes. Then there was the crappy Walkman that played tapes, then the versions of the Walkman which played tapes and had auto-reverse, where it would flip the tape over for you AUTOMATICALLY, which was like, a godsend for a lazy teenager like me.

Then they came out with CD's! Whoohooo! And then portable CD players. Then you could rip and burn premade CD's, and also make mix CD's on your computer. At this point, I thought this was the culmination of the glory of music, portability and creativity. It couldn't get any better than this, I remember thinking to myself back around 2002. I mean, making mix tapes sucked (see my other blog entry) and CD mixes were awesome but limited to about 17 songs per CD if you were lucky. But, oh no. It got better with the magic of mp3's. And downloading music from the internet. And the internet in general. (Oh, and finding out someone else out in cyberspace also cried to that one super depressing song by Suzanne Vega -- aren't they all, though? Kidding! But that's another blog post, I promise!)

And then, tah dah! The musical powers that be continued their intrepid trek into the space where only true innovation treads -- streaming internet radio and satellite radio. Sites like Pandora. Last.fm. And last but not least, XM Radio.

Thank god for XM Radio. We have XM Radio in the car, and it is phenomenal. It's satellite radio and, they have these "genre" radio stations, and (yes, I'm finally getting to the point of this blog, you impatient ass!) I love the one called "Fred". It's Channel 44, in case you care. Every time we get in the car I turn Fred on. And basically every time it comes on, they are playing a song that I LOVED in high school or college. No kidding!! When I yelp for the 247 millionth time that I love this song or that song on Fred, Jim's always like, "You can't love every song. How can you love every song this station plays?" and I'm like "Uh, you try spending your high school weekends in your room with a tape player and the MSOE radio dj's as your only friends. Music was my BEST FRIEND, man!" Ha. Sniff.

Okay, so anyway, just wanted to let you know about Fred. They have played stuff like "Under the Milky Way" by The Church (uh, my first make out session soundtrack) or "Elephant Stone" by the Stone Roses (uh, remember Bailey's? A fun place? First time I went there, they were playing that song) or "Hey Ma and Pa" by Fishbone (uh, dated some guy because the only music we had in common was Fishbone, so that's all he'd play when we hung out) and a million other tunes that just make me all misty-eyed for my lonely high school days and then my fun college nights!

Do you listen to XM Radio? Which one of their genre radio stations bring it all back for you?

PS -- Check out LAST.FM, if you dare. :)