The Village Idiot: Don’t stop, don’t look, don’t listen
It wasn’t long ago, at least in geological terms, when you could listen to one radio station and hear a song by the Beatles followed by a song by country star Roger Miller then hear a hit by Frank Sinatra. An instrumental by Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass might come after a Four Tops record but before a Peter, Paul and Mary folk song. In an hour you might hear 10 or 12 different types of music. Sure, there were country stations and soul stations and classical stations, but the big winners played the Top 40 songs over and over.
Today’s radio is the opposite, with each station playing one type of music all day long. Rap, country, metal, classic rock, pop and nothing else. Some stations get ridiculously specific. “At XYZ-100, we play the best hits of 1987 through 1992 and two songs from June 1994!” “At Attention Deficit Disorder 102, you’ll hear the best music of the mid-’60s to 1973!” The country stations play music by people who grew up in big cities but pretend they were raised on a poor dirt farm. When these guys are not out golfing in Palm Springs and skiing in Aspen, they’re singing about picking cotton and spitting tobacco.
It’s not just radio. You can hardly find a magazine on the newsstand that any two people in the same household would both enjoy. Instead of something for everybody, there’s something for almost nobody. Look at the magazine rack in any grocery store and you wonder which of your neighbors is buying Garage Door Opener Aficionado, Surrogate Father News, New Working Mother Woman, Bowling Ball Collector, Taxidermy Today or Teen Lawyer. The wife is buying Sophisticated Living while the husband is buying WWE SmackDown! Is that Junior rifling through Super Sadistic Videos while Muffy is picking up Xtreme Piercing? What does that family talk about at dinner?
The greeting card companies are doing it, too, making incredibly specific cards for the most unlikely events. You can now buy “Happy You Passed That Kidney Stone, from Your Second Cousin, Bob.” cards, “Your Grandmother (mother’s side) is So Sorry You Got Voted off ‘American Idol’!” cards and “From Your Nephew Joe in the Navy — Heard You Got the Cat Spayed!” cards.
Last year I got a Happy Halloween card from normally normal Alice down the road. What is the etiquette here? Am I supposed to send her one back or send a mental health worker to her home to check up on her? You might think, “What a harmless gesture, a Halloween card.” But trust me, that’s how it starts. First, it’s cards; in 10 years they’ll want us all to exchange Halloween gifts.
But for your niche-marketing dollar, nothing beats the cable TV. Why spend a million dollars a minute advertising on “Friends” when, for pennies, you can run your infomercial on “The Left-Handed Blond Bass Fishing Awards.”
They sell an awful lot of cleaning products on these infomercials. And all of them brag about how well they remove bloodstains. If you’re cleaning up so much blood that you need to buy two bottles of this stuff for $19.99, I can’t help but wonder, what is going on at your house? Maybe you should be calling a doctor, not an 800 number. Or the police. Sure it removes bloodstains, but what about those unsightly bullet holes in your living room walls? No problem. Buy Bullet Patch! One application and you’ll never know it was there! From the wonderful folks who brought you Organic Citrus Blood Remover!
(Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes A Village Idiot: A Memoir of Life After the City.” He also contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected].)