Listen to the ra-a-di-o

It was a bit hard hearing the latest Country & Western songs in France-- a taste I acquired over many years of cross-country trips. If you've ever driven across the U.S., you know that there are long, long stretches of highway where if you don't have your own CDs, you are listening to Country and Western. My favorite song is "You're the reason God made Oklahoma."

It's fun to listen to the radio in Los Angeles, and most of the stations are in English. I enjoy scanning through them sometimes and listening to the brief snippets of Bible-thumping (how it reminds me of West Virginia!); rap; Spanish-language ballads sung with a choke in the voice; the news on NPR (pretty much only Iraq, Israel/Palestine and the United States), finishing with the unmistakable nasal whine of Jim Svejda on KUSC, an excellent classical station. Every morning, filmmaker David Lynch gives a weather report on indie station 103.1 from his balcony. But when I need to just get through a traffic jam, there's nothing like Go Country 105, the Country & Western station that in Darwinian fashion bumped a classical station off to AM radio shortly after I moved here. Right now there's a catchy  song by Carrie Underwood that must make a lot of men nervous:

I   dug my keys into the side of his pretty little souped-up four wheel drive--
carved my name into his leather seeeeeats--
I took a Louisville slugger* to both headlights--   
slashed a hole in all four tires--
maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats!

It's no doubt my gloomy outlook on life (which few people outside my family realize, I am relieved to say) but the fact that you can listen to the radio in the car all day, every day, and not learn anything about the rest of the world alarms me. This is an epoch in which Al Qaeda is striving to find a way to attack Los Angeles and Melbourne (why Melbourne?) with a nuclear bomb, and Lindsay Lohan is in the headlines again.

*Note to non-Americans: A Louisville slugger is a baseball bat.

Comments

[anna]

Who is Lindsey Lohan? Why is she newsworthy? I see her referred to a lot... She doesn't seem to have got through to our news progs (here in UK).

[Sedulia]

Lindsey Lohan is a pretty and talented young actress, age 20, from a dysfunctional family, who has grown up on camera before the eyes of the country and is now deteriorating from drugs and drink in a very public way. A sad and mesmerizing sight actually.