Listening to music while traveling can be the worst way to listen to music. My past week has consisted of listening to music where I could and often when I didn’t want to. For example, there was the festival cover band who played both Led Zeppelin and Katrina and the Waves in a ten minute stretch. The latter seems like exactly the sort of thing that a festival cover band should play. The former, though, is something that cover bands should never attempt, because it just reminds you how much the cover fails to live up to the original. And I had other disappointments. While eating at a noodle place, I also discovered that Alan Hunter (along with most of the original MTV VJs) does an 80s show on Sirius radio. When will 80s nostalgia go away?
To have some control over the music I was listening to, I had to find a way to play the music from the iPhone on the car stereo. Unfortunately, this car stereo had no direct line in and no tape player. So that means the only way to have my way with it was to use a car transmitter. If you’ve ever tried to use one of these things, you know how crappy they are. But I bit the bullet and bought one. Sure enough, the sound quality was limited and interference from actual radio stations was off-putting. However, once outside of civilization, in the land that cell phone reception forgot, it worked okay. Miles Davis goes well with remote New Mexican highways.
Now, here are a couple videos for you, which are completely unrelated to anything I wrote above.
I used to listen to a lot of local radio when driving through NM because there were a lot of good classic country stations. And then Clear Channel ruined everything.
When driving at night, I would listen to techno. This is the only time I have ever listened to techno.
My favorite radio in NM is the Navajo channel driving down route 666.
Sadly, they have renamed Route 666.
Clear Channel has indeed ruined everything. There used to be an interesting local flavor in every town, but now all radio stations are the same. That’s not to say that I don’t see the value of big time mass media. I think it has the ability to give millions of people a sense of collective identity, which is great for keeping them from killing each other. But it doesn’t have to come at the expense of squeezing out local programming entirely.
The last time I drove through NM, the only local stations were Christian stations. Blech. I remember the college station in ABQ being okay, though.
Yeah, Christian stations don’t count.
Ooh I just remembered the tourist information station! That’s good too. The audio tour is narrated by Ricardo Montalban.
I wish I would have known that before the trip.