Around The Dial

It’s pledge week on public radio, which means that the morning and evening commute is jacked because if it’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a bunch of bleeding heart liberals asking me for my fucking money.
It means that I’m forced to listen to commercial radio for an entire week.
I’d listen to the obligatory classic rock station, but I’ve heard “Stairway” more than I care to imagine, so I changed it over to KRNA, the home of shitty current rock. I was anticipating a little bit of “Dwyer & Michaels” action in the morning, but to my surprise, I was met with a little bit of…you guessed it…getting the “Led” out. Thankfully, the Zep tune was “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” one of the many Page/Plant tunes that hasn’t been raped from excessive AOR burn, but it struck me that KRNA didn’t play tunage, other than brief bumper music bullshit, when the comedic genius of Dwyer and Michaels are on the air.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with Dwyer and Michaels, they are as incredibly unfunny as any typical medium/small market morning show complete with interviews with stupid people and the pair waxing poetic about hot topics.
I’m sure they’ve made a few comments about Sarah Palin looking like a MILF as discussing the finer points of her political agenda isn’t really a ratings grabber.
It doesn’t appear that their morning fodder was much of a ratings grabber either as the duo was nowhere to be found after the Zeppelin. In fact, the station promo sweeper identified mornings on KRNA as the equivalent of “less talkin’..more rockin.’”
I really don’t know the details of why the “two idiots” are no longer in the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City airwaves. My guess is that if they were a huge success, the station would have insured that they would still be on the air. I do remember some rumblings about them getting sued by Clear Channel for a non-compete violation when they began broadcasting here after getting booted from their original Quad Cities home.
Who knows, maybe they’re back on at the Q.C.
The website doesn’t address this and two stations are listed on their website’s links.
Factoid: the Quad Cities actually has a higher Arbitron market rating than the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City area even though Cedar Rapids is the state’s second largest city and Davenport is built upon a foundation of clay sand and fecal matter.
Have I mentioned how much this market’s radio choices suck? For fucks sake, people own iPods with 5,000 song playlists and these stations are still rolling over the same fucking 900 songs continuously.
Wanna know why radio is losing listeners? Even two dorks can figure that out.
And then there’s this recent bullshit, at least on KRNA, where we’ve got radio “personalities” with clever one names like “Shark” and “Static.” Since I don’t listen consistently, I can only comment on the brief amount of experience I’ve had. And that, my friends, is with “Shark,” a name so stupid that you don’t even care how he got it. “Shark” had a comedian on one afternoon who happened to be a little person and who happened to have a show going on that evening at a local comedy club. The comedian drew attention to his height, stating that he could get away with things like grabbing girls’ asses. Shark thought this was funny and laughed at every word the comedic dwarf said even though nothing was even remotely humorous.
Compared to Shark, Dwyer and Michaels are like Bob Fucking Hope. They’ve been mainstays in Eastern Iowa, specifically the Quad Cities, but only because they invented the genre of morning show for us po’dunk Iowans. In the late 80’s, the best you could get were an announcer and the newsreader to chitchat about some bullshit AP news of the weird stories for a few minutes. Dwyer and Michaels expanded that concept for an extra forty minutes and, as a result, they’re viewed as deities even though 90% of their shtick ain’t even funny.
I would encourage readers to figure out why Dwyer and Michaels are not on KRNA anymore, but by the time you do, pledge week will be over and I’ll be back on the public radio tip again.