Buhner.com

Ok, I’m fuck­ing pissed.

Liv­ing on East­ern Long Island, we don’t get much in the way of radio sta­tions. Mainly, it’s Con­necti­cut sta­tions we get from across the Sound, which offer either clas­sic rock or top 40 pop, and local sta­tions which play what­ever they seem to want to (mainly either adult con­tem­po­rary, clas­sic rock, or a vary­ing mix of every­thing on the planet). Nice to have, but for those of us who want to hear new music not put out by Usher, you have to look for an “Alter­na­tive” sta­tion. There used to be this sta­tion I actu­ally got out of Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island which had great alter­na­tive music and decent radio tal­ent, but one day, out of nowhere, they started doing “sports talk” and I never heard a song out of them again. There was one before that in Con­necti­cut, but I lost that one too. They came and they left, but there was always one con­stant — K-Rock.

K-Rock (WXRK, 92.3 out of Man­hat­tan) was the alter­na­tive sta­tion to be mea­sured by. When I was going to Hof­s­tra, I lis­tened to K-Rock to get my fill of new music, and when I ended up liv­ing in East Meadow for a period, it was more of the same. K-Rock had great jocks (Wil Pen­darvis off the top of my head was a great one) and great music, and for those who like him (I’m still not much of a fan), they were the home sta­tion for Howard Stern. K-Rock got the inter­views, got the tick­ets, had their own con­certs (the Dys­func­tional Fam­ily Pic­nic was always one of the best con­certs of the sum­mer), and was just the alter­na­tive sta­tion you lis­tened to if you were any­where in the area. It was my #1 pre­set on my “up-island” pre­sets (my sec­ond row of sta­tions I can’t get on the east end but can get when­ever I go to visit the inlaws or any dis­tance past Riverhead).

Now it’s dead.

Yes­ter­day (I didn’t hear it, I was directed to a News­day link) WXRK switched their for­mat to — you guessed it — clas­sic rock. Every sta­tion nowa­days seems to switch to “clas­sic rock”, it’s the safe fall­back, just like get­ting a ham­burger at a restu­ar­ant or wear­ing a black t-shirt. No fuss, no risk, noth­ing to set you apart from any­one else.

XRK is doing things a lit­tle dif­fer­ently, though, I guess to appease those ready to bitch. They’re stream­ing what was the old for­mat as “K-Rock2” on the net. So K-Rock isn’t “dead”, it’s just not avail­able on your radio.

If you read the News­day arti­cle about the for­mat change though, there’s a sense of bit­ter­ness with the whole for­mat change towards the “tar­get audi­ence” that the old K-Rock had. To hear WXRK pro­gram direc­tor Robert Cross talk about it, punk, emo and new-wave bands appeal to younger lis­ten­ers who find most of their music through the Inter­net any­way. Cross vents:

“They’re tun­ing in for less and less peri­ods of time. They have IM-ing to do and MP3s to down­load and PlaySta­tions to play. I can’t imag­ine 14-year-olds even buy radios any­more. Why would they?”

No word whether or not Cross was shak­ing his fist at the time of the quote or whether he men­tioned after that those same kids were always cut­ting across his lawn.