Buhner Dot Com Est. 2000, which is like 1947 in Internet years.

K-Rock, where the “K” stands for “Klassic”!

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.