Broken cassette player serves as reminder radio needs fixin', too

My cassette player in my car died this week, and I’m not happy about it.
While this statement makes me sound primitive, just one step above someone still using an eight-track player, rest be assured I haven’t listened to a cassette since 1992. I use the cassette player, with an adaptor, to connect my iPod Touch to my stereo, allowing me to listen to nearly 2,000 of my favorite songs from my portable library. Call me archaic now.
Without a cassette player, though, I’m now forced to listen to the radio, and it’s driving me mad.
No matter what station I listen to, it seems nearly identical to the one I listened to before it and the one I will listen to next. Radio has become a formula in which a small selection of the same songs are played over and over again, the deejays have little personality and read the same script, and the commercials are played in synch with other stations to give people no reason to change the dial when they come on.
Radio stations playing the same songs repeatedly is nothing new; as a teen a friend and I would listen to pop stations while fishing to hear how many times in one hour it would play a popular song of the time, such as “Can’t Touch This” by M.C. Hammer. Top 40 radio was designed to do this.
Variety was available by listening to non-Top 40 radio stations, but this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, as even those stations seem to have a limited selection.
Deejays were fun to listen to when I was younger, but now most of them seem like the same person. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are, as technology has probably allowed for the invention of a computer-generated person, like Max Headroom, to deliver bland commentary between songs, flavored with brief news tidbits taken from a wire-feed anyone with a computer already knew about yesterday.
A few of the morning deejays on several radio stations can be entertaining at times, but even they sometimes seem bored following the same script their corporate-owned bosses say they should follow because studies show that’s what the public wants.
I didn’t always have a problem with radio. As a child of the 1980s, I grew up loving it. I can recall spending many Sunday evenings listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown, ready to press record on my boombox when he played a song I wanted for my collection.
I also perfected the art of speed-dialing trying to win radio station contests that required people to be a certain number caller. I won a few contests, although the prizes weren’t anything to brag about.
Before the day of instant information from the Internet, radio was my main source of news about some of my favorite music artists. I fell asleep and woke up listening to the radio in hopes of catching news about the release date of the next album by artists such as Guns N’ Roses, Poison and Bon Jovi.
During college I was a student deejay, taking control of the radio station for three-hour shifts at weird hours. I may have had only three listeners sometimes, but I made sure those three listeners were entertained. I played songs I loved, figuring they were probably listening because they shared my taste in music. I didn’t stick to one genre, going from a Public Enemy song one minute to an Eagles song the next. If people called in to request a song, I played it if I had it.
My friends would also join me in the studio, many of them student deejays themselves, and we made sure listeners would laugh.
This free-for-all format has disappeared from radio, and that’s why I’ve been listening to my iPod for the past two years. I’m kind of sad my broken cassette player has reminded me radio is broken, too. I prefer to remember the good times I once had with radio. Maybe I need to fix my cassette player, so I can fix my mind into remembering when radio was good.