Stage 1: Anticipation

Like pretty much everyone I know, I was excited when the news came out that Minnesota Public Radio would be opening a third station in the Twin Cities market in January 2005. In addition to the existing news and classical music channels, the word went, MPR would enter the contemporary music fray with a new station devoted to “eclectic” music, a designation that was quickly revealed to be a euphemism for “indie rock with a few extras.”

The announcement was met with near-universal acclaim (three smallish camps kept it from being fully universal: A) diehard fans of the St. Olaf College-based classical station that would have to be sacrificed to make room for the new service; B) on the fringe of group A, a subset of media-consolidation watchdogs who were rightfully concerned about the way an allegedly nonprofit radio organization was snapping up bandwidth, and C) diehard hipsters who preemptively declared that public radio "eclecticism" would amount to thinking-man's classic rock, like maybe the past few Tom Petty records that no one listens to), and with good reason: for a city with a musical heritage this rich, Minneapolis was remarkably poorly-served by its radio spectrum.

Outside of this new station, Twin Cities music fans looking for something beyond the usual Midwestern constellation of classic rock and young country stations have few options. The least-palatable one is Zone 105, a Disney-owned “alternative” station specializing in by-the-numbers (literally, even; a surprising number of the station's featured bands followed the naming algorithm $word-#, e. g. Sum-41, Blink 182, Maroon 5) bogus punk, whose marketing strategy revolves around thrice-hourly commercials bragging about not being owned by Clear Channel.

Somewhat better is the U of M's semi-legendary Radio K, which is actually a pretty cool radio station but not without significant flaws. Radio K broadcasts a very weak AM signal, for one thing, meaning that just picking it up is far from a given. And then, if received, the low-power mono signal has a way of making every song sound like it's coming out of the single dashboard speaker of your grandmother's 1982 Reliant K. More troublesome yet, Radio K's FCC license permits them to broadcast only during daylight hours; this far north, the tilt of the Earth's axis of rotation means that you don't get a whole lot of Radio K broadcast hours during the winter (there is actually a third option, the volunteer-based KFAI community radio, which can be sort of interesting at times but generally too anarchic to really count on unless you're fine with sudden swings from Son Volt to Peruvian folk music).

So, then, an MPR entree into the contemporary rock market was good news indeed. And the ongoing slow drip of information continued to be encouraging: MPR was amassing a Murderer's Row of the best, most interesting, least obnoxious local DJs (including Mary Lucia, sister of local god Paul Westerberg and an accomplished columnist). MPR would be basing the station on a playlist of around 50,000 CDs, compared to the ~500 that local commercial stations used. Semi-local heroes (they're from Duluth, it's an easy day trip) Low would be signing on to do a support show. Better and better.

The excitement grew, and no one was immune. My wife set one of the preset buttons on her car stereo to 89.3 weeks before the station was actually supposed to start broadcasting, and made a point of checking it a couple of times a day just in case they started early.

The big debut rolled around at the very tail-end of January. And the station did not disappoint. Driving around during the first few days I heard Wilco, something from the Loretta Lynn- Jack White album, Low, the Replacements (among the many crimes of Zone 105, by the way, is their habit of proclaiming their love for Minneapolis music and then showing it by playing the same goddamned Replacements song every day-- “Alex Chilton” is a great song, but Christ, it's not like it's the only thing they ever recorded), Husker Du, Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks, the Decembrists, the New Pornographers, Johnny Cash, Calexico, Le Tigre, and Guided by Voices; all artists that come up with great frequency on my iPod. I had a couple of very minor nitpicks (rather than just referring to themselves by their frequency and call letters, like other MPR stations, they stuck themselves with the cheesy and rather corporate-sounding name “The Current;” and their attempts to make transitions into MPR news updates sound hip were embarrassingly awkward), but overall it was wonderful. It was like the station was programmed just for me.

And then, after a week of this, the horror of that last statement hit me.

Stage 2: Backstory

I grew up in a smallish town in rural Nebraska. I was smart, not very good at sports, and increasingly convinced that my town was a backwater hell hole full of uncultured rubes. And, following the standard narrative, my friends and I turned to music; the more esoteric, the better. We prided ourselves on hating all of the mass-market garbage being broadcast out of Omaha. We spent our evenings and weekends bitching about how the Pixies never toured through Nebraska or that we were too young to have ever seen the Velvet Underground play and that sucked because the VU were fuckin' awesome, man, really they were.

The only thing more fun than kvetching about how our favorite bands gave Omaha a wide berth was feeling superior to anybody who hadn't heard of those bands (the joke here, and you can take this as a sort of ironic precursor to the whole point of this essay, is that in those pre-Internet days we got almost all of our information about these allegedly obscure bands from MTV, which we would both watch obsessively and mock incessantly... this, by the way, was before the Legion of Decency chapter led by my grandmother succeeded in getting MTV removed from the local cable lineup; between that and their banishment of Dungeons & Dragons and Playboy magazine, the Legion had an amazing record of kicking down the pillars of my teenage lifestyle).

And over time, I built a fairly substantial part of my self-image around the idea that I was a man of rare, refined musical taste. This sense went through a few surface changes over the years (a few examples: my early embrace of the idea that bands who sold out should be shunned like poison; my later refutation of that same embrace and adoption of a position re: selling out similar to but somewhat less militant than the one Dave Eggers stakes out; my mid-20s embrace of pre-1980 country music; my late 20s redefinition of the Keith Pille musical canon to accommodate a Chuck Klostermanesque appreciation for supposedly worthless 80s and 90s butt rock; and so on), but it remained a cornerstone for me and for a very strong majority of my friends.

Stage 3: Existential Dread and Self-Delusion

You see where this is going, of course. In my mind, I'm supposed to be this one-in-a-million devotee of obscure music, and an unfortunately large portion of my self-image as a Reasonably Cool Guy rests on this. And then, out of nowhere, this fucking radio station comes along and acts like they've been swiping my iPod every morning in order to set their playlist. A public radio station-- which, to some extent at least, has to base their musical selection on what will appeal to young professional Twin Cities residents enough to make them want to pony up during Pledge Week-- has me dialed in almost exactly. And (speaking anecdotally, at least) everyone loves the station's musical choices so much that the high awesomeness quotient of The Current is the dominant topic of conversation for February of 2005. So they're dialed in, too.

All this time I thought I was special, it turns out I was just a demographic.

I resisted this idea at first. Sure, I said, they overlap with me on newer music, but that's just because their music director and I are both directed to the same 10% of recent musical output by Sturgeon's Law (i.e., “90% of everything is crap”). Those jokers at The Current are never going replicate all of the older country and bluegrass I listen to.

And then I heard Hank Williams bubble up through their rotation a couple of times, with unsubstantiated reports from friends that Johnny Horton, Roger Miller, and the Del McCoury Band have been heard as well. Making it worse, their morning drive-time show skews heavily towards old-timey music, including this unbelievably cool old vaudeville song that features some gravel-voiced guy singing “Ink-adinka-dink-a-dinka-do” over and over.

OK., fine, I told myself. Ever since O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the whole world's been into old-timey music. Not much I can do about it. But even if I give up on being special with the newish indie rock and the old-timey twang stuff, I can at least assume that the Current isn't going to duplicate my classic rock taste. Maybe they'll play Springsteen, because everybody loves Springsteen, but that's as far as they're going to go into the classic rock realm. I actually sat and thought about a good example of the sort of awesome-but-simultaneously-obscure-and-sort-of-underground-popular classic rock song that I like that they would never, ever play. After a few minutes, I settled on Bowie's “Suffragette City.”

Two nights later, as I sat around the house reading comic books, Mary Lucia stabbed me in the back and played “Suffragette City.”

All right. Fine. You got me. The set of 419 albums on my iPod is nothing but a subset of The Current's 50,000-disc library. I'm just another data point in the demographic. I'm a drop in the bucket. When it comes to musical taste, I am not a special snowflake.

Stage 4: Ramifications

Looking at it with any sort of perspective, it's silly for someone who listens to recorded music around the switchover from twentieth to twenty-first centuries to think they're the keepers of some fantastic musical secret that no one else knows about. Until very, very recently (and I'm talking about the past, say, three years, when cheap-but-high-quality digital home recording capability and ubiquitous broadband Internet access converged to make it at least theoretically possible for unknown bands to record pro-quality albums in their basement and disseminate them online without an ounce of label involvement), any CD you came across had to be accepted as a potentially viable seller by a label (even the indies; the only difference being one of scale... even the purest indie label is going to have to give some thought to sales if they plan on sticking around). The Jayhawks' ongoing complaint that they couldn't really think of themselves as successful because they never had a gold record meant that they sold hundreds of thousands of records, just not 500,000.

What I'm getting at here is that, for the most part, if a supposedly super-obscure piece of recorded music has gone through enough hurdles to get to you, it's almost certainly gotten to a whole shitload of other people, too. It's fun to pretend otherwise, but the more you think about it, there's an entire industry aimed at scatter-shooting recorded music to the widest possible audience in order to get a steady revenue stream (and if you doubt said industry takes its job very, very seriously, I suggest you talk to the teenagers who the RIAA took to court over music-downloading). Given that machine, the odds of you being the only one to have found and appreciated your copy of the Occult Morphinas' Strange are exceedingly low.

And the thing is, once you start thinking about it this way, it becomes more and more clear that this “my music rules because I'm the only one who's into it” approach is silly and really should have nothing to do with your enjoyment of the music you listen to. Although it's certainly true that anything aimed at the widest possible audience will shoot for the lowest common denominator (The King of Queens, Titanic, The Da Vinci Code, Britney Spears, Budweiser, CSI, People Magazine, Pearl Harbor, the Dodge Neon), it's silly to say that quality has to have an inverse relationship to audience size. Everyone on the planet, it seems, loved Seinfeld, and that show just looks weirder and more wonderful as it recedes into the distance.

The fact that there are people other than me who listen to Wilco doesn't detract from the quality of their music. Thinking otherwise is really just elitist, pretentious bullshit, a sort of attempt to use obscure music snobism as a stool to stand on and feel superior to the ignorant masses. And while this might be a pretty effective tool for dealing with high school alienation, it's a piss-poor way to go about being a rational adult, especially if you don't want your rational adulthood resting on bitter adolescent foundations.

Stage 5: Acceptance

So, fine, then. Lots of other people who share my approximate age/income/educational situation like the same music I do, and I really should have been tipped off to that sooner by how tough it is to get Shins tickets. You know what? That's fine. I like what I like, I have emotions and memories that are all my own tied up in all of the music I love (favorite example: climbing up a slippery waterfall in northern Minnesota, with a small river hitting me forcefully on the chest, singing Wilco's “Pieholden Suite” to keep myself calm as I work on my footing), and that's all that matters.

And better yet, now there's something to listen to in my car that doesn't require hooking up an iPod adapter.

Awesome.