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AnchorDesk

David Coursey
Satellite radio: Why you gotta get 'It'

David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Friday, July 11, 2003
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You may not believe this, but it's 1:50 a.m. and I've gotten out of bed and come downstairs to write this column just so I can tell you how much I love It.  No, not the column. Or almost falling down the darkened staircase as my size 12.5s slid out from under me.

No, I'm here to tell you how much I love It , a special program that's been running continuously for the past 10 days on XM Satellite Radio, in which every record that's made the pop music charts since the Depression is being played back in chronological order.

David's fave radio
The radio that makes It  possible: Delphi's isn't the only XM hardware. But it's the satellite unit David likes best.
As you read this, the program has reached the 1970s. It  probably has about 10 more days to run--24 hours a day, commercial free--before it reaches the present. At that point, I'm hoping It  will start again from the top for a second run.

Lest you think this is a column about a radio show, let me tell you what it's really about: Satellite radio is saving a dying medium, one which I happen to love very much.

LYING IN BED for the past couple of nights, I've listened to music that I haven't heard since it played on KLIF, the great Top 40 station of my misspent Texas youth, stuff I never thought I'd hear again. Because the songs are running chronologically, It  is like listening to the music as it happened. Heard in the correct temporal context, even songs I don't like make some sense.

Then there are the tunes that etched themselves into my psyche--and hopefully no one else's. Does anyone besides me remember the words to the Neon Philharmonic's "Morning Girl" or "Where's the Playground, Susie?" by Glenn Campbell? These gems are scattered among better-known hits from the Beatles, the Temptations, the Supremes, Creedence Clearwater, and others--and I love them all.

I'm only sorry I didn't find It  earlier. I started listening to It  when the program was in the mid-1960s and immediately wished I'd started earlier. I'm fine about missing the late 1950s through the Beatles, but am sorry I missed the 1930s and '40s. I'm planning to continue listening until just after disco and before rap and hip-hop (which, like most sensible people, I detest).

I've had an XM Radio for about 9 months, since my former colleague Desmond Crisis introduced me to the Delphi SkyFi receiver, which I've written about previously. There are many things I like about XM, but It  is the best so far.

This show is better than the old American Top Forty programs with Casey Kasem they played during the holidays. It's better than all the Bob Hope programs from the 1940s and '50s they ran to celebrate the great comedian's 100th birthday recently. It's even better than The Monster,  a recent history of country music special, or the Frank Sinatra channel.

It  is not, however, as wonderful as the Old Time Radio channel or the "decade" channels (one each for the '40s to the '90s) that made It  possible.

YES, I KNOW I'm gushing. But, truth be told, I love radio, which I think of as magic, a lot more than I love computers, which I think of as smart dirt. (Computers are silicon, silicon is sand, sand is part of soil, and soil is dirt, hence computers are smart dirt). Of all the technology I've purchased lately, the XM Radio is the probably the best--it's certainly made me the happiest.

XM is subscription radio. But that's CD-quality audio, delivered by satellite, more than 100 channels, many commercial-free, for $10 a month. The SkyFi receiver can be moved from car to car or from a vehicle into the house. Mine lives on a bedside table, plugged into the AUX input of a Bose Wave Radio. The sound quality is excellent.

XM competes with Sirius. When I was checking out both, I liked the programming mix on XM better, but I'm sure Sirius has many good things to be said for it.

THE BEST THING about XM (and this applies to Sirius as well) is that it's saving radio. When the only thing decent on your local airwaves is the NPR station, the satellite services come to the rescue. My friend Andy bought a SkyFi two weekends ago because there's no country music on in the San Francisco area; XM has something like five channels of the stuff.

There are also channels for jazz, classical, world music, and new age, as well as a few dozen talk and news channels. One of the reasons I got XM to begin with was because when I moved to the sticks last November, I lost the San Francisco NPR station that plays the BBC World Service overnight. With XM I have the BBC 24 hours a day--a real blessing during the Iraq War.

XM and Sirius are both a whole lot better than the dreck radio monopolists like Clear Channel spew forth these days. Because I'm paying for XM, the company's main goal is to keep me happy. I no longer have to put up with stations that cram 18 minutes of commercials into every hour and make money by selling whatever's left of my attention span.

Regular readers of this column know that my other favorite entertainment devices are my iPod and any of several personal video recorders, known collectively as TiVos. But my TiVo comes with a near $100-a-month bill from DirecTV. For about one-tenth the money, XM is probably a better deal, though I'd have a hard time getting rid of either.

For my $10, I can lie awake nights, listening to comedy and drama from the '40s and '50s or music from the '60s and '70s. I can go channel surfing and find something I've never heard before. It's almost as fun as when I used to spin my shortwave receiver dial until almost dawn.

Until XM came into my life, listening to commercial radio had convinced me the Buggles were right, that video really did kill the radio star. But with XM, I've found out something different--that radio is being revived. And there are a hundred XM channels that prove it.

What do you think? Have you heard satellite radio? Are you happy with what you hear over the airwaves? TalkBack to me! 

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