Life in Playa

A little rant…

I don’t know what category this is going to fall under, I guess its just a general life statement.

I spend about 4 hours a day in my car driving around Playa Del Carmen, about 6 hours a week working on my various websites(I know it sometimes can be hard to tell), and another 15+ hours a week reading or puttering around my house.  During this time I like to listen to music, punk rock more specifically.

Now, I live in Mexico, I have for a few years.  SolRadio or Radio Turquesa here in Playa is absolutely wonderful if I need to find out the latest reports about the hurricane that is sitting 30 miles out or the teacher strike/riots in Chetumal, but they are seriously lacking in music that I can stand.  Don’t get me wrong, I even like the traditional Mexican style music occasionally, it makes me feel like I live in a Quentan Tarentino movie…But to relax or just zone out I like punk rock.

I was introduced to XMRadio about 5 years ago by the contractor I worked for at the time in Oregon.  We drove from job to job and listened to XM Comedy or metal or punk rock, whatever we felt like that day.  It gives a great break from terrestrial radio, which is often in the more remote parts of Oregon either christian radio or country(nothing wrong with country, just not all the time).

When I moved to Mexico I quickly learned from the guys that had been here longer than I had that if I wanted music here XMRadio would work great for me.  So when I went back to the States the last time I purchased a Pioneer Inno XMRadio and MP3 player.  It is great, it gets reception down here in PDC, its portable so I can move it from house to car to beach with ease, and it records music so when it isn’t getting reception I can still pull up my favorite music from its memory.

XMRadio has improved the quality of my life in PDC, I counted on it to give me quality punk rock music on Channel 53(FUNGUS) as long as the line of sight from the antenna wasn’t blocked to the south.  I could even tune into XMOnline from my laptop so when I am sitting in Coffee Cafe I can still listen to punk rock.

On September 16th when I got in my car in the morning that all changed.  The punk channel was silent, I left it for a while, sometimes there are broadcasting breaks or maybe a cloud was blocking the antenna.  No dice.  I checked the display screen on the Inno, the cute little “FUNGUS53″ symbol was no longer showing in the top-left corner of the screen, it said “AC/DC” and there was a scrolling message about AC/DC Radio starting at 6pm.

I quickly pulled up the programming menu, there must be some mistake, I must have entered the wrong channel accidentally.  No mistake, no wrong channel, Fungus53 is gone.

XMRadio and Sirius Satelite radio recently merged and now to pay the bills they have decided to cut punk rock out of both lineups and replace it with AC/DC 24 hours.  Apparently AC/DC is releasing a new album soon and they must have contributed a little bit to the Sirius/XM coffers to get their own premium payola channel.

I don’t mind a little AC/DC, despite the fact that it reminds me of getting beat up in the locker room after gym class.  You know what I’m talking about.  I just cannot deal with 24 hours of AC/DC in order to replace good punk rock variety.

I wrote a letter to XMRadio about this, their answer was rather patronizing, “Fungus was one of the channels that had a very loyal but also a very limited audience.” My subscription to XMRadio is paid until the end of the year, after that I am not so sure about renewing it.

So what am I going to do about the music situation?  I just so happens that in a recent update of ITunes, Apple released an add-on called Genius.  This thing is pretty cool, I can click on any song in my library and tell Genius to do its work, it picks out a playlist of songs that go well with the song I picked.  It also recommends songs that I don’t have in my library that I might like.

I was skeptical at first, I was thinking that I would put in a hard-core punk rock song like “Demonica” by The Dwarves and get back ten kinds of Blink-182 and other highschooly poppy punk bands.  Not so.  As a matter of fact, I was really impressed by the way this thing worked out.

Now, I like to think my musical tastes are unique, but it really doesn’t seem that way.  I was testing this Genius thing out, I put in a Steve Earl(Trucker Rock/Country) singer and asked Genius to do its magic.  How does Apple know that Social Distortion(Punk), Slayer(Metal), Reverend Horton Heat(Rockabilly) and Flogging Molly(Irish Punk Rock) will all go so well with Trucker Rock?  Well, I am officially impressed.

So, SiriusXM, you may have lost my business, but I will probably be spending more money on ITunes now for replacement music.  I am going to miss my XMRadio, but I guess an IPod will dock in my car just as nicely as the Inno.