Over the past weeks, I've touched upon music that was removed from the studio and left for dead in our Music Library (like Wool and Corrosion of Conformity), arguably featherweights unable to get a decent punch off the big names like R.E.M., NIN, and SM3. Trashy thrash, perhaps, but it wasn't like it was Garbage.
I'll admit I was a fan of the group and a lot of us were hooked by the pulsating sound of the music – and Shirley Manson, to boot – and there wasn't a problem adding their songs into rotation. Their first album was probably their best though each album afterward lost a bit of the debut luster and resulted in more of the same tired noise. Enjoyable - but you got the sense you'd heard it before. However we had only a scant handful of Garbage songs in rotation and I was a bit disappointed the station did not own one of my few favorites, Supervixen. Or so I thought.
Our modern rock shifts were spread across nine hours of the eighteen-hour broadcast day and it easily was the format with the most music in rotation and largest listener base. As the popular music of the day, it was a given that we were bound to, sooner or later, get requests and with so much music it could take an hour to find whatever you were looking for. Hence the master playlist, a ten-to-twenty page document sorted by artist of everything in rotation. A lot of people, myself included, assumed the master list included everything off our 100+ preview discs and whatever else was in the rock catalog. Not quite – during my junior and senior year I began to notice that our "sound of the station" mentality was making us sound predictable from day to day and many songs we had, like Supervixen, were on preview discs but never played. Why? I'm guessing that certain tracks were more associated with artists than others; in the case of Garbage, Stupid Girl might beat out Supervixen as more popular. Hence, Syd "the Kid" and his theories of radio programming – it might have worked at a major market station but at an operation as insignificant as ours, it wasn't needed.
At some point late in my junior year or early senior year, the old computer was scraped and the station bought better playlist generating software. This meant updating our records of music in rotation and adding back those tracks seemingly lost. Day-to-day programming wasn't as predictable and, thus, we were able to add more garbage.
And occasionally decent music, too.
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Supervixen
(Garbage)
Garbage
From the album Garbage
1995
Come down to my house
Stick a stone in your mouth
You can always pull out
If you like it too much
Make a whole new religion
A falling star that you cannot live without
And I'll feed your obsession
There'll be nothing but this thing that you'll never doubt
A hit is hard to resist
And I never miss
I can take you out
With just a flick of my wrist
Make a whole new religion
A falling star that you cannot live without
And I'll feed your obsession
There is nothing but this thing that you'll never doubt
This thing you'll never doubt
And I'll feed your obsession
The falling star that you cannot live without
I will be your religion
This thing you'll never doubt
You're not the only one
You're not the only one
[Background:]
Now I want it too much
Now I want it to stop
Now I'm lucky like a falling star that fell over me
Bow down to me, bow down to me
Bow down to me, bow down to me
Bow down to me, bow down to me
Bow down to me.
