As a follow-up to yesterday's concert review, it was with no small measure of amusement that I noted "Dead Disco" as Metric's opening song. It happened to the track that introduced me to Metric back in 2005, in a backhanded way.
In my university radio days, my pal Dave and I hosted a weekly morning show. For the many, many, many of you who never listened to it, I can only describe it as the greatest radio show you've ever heard. Imagine two guys who only kind of barely knew what they were doing, hosting a show with a virtually non-existent audience*, and playing wall-to-wall outstanding music.
* = the station manager didn't enjoy it when we openly mentioned our small listenership on the air. I wonder why!
So if you're working on any sort of radio broadcast, big or small, you still have to adhere to Canadian broadcasting regulations. As per Canadian content (CanCon) laws, a certain number of minutes per hour had to be devoted to Canadian musicians and/or new music, as in music released within the last year. Our station had a shelf of CDs in the studio devoted to both new music, Canadian music, and both, so we had easy access to picking stuff out over the course of our show that allowed us to meet our quota.
Picking music that was both new and Canadian killed two birds with one stone, so when Dave and I found a new/Canadian song we liked, we'd tend to make it part of our regular rotation. Or, "liked." One week, we more or less randomly grabbed Metric's first album off the new/Canadian shelf since we'd vaguely heard of them, and played Dead Disco simply because the name stood out.
After playing the song, our next step was to talk on the air about...how we didn't care for the song. Frankly, I didn't think the song was all that bad, just kind of forgettable. But it fit with the generally irreverent tone of our show to make fun of what we just played, and then to make fun of ourselves for playing it. ("What kind of incompetents play a song without ever hearing it? What if Emily Haines had randomly started dropped f-bombs?")
We amused each other with our dialogue so much that we played Dead Disco again the next week, continuing the running joke. "Why are we playing this song again?! We don't even care for it!" This seemed like a funnier idea for us than, you know, playing a different song off the album, or actually listening to the record in the first place to pick out a song we truly enjoyed. Anyway, Dead Disco ended up being played every week until it no longer qualified as new, and was thus banished to the netherworld of the CD archive room. Or, maybe it kept being played for a while after that, since Metric obviously became a pretty popular band. I stopped doing the show, so I have no idea.
With all this in mind, it's funny that I didn't become a proper Metric fan since 2012, since I already had such clear awareness of them. It's also funny that both Dave and I saw Metric in separate concerts in separate cities this past week, thus giving the band the last laugh after all.
In my university radio days, my pal Dave and I hosted a weekly morning show. For the many, many, many of you who never listened to it, I can only describe it as the greatest radio show you've ever heard. Imagine two guys who only kind of barely knew what they were doing, hosting a show with a virtually non-existent audience*, and playing wall-to-wall outstanding music.
* = the station manager didn't enjoy it when we openly mentioned our small listenership on the air. I wonder why!
So if you're working on any sort of radio broadcast, big or small, you still have to adhere to Canadian broadcasting regulations. As per Canadian content (CanCon) laws, a certain number of minutes per hour had to be devoted to Canadian musicians and/or new music, as in music released within the last year. Our station had a shelf of CDs in the studio devoted to both new music, Canadian music, and both, so we had easy access to picking stuff out over the course of our show that allowed us to meet our quota.
Picking music that was both new and Canadian killed two birds with one stone, so when Dave and I found a new/Canadian song we liked, we'd tend to make it part of our regular rotation. Or, "liked." One week, we more or less randomly grabbed Metric's first album off the new/Canadian shelf since we'd vaguely heard of them, and played Dead Disco simply because the name stood out.
After playing the song, our next step was to talk on the air about...how we didn't care for the song. Frankly, I didn't think the song was all that bad, just kind of forgettable. But it fit with the generally irreverent tone of our show to make fun of what we just played, and then to make fun of ourselves for playing it. ("What kind of incompetents play a song without ever hearing it? What if Emily Haines had randomly started dropped f-bombs?")
We amused each other with our dialogue so much that we played Dead Disco again the next week, continuing the running joke. "Why are we playing this song again?! We don't even care for it!" This seemed like a funnier idea for us than, you know, playing a different song off the album, or actually listening to the record in the first place to pick out a song we truly enjoyed. Anyway, Dead Disco ended up being played every week until it no longer qualified as new, and was thus banished to the netherworld of the CD archive room. Or, maybe it kept being played for a while after that, since Metric obviously became a pretty popular band. I stopped doing the show, so I have no idea.
With all this in mind, it's funny that I didn't become a proper Metric fan since 2012, since I already had such clear awareness of them. It's also funny that both Dave and I saw Metric in separate concerts in separate cities this past week, thus giving the band the last laugh after all.
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