My name is Iain, and I listen to Flow

Flow 93.5 is my favourite radio station. It’s the #1 preset in my car, and it’s the station my alarm is set to. I love it. I listen to the Morning Rush, the Urban Sweet if I’m out at lunch (specifically, the Midday Mix at noon with the incomparable DJ Starting From Scratch), Flow Factor (also including Scratch doing the Traffic Flow Mix Show at 5), and if it’s a late day at work, I can catch the Trauma Unit with Scratch’s Critical Mix at 7pm.

I’m not saying that this is the only station I listen to, far from it….but it’s without doubt my favourite. This also isn’t to say that Hip Hop, R ‘n B, Rap, Dancehall or whatever else you want to call it is the only kind of music I listen to, either. Again, not even close. I just find that there isn’t a whole lot of good music from new artists that has come out in the last few years (major exceptions such as The Killers and Audioslave notwithstanding) outside of these genres. It has been mostly good singles, followed by crap, if anything at all.

I’ll take the gun-toting thugs from the Three 6 Mafia or D12 over the pussy-punks from Good Charlotte (and all those other bands that are basically identical, but I can never remember the names to) any day. Maybe it’s a credibility thing, but I just find music from Compton (The Game), Jamaica Queens (50 Cent), Atlanta (Ludacris) or even Nashville (Young Buck) a little more interesting than what I perceive to be a bunch of faux-angst from the suburbs. I understand this kind of music is called “Emo”, but I couldn’t care less. It’s awful.

Why am I attacking Pussy Punk? Mostly because it’s apparently all wonderfully good and award winning…I’m not going to waste my time on Ashlee Simpson’s music career, as it’s pretty self-explanatorily awful. Also, nobody to my knowledge pretends to like Creed or any other band of their ilk anymore, so I’m not bothering with them, either.

Whatever happened to the Golden Age of rock? Granted we all think of the music we grew up with as being the best, but for my money you can’t compare to the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Green Day… (I could go on) as a collective to what we have today. There are some groups that compare, as I noted above, but as a whole? Yikes!

Before that, Metal pretty much was the only worthwhile thing going (let’s just ignore Devo and Dexie’s Midnight Runners for now…they’re cool, but on an entirely different level) and I think that Van Halen, KISS, Bon Jovi etc. are still pretty cool. Hell, JBJ and the boys just put out another record, did they not?

I’m not even going to disrespect Sabbath, Zep, U2 or the Stones by making anything more than a cursory comment that, yes, they are above everyone I mentioned above without exception. That’s not even up for debate.

Moving on…

I guess my point is that I do like rock…almost always have…but now I’ll gladly take a Dr. Dre track with bass so thick you can eat it with a spoon over some whiny suburbanite with a cookie-cutter guitar riff any day of the week.

I’d just like to know: “Why?”