Last night in a rather confused conversation with Prof. Groom (at least from my perspective), he basically ended up dissing me for playing into the stereotype of the kind of music that existed in the 1980s on my radio show this past week. When people think of the 80s, they think of the music my sister associates with the 80s* unless they are specifically tuned into other less popular genres of music. But for me, I don’t necessarily associate the 80s with White Snake or Journey. I’m more likely to think of the Talking Heads or Duran Duran, really loud clothing and John Hughes. This is because I grew up not with Toto but with the Talking Heads and the Tom Tom Club.
The point of my themed shows is not only to expand my listeners knowledge of music, but also to a certain extent to expand my own knowledge of music**. Because I grew up with two parents very much attuned to the alternative music scene of the eras in which they lived, some of the more mainstream stuff got pushed to the side or completely ignored and derided. Really, if this were all about me, I should be doing disco instead of singer/songwriters for the 70s because I know about ABBA and not much else when it comes to disco. But for better or worse this isn’t all about me, so I’m doing singer/songwriters next week.
I have come up with a new idea though for one of my themed shows. I’ve always had problems programming female artists into my regular shows, a fact that’s bothered me almost from day one, and so for my fourth themed show I’m going to be devoting an entire hour to female singer/songwriters. So while I might play into certain stereotypes, I’d much rather go for an alternative than low hanging fruit most days of the week. Even if that means playing hair metal.

*This is not meant to be a diss to my sister, but fact is she really likes hair metal. And she knows it.
**Except for the Kinks. That show’s entirely because I don’t get to write about them this semester and I freakin’ love them.