The Radio At My Work Is Terrible Enough That I Wrote This Article About it

You would think competition with streaming would improve radio. Or at least that radio wouldn’t get meaningfully worse due to its presence. I remember the main complaint about the radio being how it would play annoying catchy songs that would stick in your head no matter what. I wish the radio at my job played catchy music. 

What was your favorite song from last year? Favorite album? I’d bet a good number of people would answer that question with a pop song or a pop album. We don’t live in an era where everyone hates pop music. Even if you’re a staunch left-wing anti-commercialist you have fun with Sabrina Carpenter, because who couldn’t. But for some reason the DirectTV radio station they play at the movie theater I work at (it’s either modern hits or modern pop/adult contemporary) believes that you can toss out your Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan vinyls, because the new hotness is actually whatever the least interesting artists of the past twenty years are releasing now.

Remember Train? I’m sure you do. For some reason they stayed around and had mainstream radio play into the mid 2010’s despite having perhaps two decent songs. They’re back! And this time they have a reggae song! I apologize for informing you of this fact. This is the sort of news I would give friends when I wanted them to hate me. This was forced on me by my work. I shouldn’t need to tell you why Train making reggae immediately sucks, but here goes.

Good reggae is authentic, tied deeply to the struggles of Jamaica and of Black people around the world. Pat Monahan has no ties to Jamaica and I seriously doubt any person with skin darker than mayonnaise has been near him in his life. Moreover, I can’t think of a band with less soul and authenticity than Train. I’m not saying it should be illegal for white people to make bad reggae music; that’s a tradition about as old as reggae itself, but perhaps it should be illegal for Train to make reggae.

Speaking of shitty inauthentic reggae, what about Maroon 5! They were actually a pretty good band once, but my work’s radio doesn’t play “Makes Me Wonder”, “This Love”, and they sure as hell don’t play “Sunday Morning”. They play Middle Ground, a song so bad nobody paid any attention to it despite people apparently listening to the billion other terrible Maroon 5 songs. I struggle to think of another song so grating that also has nothing to offer in return. In the chorus he ends various lines saying “am I”, but the singing is only concerned with being high and loud so it sounds like he’s saying “he-bah” or some other nonsense. Maroon 5 only seems to be appealing to people because of their lead singer Adam Levine being a force of personality. But rather than being a rock’n’roll sex god like many before him he instead chose to be some somber balladeer with songs like “Middle Ground” and “Nobody’s Love”. Except he has none of Ed Sheeran’s everyman charm, Lewis Capaldi’s desperation (who I also dislike but I at least admire more than Lavine), or the earnestness of the many Taylor Swift knock-offs. Instead he’s just a charmless, noxious void that radio still likes for some unknown reason.

There are so many wannabe Swift’s that I don’t care to get into them. They’re clearly attempting the same niche as Olivia Rodrigo’s ballads: teenage, melodramatic, honest, and with the same obvious common ancestor. I don’t enjoy Rodrigo’s slower songs much, but I’d listen to “Deja Vu” or “Driver’s License” a thousand times before I willingly listened to “Fingers Crossed” (by Lauren Spencer Smith). I think I prefer both to completely unremarkable ballads from the likes of Nate Reuss, Kelly Clarkson, and P!nk. I remember when P!nk was edgy, cool, a rock star. Now she has a song called “Never Gonna Not Dance Again” which is so generic it hurts. Ah yes, your rebellion against the people in your life who tell you what you cannot do is dancing. Dance is fine as a metaphor for freedom, but the song’s sentiment is boring and uninteresting. Footloose is over forty years old. Moreover, I can’t imagine the song’s groove would inspire anyone to dance besides a thoroughly boring mom who’s getting craaaaazy because she drank a bit too much chardonnay.

Another artist with boring parent vibes my work radio plays is Andy Grammar. You may remember him from the annoying and somewhat absurd Honey I’m Good, or the decent hit Keep Your Head up. He’s still around somehow, with a song called “Magic”. “Magic” is a song for middle class white people, by which I mean it’s a song for people with no problems. It’s about how everything is fantastic and he just wants more of what life has to offer! Not only is this a mind-breaking sentiment during America’s current crisis, it’s boring for a song. It’s not just for middle class white people because of its disconnect with everything around it, it’s also because it uses AAVE in the cringiest way possible. No, Andy Grammar, you do not want the “shooters” or the “static”! Those mean people are going to try to fight and or kill you! That’s about the furthest from the heavens’ blessing as you can get! But all that it takes to get radio play on DirectTV is being white and uninteresting, so sure. Andy Grammar. Why not? 

What blows me away is that if I look at the radio airplay chart as of the week that I write this, next to none of the songs on the chart get regular play. I hear “Espresso” occasionally, “Birds Of A Feather” once in a blue moon, “Too Sweet” once or twice a day, and “Abracadabra” or “Pink Pony Club” once or twice if I’m lucky. I either like or am okay with most of those songs, but I don’t understand why songs like “Die With A Smile”, “Luther”, “That’s So True”, or either song from The Weeknd’s latest album on the chart get no play whatsoever. Instead, out of the list they play the abhorrently generic “Love Somebody” (Morgan Wallen), the vomit-inducingly sweet “I’m Gonna Love You” (Cody Johnson and Carrie Underwood), and the terribly blunt “Stargazing” (Myles Smith).

Myles Smith brings me to another trend: bad knock-offs of Aviici’s “Wake Me Up”.”Wake Me Up” mixes country elements with Aloe Blacc’s soulful vocals, vague hints at a story, wisdom largely unrelated to the loose story, and a solid drop for a solid, novel song. Everyone else seemed to learn that EDM and country was a surefire hit. So you have “Stargazing”, a song whose chorus is sung, “TEHK MY HAART DON BREK IT LUV ME TO MA boooooones” which gets grating very quickly. There’s also Kane Brown and Marshmello’s “Miles On It” which I despise. It’s a song about having sex in the back of a truck. Car/Sex metaphors are already overdone, so of course this song does nothing new with them. It isn’t even the slightest bit subtle, and Brown’s semi-rapped flow is immediately annoying. When you add Marshmello’s uninteresting drop on top, you understand that the song is loud, annoying, and boring with nothing more to it. Why did we let country become bad hair metal? 

Maybe because we don’t have rock anymore. After all, nobody is playing an actual rock band in 2025, right? JUST KIDDING, SHINEDOWN IS HERE FOR SOME REASON. If you don’t know Shinedown, good for you. They’re one of the many bad, scumbag/post-grunge bands, probably best known for their bad cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”. That song sucks, but at least it has muscle. Their songs “Three Six Five” and “A Symptom of Being Human” are so wimpy it feels wrong to call either rock. Three Six Five doesn’t offend me much, it’s just a run of the mill bad song with a mid-tempo groove and stupid lyrics. “A Symptom of Being Human” offends me because it’s a song about struggling with being an outcast, and the chorus goes “Sometimes I'm in a room where I don't belong / And the house is on fire and there's no alarm / And the walls are melting too / How about you?” Such melodrama contrasted with the “how about you?” is just the most anger-inducing thing to me. It reminds me of Logic’s suicide hotline song where he talked about his suicidial ideation and then said “who can relate? Whoo!”, but at least that’s fun. This is no fun. It’s full of self-seriousness with nothing real to say. And don’t even get me started on the fact that the radio plays Nickelback.

Lastly we have David Guetta’s bullshit. Lazy samples of meme songs from 10 years ago with lyrics replaced with the most obvious ones imaginable. I don’t think anyone enjoys “I Don’t Wanna Wait”, a song where One Republic sings the Numa Numa song melody with lyrics about how we’re gonna party now! Even if it isn’t the weekend we’ll make tonight the weekend! And then later says the exact same thing, but it is the weekend. How do you screw up an already barren idea? I feel similarly about “Tonight” by the Black Eyed Peas, and “Forever Young” by David Guetta and Ava Max. Annoying and completely nonsensical. At least they’re not “Higher Love”, a song by Desi Trill, DJ Khaled, Cardi B, Natania, and Subhi, which might be the worst song I’ve heard played on the radio. How do you name a song the same title as an 80s song that already got sampled not long ago, and then sample “Heaven is a Place on Earth”? How do you sample “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and make it sound so terrible? Why is the beat so damn annoying? What does South Asian music have to do with the Smurfs? Why do we still let DJ Khaled be around? I don’t know. All I can do is hope for better days.

If I’m having a really lucky day, instead of the usual station it’ll be on classic R&B. I don’t love every song the station plays, but I’m never upset to hear “Too Close” by Next. And I think any moviegoer would be happy to hear a throw-back hit. At least more glad than they’d be to hear “Mother” by Meghan Trainor or “Woman’s World” by Katy Perry, songs any reasonable person heard once, went “wow that’s terrible”, and then never played again. But some days I catch a break. Some days it's 00s hits, and the worst I have to deal with on those days is Simple Plan’s “Untitled” (the “how could this happen to me”) song which I’m fine with. That song is hilariously bad, which I am more than happy to laugh at. But most days it's the same old terrible music. Because apparently that’s what my boss’s boss wants, and so my boss gets on the guy who changes the radio’s case. What bullshit.