Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Break Up...Better?

OK, two different marketing slogans to start off the morning. Yesterday, I went back through some of my old break-up emotions (you remember February, right?), and did some dangerous googling, so it was a nice coincidence that they had Greg Behrendt on Morning Sedition plugging his new book, It's Called a Break Up Because it's Broken."" Sounds like reasonable advice.
The bad break-up coming may be that of Air America and Marc Maron, if what he says on the radio is accurate. So, if you want to see him live, better go to Florent next week. I'm mixed on the show, but mixed in the way that you are if you're enough of a fan to get up at five in the morning to go see them live. twice.
The only criticism I have is that they really don't "talk about the issues" enough. For that, you have to listen WBAI. I just wish that the people on WBAI were funnier, or not half-asleep. For entertainment value, "Morning Sedition" is great. It's like a hyped-up, urban, Prairie Home Companion for the thirty-something crowd. If they take Maron off, the show will die and there won't be anything left on the network to listen to. I must be the wrong target market, because I like Morning Sedition and liked "Unfiltered" and now one is gone and the other is threatened? It seems that Air America makes the same mistakes as the Democratic Party.
Like a man who's never satisfied with the girlfriend that he has, the management there seems to diss its base and look for someone else. As Nathaniel Livingstone writes in the article linked above, it's par for the course. He says,
In announcing his debut on Air America, Springer said the radio network had cornered the "wine and cheese" crowd but needed to reach out to the "beer and pretzel" market. If you think these sentiments mirror Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean's belief that Democrats should quit placating African Americans and start recruiting "white guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks" into the Party, you aren't alone.
My bro does tell me that Chuck D's new show "On the Real" is great, but I haven't listened to it yet. Maybe today on the subway, with the podcast.
And that's it for now. Time to go teach.

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