Ick’s Radio Daze: KOSI Denver
Denver correspondent Kathy B. checks in after spending an hour with Denver’s “Continuous Lite Rock” station, KOSI. – Pete
Station: 101.1 FM, KOSI
Format: Lite Rock
Type: Terrestrial (Denver, CO)
Slogan: “Continuous Lite Rock”
Date / Time: Friday, Feb. 19th, 2010 / 10:30-11:35 am MST
Commercials: 16 minutes
Streaming Online? Yes
Hot Dude on Home Page of Web Site? No. In fact, I don’t see a single man, hot or otherwise.
Hot Chick? Not really. Amy Grant is the closest thing.
DJ: Jackie Selby
Favorite Song: (a complete guilty pleasure, I fully admit, and I’m prepared to take my lumps for this) Air Supply — “Lost in Love”Runners-up: Seal — “Kiss from a Rose,” Jason Mraz — “I’m Yours,” Sheryl Crow — “All I Wanna Do”
Least Favorite Song: David Cook — “Light On” Gads, is this AWFUL.
Song List:
Amy Grant & Peter Cetera — “The Next Time I Fall”
No Doubt — “It’s My Life”
Seal — “Kiss from a Rose”
David Cook — Light On
Air Supply — “Lost in Love”
John Mayer — “Your Body Is a Wonderland”
Faith Hill — “This Kiss”
Bryan Adams — “Straight from the Heart”
Sheryl Crow — “All I Wanna Do”
Five for Fighting — “Superman”
Whispers — “Rock Steady”
Jason Mraz — “I’m Yours”
Daniel Powter — “Bad Day”
Eric Clapton — “Layla” (Unplugged)
Plain White T’s — “Hey There Delilah”Comments: This is the number one radio station in Denver and has been for a while, probably because it’s so inoffensive that it gets played in a lot of offices, restaurants and reception areas. However, “inoffensive” often translates into “boring” for me. I’ve gotten really sick of hearing it in the Chinese restaurant across the street or while I’m waiting on hold, so I was surprised that I actually mildly enjoyed this hour, David Cook notwithstanding.
Although none of the music was what I would call “adventurous,” there were quite a few songs I can genuinely say I like quite a bit. And nothing that made me want to have a screaming fit and throw the radio out the window, although if I hear that David Cook song a couple more times, who knows what might snap (This was the first time I’ve heard it).
Maybe it’s because it’s not the time of year where they play 24-hour-a-day holiday music, which becomes excruciating after a while because so much of it is BAD holiday music. Every American Idol winner or runner up singing “Jingle Bells”! Celine Dion over-emoting her way through the Yuletide songbook! Endless repetitions of “Wonderful Christmastime”! And I swear it starts the day after Election Day.
I could have done without the semi-computerized back-announcements of the songs (it sounded like a real woman trying to sound mechanical rather than an actual computerized voice, and it became really cheesy). But they did identify every song, which is kind of nice in these times when it often seems listeners are supposed to be partially psychic. The DJ had a friendly voice, and it seemed as if she was trying to be friends with the audience — in fact, she invited listeners to become her Facebook friend twice during the hour, and to e-mail, tweet, text, or even old-fashioned call her with requests for the all-request hour that started at noon.
All in all, it could have been a lot worse.
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Ick’s Radio Daze: 99.5 – Denver’s The Mountain
Kathy B. is back for her second Radio Daze installment. Here’s her hour (plus) with The Mountain-ain-ain-ain! You can check out all of the Radio Daze pieces here.- Pete
Station: 99.5 FM KQMT
Format: Classic Rock
Type: Terrestrial (Denver, CO)
Slogan: “Ninety-nine five The Mountain, A Mountain of Classics”
Date / Time: Jan. 29th, 2010 / 12:16-1:10pm MST
Commercials: 8.5 minutes
Streaming Online? Yes (www.995themountain.com)
Hot Dude on Home Page of Web Site? Some rotating images in the upper left include Bono and the Police. I’d place all four of them in the 75th percentile of “attractive people.” But no traditional hot-looking guy.
Hot Chick? The closest thing is a Haitian relief video with Michelle Obama. Somehow I don’t think she’s on their home page as a token “hot chick.” (But yes, she is. And I’m straight.)
DJ: Mike Casey, then Robbie Knight
Favorite Song: Talking Heads — “Life During Wartime”
Least Favorite Song: I refuse to answer this on the grounds that I may incriminate myself. 🙂
Song List:
The Rolling Stones — “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”
The Eagles — “Those Shoes”
The Tubes — “She’s a Beauty”
The Ramones — “Rock & Roll High School”
Talking Heads — “Life During Wartime”
Heart — “Even It Up”
Elvis Costello — “Pump It Up”
Led Zeppelin — “The Ocean”
Queen — “Somebody to Love”
Pink Floyd — “Time”
U2 & B.B. King — “When Love Comes to Town”Comments: I first started listening at 10:45 am, in the middle of their “Commercial-free from 9 to noon” block. As I was compiling the playlist, I realized that not only was it commercial-free, it was DJ-free as well, which made me wonder if it’s a nationally pre-programmed block that goes out to a bunch of different radio stations across the country. Granted, all of the songs were ones that most people older than 15 don’t need to have identified for them (and the more you’re over that age, the less you need them identified)*. But it made me wonder if I could pick a radio station at random from say, Duluth, look at their program list, and find the exact same block of songs in the same sequence.
So I decided to pick a different hour of programming, in the interest of fairness. At 12:16, after a five-minute block of commercials, they started their daily “Barrel of Monkeys” feature, in which listeners call in and request songs — the catch being that each song title needs to start with the last letter of the previous song title. Apparently they had ended with U2’s “New Year’s Day” the day before. The Ramones and Led Zeppelin songs were “Wild Cards” that they threw in because I guess they didn’t want too many songs beginning with the same letters so close together. Five more minutes of commercials and the “normal programming” started with Queen.
The previous hour had been cookie-cutter classic rock, so it was kind of nice to hear a few curves thrown during the request hour (it’s been a while since I heard the Tubes or a deep Eagles track). But it still kind of left me with a “meh” feeling. There wasn’t anything that I found extremely offensive, but neither was there something that made me smile just hearing it come on. It’s all kind of in that middle ground of “I don’t really like any of this all that much, but I don’t really hate it either.” On a scale of 1 to 5, everything comes in between 2.75 and 3.25.
*In case anybody’s interested, this is what was played in the hour and a half leading up to the “Barrel of Monkeys”:
Santana — “She’s Not There”
Foreigner — “Hot Blooded”
Steely Dan — “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”
The Pretenders — “I’ll Stand by You”
Genesis — “That’s All”
Jimi Hendrix — “Fire”
John Mellencamp — “Cherry Bomb”
The Police — “Spirits in the Material World”
Styx — “Fooling Yourself”
Eric Clapton — “Tears in Heaven”
Supertramp — “Bloody Well Right”
The Clash — “Should I Stay or Should I Go”
The Rolling Stones — “Beast of Burden”
The Allman Brothers — “Blue Sky”
Stevie Nicks — “Edge of Seventeen”
Talking Heads — “And She Was”
Billy Joel — “My Life”
Aerosmith — “Dream On”
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers — “Don’t Come Around Here No More”
The Cars — “Moving in Stereo”