Apart from a fairly large number of repeats per day of some songs, I continue to find more and more to like about Urge Radio. The past couple of days I've been listening to the "I Love the 90s" station a lot, which I assume is named after some show on VH-1 that I probably wouldn't watch even if I watched VH-1 because it would be full of D-list celebrities and "critics" cracking painfully bad jokes and trying to sum up ten years in a few overwrought clichés. That being said, all in all I'm finding the 90s station surprisingly tolerable, even in spite of the large number of pop songs it plays that I'd rather never be reminded again. ("Mmmbop" and "Macarena," anyone?)
I'm finding it curious exactly how Viacom chooses to define a decade musically, though. I mean, yes, choosing music released in the years between 1990 and 1999 is certainly a quite reasonable way to do things, but I think this also presents some problems. As an example, two of the songs I frequently hear on this station are Wilson Phillips' "Hold On" and Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle." While both songs were technically released during the decade, I consider the former to be much more representative of 80s pop and the latter of this decade's sound. Similarly, I think cases could be made for including some stuff that wasn't released during the 1990s in this station because it would thematically fit well. (The Sugarcubes' first two albums and the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique both come to mind here.) I'm not saying that dividing decades by dates as opposed to themes is a bad way of doing things, but I don't think it's the way I would do things if I were programming these kinds of things.
The main thing that listening to this station has done, however, has been to make me feel incredibly old. This has been the first time I've really been forced to sit down and come face-to-face with the fact that the music of my young adult life is now considered classic rock. I mean, most of the stuff I listened to then was stuff I considered to be "instant classics," but there's a difference between that and classic rock. My folks always loved classic rock when I was growing up (and back then pretty much every radio station in Toledo was either classic rock or country), and it was one thing to listen to something that came out before I was born on a station like this, but now the "classics" bar has been pushed up to stuff that came out when I was fully grown.
What I'm really wondering now is what things will be like thirty or so years from now. Although I don't actually watch them, I can't help but notice in the television listings that PBS has been doing a lot of "sounds of the 50s/60s" stuff lately, bringing back together some of the artists of the day to perform their hits. This will certainly be the case with 1990s artists in just a couple of decades here, and it's making me think about what artists could be chosen for such specials, and what those choices would say about the decade as a whole. I mean, given that this is PBS we're talking about here, I'd like to think that some of my favourite artists like Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan would have a better shot of appearing, but at the same time there's a part of me that can't help but worry that in twenty or thirty years a new generation of people not yet born are going to think that the most emblematic artist of the 1990s was Green Day or Ace of Base.
Also, even though this is entirely my fault for being wrapped up in so many other things for the past six years or so, I can't help but be bothered by the fact that I have next to no idea who might be included in a similar special about this decade. Then again, given what little I've heard of pop music released in this decade, I think that this perhaps is actually a good thing.