Cleanup in Aisle Lunatic (h/t romad1)

[oblong]

 

[pfife]

Columbus... Ohio....

[romad1]

 

Very interesting 

[mtutiger]

32 minutes ago, romad1 said:

 

Very interesting 

The key term being "appearance of a scandal"...

It all goes back to the first impeachment, which was Trump blackmailing the Ukrainian government to compel them to open an investigation that would benefit him politically. Wrongdoing or anything of the sort was irrelevant, just the appearance of an investigation was political gold.

Still think that event is somewhat underrated in his political downfall... it really tipped people off to the playbook and people were much more wise to claims after it.

Edited December 4, 2022 by mtutiger

[oblong]

Mitch Albom with a column today trying to both sides the media on this.  Made no mention of the actual content being “censored”. And to top it off he claims to have been a journalist for 40 years and knows how to get thru the clutter.  
 

Check out this article from Detroit Free Press:

Mitch Albom: How big was Elon Musk's bombshell? Depends on your news source

https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/mitch-albom/2022/12/04/elon-musk-twitter-bombshell-matt-taibbi-hunter-biden/69698638007/

[romad1]

this is a professional joke

 

Very good 

[Screwball]

6 hours ago, oblong said:

Mitch Albom with a column today trying to both sides the media on this.  Made no mention of the actual content being “censored”. And to top it off he claims to have been a journalist for 40 years and knows how to get thru the clutter.  
 

Check out this article from Detroit Free Press:

Mitch Albom: How big was Elon Musk's bombshell? Depends on your news source

https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/mitch-albom/2022/12/04/elon-musk-twitter-bombshell-matt-taibbi-hunter-biden/69698638007/

When I grew up my parents listened to WJR via transistor radio to hear JP McCarthy. Later in life, I drove an hour (or three because Toledo highways that became parking lots every summer...) to work in the late 80s, early 90s, and listened to him on my way.  I also remember listening to Albom on the way home - he had an afternoon show.

I did a quick search.  It appears JP died in 95, and Albom came along in 96. Albom sure isn't a JP, but not many are. Maybe I'm just too old.  Or maybe radio has went to shit, which is how we get Mitch's of the world.

[oblong]

26 minutes ago, Screwball said:

When I grew up my parents listened to WJR via transistor radio to hear JP McCarthy. Later in life, I drove an hour (or three because Toledo highways that became parking lots every summer...) to work in the late 80s, early 90s, and listened to him on my way.  I also remember listening to Albom on the way home - he had an afternoon show.

I did a quick search.  It appears JP died in 95, and Albom came along in 96. Albom sure isn't a JP, but not many are. Maybe I'm just too old.  Or maybe radio has went to shit, which is how we get Mitch's of the world.

Radio went to shit. When JP died all the stations in the area went black for a few minutes.  It was Dick Purtan’s idea.  WJR had some very intelligent overnight hosts. To this day David Newman was the smartest person I ever heard on the radio.  Just a former truck driver who read a lot of books. 

[Screwball]

30 minutes ago, oblong said:

Radio went to shit. When JP died all the stations in the area went black for a few minutes.  It was Dick Purtan’s idea.  WJR had some very intelligent overnight hosts. To this day David Newman was the smartest person I ever heard on the radio.  Just a former truck driver who read a lot of books. 

I remember Dick Purtan too. I think he was part of CKLW (800?) at one time?  Who was the guy on WJR who came on at like 11 at night and did a show called "night flight" or something like that? Air time before JP came on at like 6?

CKLW (back in the day); we saved our money and bought radio/recorder devices so we could record the tunes from CKLW. Spent hours making our own tapes. Had to blast the music while cruising in our not so much of a hot rod (gas was .35-.40 cents), but we did see American Graffiti (1973) last night.  🙂

Somewhere along the line it got all fucked up - I blame it on disco.

 

[gehringer_2]

46 minutes ago, oblong said:

Radio went to shit. When JP died all the stations in the area went black for a few minutes.  It was Dick Purtan’s idea.  WJR had some very intelligent overnight hosts. To this day David Newman was the smartest person I ever heard on the radio.  Just a former truck driver who read a lot of books. 

It's probably imposssible to decribe the nature and reach of what AM radio used to be to anyone who wasn't there. Such a completely different world. And work was different as well. Untold numbers of stores and shops where having 'JR on all day long for both the workers and customers was just normal business.

And it was the importance of the media (and the rules of the era) that forced all that top talent to the forefront.

[gehringer_2]

1 minute ago, Screwball said:

Somewhere along the line it got all fucked up

Probably a thousand reasons: Business consolidation, repeal of the fairness doctrine, high quality car and home audio systems that drove people to FM where no station had the reach of the clear channel AMs and probably a dozen others you can think of.

The loss to politics has been serious. JP or Warren Pierce might have had a 20 minute non-confrontational but still probing interview with the governor or a senator on any given day. You can't BS or sound bite your way through an interview that long even if the interviewer isn't Mike Wallace in attack mode.

[oblong]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

It's probably imposssible to decribe the nature and reach of what AM radio used to be to anyone who wasn't there. Such a completely different world. And work was different as well. Untold numbers of stores and shops where having 'JR on all day long for both the workers and customers was just normal business.

And it was the importance of the media (and the rules of the era) that forced all that top talent to the forefront.

I’d also add technology along with consolidation was a deadly one two punch. Why pay two people to do the same job?  A guy in Pittsburgh can record can do sound bites and all that and can be transmitted anywhere.  You don’t need a jockey.  Just pull it up off the computer. Preload the weeks worth of songs. Every city has the same 4 channels.  Even across media.  Jay Towers can anchor the morning show on Fox 2 and also do radio?  
 

a big memory of my college years is falling asleep to the guys on WJR and waking up at some point around like 5:30 am to hear Byron Macgregor give the news with the “teletype” playing in the background as if it were 1938. And somehow in my sleepy state I knew which button to hit to switch to FM and how many hits of static to dial to get to WRIF for Drew and Mike. Fall back asleep. Wake up. Go to class. Get back around noon. Go to sleep. Ah the life.  

[The Ronz]

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

 Who was the guy on WJR who came on at like 11 at night and did a show called "night flight" or something like that?

Night Flight 76 with Jay Roberts.

JP McCarthy's shows on Opening Day were legendary.

[chasfh]

10 hours ago, Screwball said:

I remember Dick Purtan too. I think he was part of CKLW (800?) at one time?  Who was the guy on WJR who came on at like 11 at night and did a show called "night flight" or something like that? Air time before JP came on at like 6?

CKLW (back in the day); we saved our money and bought radio/recorder devices so we could record the tunes from CKLW. Spent hours making our own tapes. Had to blast the music while cruising in our not so much of a hot rod (gas was .35-.40 cents), but we did see American Graffiti (1973) last night.  🙂

Somewhere along the line it got all fucked up - I blame it on disco.

 

Disco sucks.

[oblong]

I learned from a recent Bee Gees documentary about the evolution of Disco and it's prominence in the gay community very early on.  Then the Bee Gees made Saturday Night Fever and suddenly everybody decided to make disco and that's what ruined it.  It had it's niche market and was fine but then it was over saturated.  There was also some definite anti gay sentiment behind the drive against it.  Not saying that's what people today are doing but within the times of the 70's that was a force.

 

[Screwball]

9 hours ago, The Ronz said:

Night Flight 76 with Jay Roberts.

JP McCarthy's shows on Opening Day were legendary.

Yep, that's it.  Thanks.

[chasfh]

Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine was the bright red line after which American media turned to complete shit. Because stations were no longer required to provide balance to political or otherwise partisan speech, radio became the Internet before the Internet. Just one more way by which Ronald Reagan fucked future generations.

[Screwball]

8 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Disco sucks.

I was really only half kidding about blaming disco.  As I look back, I think disco helped usher us into the materialistic/consumerism type of world we have today.  The Fonz turned into Tony Manero (Saturday NIght Fever - 1977). We went from blue jeans and tee shirt with a pack of smokes rolled up in the sleeve to platform shoes, leisure suits, and drinking grasshoppers. Edward Bernay's like marketing set the vision and culture.

Travolta in that stupid outfit on the poster of the movie was enough to make you puke - but that's what so many became.

[chasfh]

4 minutes ago, oblong said:

I learned from a recent Bee Gees documentary about the evolution of Disco and it's prominence in the gay community very early on.  Then the Bee Gees made Saturday Night Fever and suddenly everybody decided to make disco and that's what ruined it.  It had it's niche market and was fine but then it was over saturated.  There was also some definite anti gay sentiment behind the drive against it.  Not saying that's what people today are doing but within the times of the 70's that was a force.

 

Yeah, I’ve heard this as an adult, that people who hated disco did so because they were racist and/or homophobic, full stop. That’s horseshit. Black people were already all over top 40 radio, and gay people made glam rock cool even among straight teenage guys.

I was in my late teens myself at the time, and the idea that disco was about black people or gay people never occurred to me. Far as I was concerned, disco was how white people ruined funk. I’d grown up on Ohio Players, and Earth Wind and Fire, and Kool & the Gang, and tough like that, because that’s what the hits were on CKLW and WDRQ. That stuff was great. Bee Gees and ABBA and KC and the Sunshine Band fell far short of great.

I hated disco because disco wasn’t about the music—it was about everything attended to that lifestyle except the music which, for the most part, might as well have been written by computers. The music was merely background noise for the vapid, shallow, superficial lifestyle disco people led, and that stupid movie with Vinnie Barbarino cemented all that into the top of the culture for years. Disco is what drove me into the arms of chainsaw guitar rock and, regrettably, prog rock. (Later, new wave music drove me into the arms of the Beatles, the Who, and, regrettably, Jethro Tull.)

None of this had anything to do with hating black people or gay people. Most people who insist this is the case were not even alive at the time disco dinosaurs roamed the earth, and it sounds for all the world like they are underdogging when they insist as much.

[romad1]

21 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Yeah, I’ve heard this as an adult, that people who hated disco did so because they were racist and/or homophobic, full stop. That’s horseshit. Black people were already all over top 40 radio, and gay people made glam rock cool even among straight teenage guys.

I was in my late teens myself at the time, and the idea that disco was about black people or gay people never occurred to me. Far as I was concerned, disco was how white people ruined funk. I’d grown up on Ohio Players, and Earth Wind and Fire, and Kool & the Gang, and tough like that, because that’s what the hits were on CKLW and WDRQ. That stuff was great. Bee Gees and ABBA and KC and the Sunshine Band fell far short of great.

I hated disco because disco wasn’t about the music—it was about everything attended to that lifestyle except the music which, for the most part, might as well have been written by computers. The music was merely background noise for the vapid, shallow, superficial lifestyle disco people led, and that stupid movie with Vinnie Barbarino cemented all that into the top of the culture for years. Disco is what drove me into the arms of chainsaw guitar rock and, regrettably, prog rock. (Later, new wave music drove me into the arms of the Beatles, the Who, and, regrettably, Jethro Tull.)

None of this had anything to do with hating black people or gay people. Most people who insist this is the case were not even alive at the time disco dinosaurs roamed the earth, and it sounds for all the world like they are underdogging when they insist as much.

Explain Queen and Judas Priest to anyone who thinks the anti-disco thing was anti-gay.   There was an element of that.  I recall that the Village People cassette tape I had was smashed into a million pieces by my older brother who pointed out that all the songs were about gay dudes hooking up.  I wasn't aware of that at all at the time.   And the Queen and Judas Priest things weren't really understood by people at the time either.  

[oblong]

 

 

Here's an article that goes into more detail.

https://signorile.substack.com/p/the-disco-sucks-movement-and-the

 

To say "none of this" is a stretch as obviously at the time that was the feeling.  It's not rewriting history.

 

From a rolling stone piece in 1979

Quote

[W]hite males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they're the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium.

 

From the article above.

Quote

Vince Lawrence, a Black house music pioneer who, at that time, worked at Comiskey Park as an usher and witnessed what happened, says in the Bees Gees documentary that it was equivalent to “a racist, homophobic book-burning.”

 

Quote

One man who was at the stadium when he was 15 reflected on it 35 years later in 2014, admitting it was very much about racism, about a fear of Black people moving into white neighborhoods:

The chance to yell "disco sucks" meant more than simply a musical style choice….More importantly, it was a chance for a whole lot of people to say they didn't like the way the world was changing around them, or who they saw as the potential victors in a cultural and demographic war.

Quote

Even now, some in the media are somewhat dismissive of what went on back then. Music critic Jon Pareles of The New York Times, for example, noted in a review of “The Bee Gees: How Do You Mend a Broken Heart” that “the documentary takes pains to point out” that “disco had emerged from Black music and Black and gay clubs,” as if that isn’t a very significant aspect to emphasize.

 

I mean... why not just let people enjoy what they enjoy?  The critique I see here is a musical one which is fine to have if it's not your cup of tea but it's not hurting anybody if an ostracized community finds comfort and pleasure from "house" music that may not live up to your standards of what music should be.

this sounds to me like people in the 90's complaining that Rap and Hip Hop was not real music.  That sentiment was very real and it isn't until the last 10-15 years that suddenly everybody seems to have been a fan when I can tell you as a young adult at the time they certainly were not.  We'd never have nevisioned Ice T doing reverse mortage commercials or Snoop Dogg doing stuff with martha stewart.  People wanted them in jail.

 

 

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

 

 

Here's an article that goes into more detail.

https://signorile.substack.com/p/the-disco-sucks-movement-and-the

 

To say "none of this" is a stretch as obviously at the time that was the feeling.  It's not rewriting history.

 

From a rolling stone piece in 1979

 

From the article above.

 

 

I mean... why not just let people enjoy what they enjoy?  The critique I see here is a musical one which is fine to have if it's not your cup of tea but it's not hurting anybody if an ostracized community finds comfort and pleasure from "house" music that may not live up to your standards of what music should be.

this sounds to me like people in the 90's complaining that Rap and Hip Hop was not real music.  That sentiment was very real and it isn't until the last 10-15 years that suddenly everybody seems to have been a fan when I can tell you as a young adult at the time they certainly were not.  We'd never have nevisioned Ice T doing reverse mortage commercials or Snoop Dogg doing stuff with martha stewart.  People wanted them in jail.

 

 

This is a fair response to my strongly-expressed opinion.

Speaking only for myself, the "this" in "none of this" contemplates only my thoughts and feelings that I expressed as strictly my own in the preceding two paragraphs. I was responding more to an idea I have seen expressed that everybody who hated disco necessarily did so because they hated black and gay people. As an absolutist statement, it's garbage. (had I meant it as you interpreted it, I would probably have said "none of it" instead of "none of this".) By the same token, I would never stipulate that no one hated disco only because they hated black and gay people, which is also a garbage absolutist statement. I'm sure there were a lot of those people around, too. I was just saying that, from my own standpoint, that never occurred to me, or at least I don't recall that it did.

My objection to disco was not because of its roots, but because of how completely it overwhelmed music culture at the time. It is difficult to overstate just how ubiquitous disco music was in the late 70s, and how completely it wiped out all vestiges of other music genres within popular culture for three solid years running. You couldn't go to school or flip on a TV or walk through a mall and not hear disco music playing either in the foreground or the background. To me, it wasn't simply a matter of letting people who enjoy it enjoy it. It was a matter of having it foisted upon me by disco culture at large in a truly relentless manner. I didn't like new wave music, either, because I think it was also superficial and weak as music goes, but in a way, thank god for new wave, because that's what finally put disco into its grave as THE dominant cultural force. (Disco enthusiasts could probably blame MTV, which has its own struggle with racial balance, for that.)

FWIW, I loved Ice-T in the early to mid-90s, the days of The Iceberg and O.G. Original Gangster and Home Invasion. He was my go-to "gangsta rapper", and I started listening to several of the acts he name-checked in his work specifically because he name-checked them. When I have to remember some of the artists of that period, I actually replay a couple of his tracks in his head to do so.

[Hongbit]

The reason people hated disco is the same reason people hate EDM.   

They can’t dance.   

[chasfh]

I guess the one other thing I want to stress here is that disco was never presented to us in the mainstream as part of a gay way of life. There was no gay lifestyle represented in the media of the 1970s. Homosexuality was something that existed only in some shadowy netherworld, and no details about it were made available to us throughout the mainstream media that I as a 15-year old suburban white kid was immersed in. Disco was presented to us as a heterosexual dancing lifestyle, populated by the Tony Maneros* of the world and their girlfriends.

So at no point would I have been able to associate disco with the gay community at that time, which is why the idea that we hated disco because of homophobia rang so false to me once I first heard about it some 30 years after the fact. I can see now that it did have that association with some people and groups, and I can now acknowledge the pain and isolation that those people who clung to disco as a positive affirmation of their essential personhood felt when confronted with the agita wrought by the anti-disco "movement". But if I ever encountered the idea at the time through media vehicles like the Rolling Stone, I didn't commit it to memory. As far as I was concerned at the time, disco was so grounded as being a hetero trip that I never considered it otherwise.

* To this day I have never seen Saturday Night Fever even once, so I had to look up the character's name for this post.

[Hongbit]

38 minutes ago, chasfh said:

FWIW, I loved Ice-T in the early to mid-90s, the days of The Iceberg and O.G. Original Gangster and Home Invasion. He was my go-to "gangsta rapper", and I started listening to several of the acts he name-checked in his work specifically because he name-checked them. When I have to remember some of the artists of that period, I actually replay a couple of his tracks in his head to do so.

Oh man.  I remember first hearing Colors from the movie Soundtrack and thinking who the hell is this guy.   Power and The Iceberg were way ahead of their time.  When he started Body Count, my mind was melted like what can’t this guy do.  Then he went on Law and Order for 15 years and also has national ad campaigns.  Ice is a legend and still one of my favorite old school rappers.   Rhyme Syndicate For Life!  

Edited December 5, 2022 by Hongbit