I’m Sick of Hotel California

May 24, 2010

We all get sick of the newest, popular songs get the living shit played out of them on practically every radio station. That new Train song. That Lady Antebellum song. Just about anything by Taylor Swift. And if I hear Kelly Clarkson’s “Already Gone” or whatever it is one more time, I will scratch someone’s eyes out.

But songs don’t have to have come out within the past two weeks for you to get sick of their constant, constant, mindnumbing play. Hell, they don’t even have to have come out in the past two decades.

That’s right, this is about even classic rock songs that radio stations play the living shit out of. While any one of these songs might get fewer plays on a given day than any of the aforementioned brand new pop stuff, it’s also worse in a way because many of the overplayed pop songs will disappear without a trace in a month or so, while Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” and Steve Miller’s “Joker” and Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” have been getting played sooo much consistently for many many years.

Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” I’m sick of, too. It’s considered this brilliant classic that everyone is supposed to love, and while I’m certainly not against the song itself, any given classic rock station will play it at least five times a day. Same with Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Same with Rolling Stones’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”.

I mentioned “Hotel California” in the title, but really, I’m sick of just about anything by the Eagles at this point, save for some of their songs which get played less often, such as “In the City”. But I swear, “Tequila Sunrise” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and even “Witchy Woman” are all pretty much running together to me. And the Eagles are one of those genre-spanning bands, like Fleetwood Mac, Heart, Toto, and others, where if you’re not hearing “Edge of 17” or “Barracuda” or “Hold the Line” AGAIN on the damn classic rock station, you’re hearing them on the light rock station. Or the mix station.

Yet as sick as we get of these songs, whenever we’re out with friends and we’re listening to the radio, and one of these songs comes on, some of them will act like “OMG, I haven’t heard this in forever!” and be all singing along to it. Of course, most people in these situations are quite drunk so probably to be expected.

But are all classic rock stations under the impression that this is what all their listeners are doing? More like most listeners are alone in their cars, stuck in rush hour traffic, banging their heads against the steering wheel because the stupid station is AGAIN playing Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” after AGAIN playing Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'” after AGAIN playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” after AGAIN playing Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind”.

Classic rock stations don’t even have any excuse for this. At least the pop stations sort of exist for the very purpose of playing the newest songs over and over, and as said, that set of songs is different a month later. Classic rock stations have like 40 goddamn years worth of music they could be playing. Instead, they pick out maybe 20 different classic bands and buy their best-of albums and pick out no more than five songs off each of those albums, and that’s their station’s whole playlist. -_-

I mean, okay, these songs are “great” and all. For people old enough to have been around when they first came out, it’s supposed to be some kind of great nostalgia, bring them back to their youth. Except that doesn’t exactly do that. The songs get overplayed and any nostalgia they could have provided is long gone. As does any sense of how “great” these classics are. And these classics become just as tiresome in our minds as the newer pop stuff, thus to us Pink Floyd might as well be Pink.

This has been Day 1 of the 100 Days of Summer, Round 10.

4 thoughts on “I’m Sick of Hotel California”

  1. I’m actually sick of it too, and people think that’s blasphemy. I don’t even bother listening to the radio anymore, and I haven’t for a long time. 90% of the songs played are songs I hate.

  2. Honestly, I’d have to disagree, massively. On occasion, I’ll hear a song more than once while listening, but even than, it’s just on an adjacent station. Even when that happens, it’s quite a noticeable occurrence, especially when 2 stations play a song at the same time. Maybe Baltimore radio just sucks, I dunno.

    However, I’m just having a hard time imagining “Tequila Sunrise”, “Peaceful Easy Feeling”, and “Witchy Woman” running together in anyone’s mind. “Peaqceful Eaasy Feeling” with “Lyin’ Eyes”, or even “Witchy Woman” and “One of These Nights”, I’ll concede, but not a combination of those 3.

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