I don’t know about you, but the cable show The Soup has long been one of my top five guilty pleasures. Judge me as you will, but I simply must know what Honey Boo Boo, Gary Busey, and/or Justin Bieber did or said over the last 72 hours. Thus I keep my eyes peeled to Chat Stew, Tales of Home Shopping, and, of course, The Clip of the Week.
Alas, The Soup does not cover radio very much. Happily, I have a supplementary source. Every day the search results for “radio” on YouTube come into my email browser via RSS. This affords me a limitless cavalcade of, shall we say, offbeat content.
For example, about a year ago a BBC presenter had little drinky winky or two (or eight) on her final lunchtime show on BBC Radio Stoke. Here is the YouTube recording of her performance:
“For the last time on lunch time letttttt’s seeeeee . . . ” she pleasantly slurred “Yoouuuuuua [artful pause] pick the mussic! Oweahhhh! . . . It’s a P – A – R – T – Y because I said sooooooo . . . !”
The UK Guardian newspaper summarized the rest of the stint:
Ah. And it didn’t go well? Not great, no. She sluurrred her worrrdds so much it took about five minutes for a listener to text in about it. Which – in classic sozzled style – she denied, announcing on air: “I sound drunk. I’m not drunk. I’ve had a couple of drinks. I’m not drunk. I’m sad.”
After which she sobered up and snapped out of it? If only. She then decided to rebel against her producers and do away with her playlist, telling listeners: “Let’s just throw it all out! I don’t get told what songs to – No, I do get told what songs to play! But I don’t get told what songs to play on the last day of my shooooowww!”
Then she put a song on, downed a pint of water and got her act together? No, she then proceeded to fumble with the equipment, play a jingle instead of a song, and screech: “It’s my last day and nothing’s working! Why is nothing working? Nooooooo!”
I judge not, lest I be judged. Back in my party days decades ago (I’m a boring teetotaler now), I was running the board at a community radio station when some producer handed me a very elaborate conspiracy theory rant to play. As the lengthy tirade about secret operations, glaring anomalies, and suspicious coincidences wafted across the airwaves, I found that it all made so much more sense after my sixth long swig of apricot brandy.
“Well, there you has it folksh,” I recall myself saying at the hour. “Don’t forget to give during the nexsht pledge drive.”
On the other hand, I can’t recall ever showing up in a studio with a pick axe in my hands. To wit: “Murder Mook” (below) over at Angry Fan Radio. I’m sure that his presumably Angry Fans understand what he is talking about. I am not sure that I do. “Ain’t no hate over here,” Mr. Mook assures us, as he twirls his axe. “Real shit.” Then something about “getting some good battles . . . ” Where should I send plasma and bandages?
Then there is the Hickock45 Radio Show, “your Internet shooting companion, coming to you from the bleak hills of Middle Tennessee.” “I’ll try not to mention Dolly Parton,” the self described “King of Rambling” promises. “It’s funny that I always have her on my mind, right?”
After a lengthy mediation on heroes and heroism, Mr. Hickock45 gets to what I presume is the point:
“What else was I going to talk about? What firearms do I have? I know what I have. I’m carrying right now, let me unload it, a big slug comes out of it, believe it or not I’m carrying the Springfield XDM, actually the 45 I have, I don’t know why, I just decided to carry it some . . . oh, I know one reason, I got some work done on the trigger and it’s better now, just like the nine millimeter, feels great, can’t talk about who did it yet because I’m not sure what all he did and all that sort of thing but the trigger is nice and crisp now and so I am more motivated to carry this little bugger; still bothers me having six rounds, get it hot again in case somebody sneaks up on me while I’m talking to you guys. Wouldn’t want me killed for lack of shooting back, especially while I’m talking to you all?”
If you actually listen to the clip, you can hear the weapon’s components click in the background. Speaking of the right to bear arms and talk about them ad infinitum, one of my favorite YouTube radio clips involves an updloaded argument between talk radio denizen Michael Savage and a Ron Paul supporter back in 2012, the Obama redux election year. Despite being repeatedly called “hysterical,” the caller did pretty well until she mentioned that she supported anti-war Democrat George McGovern forty years earlier.
“So you’re confirming what I suspect,” Savage shot back. “Most people who support Ron Paul are dyed-in-the-wool liberals.”
I summarized the firefight up on Radio Survivor, and no less than 84 Ron Paul fans posted furious feedback over the next few days. These included comments like this:
“Savage resorts to Trotskyite debating tactics, in calling anyone who disagrees “hysterical”, “mentally ill” or a “crackpot”.
If anything, this clip exposes Mr Savage to be just another brick in the neo-progressivist wall. His cold war mentality forces him to rave on about socialism, while turning a blind eye one the fact that the so-called “conservatives” are cut from the same cloth when it comes to supporting the welfare/warfare state machine.
That’s how the system works: independent of the “culture wars” that rage on in the media/blogosphere between “liberals” and “conservatives” (i.e. progressivist infighting), the machine, funded by the “above parties” monetary central planners, rolls on.”
Yow! What astounded me was that for the next twenty four hours, the responses clocked in at around one every fifteen minutes through the evening, then one every hour through the night, then back to one every fifteen minutes again. Impressive. Did Ron Paul have followers on 24 hour blog comment call?
Happily, not every YouTube radio clips is about guns, booze, or politics. Answer five questions correctly and you get a Pokemon radio card!
Or you can watch Vladimir Putin stare-a-like Nicky Romero do “protocol radio”!
Or you can enjoy Radio from Mars!
I guess there’s something about YouTube that brings out the radio Martian in all of us. Got a favorite radio YouTube channel? We cover radio/music content sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.
