I have been listening to the Jack station despite myself- I thought they were Clear Channel, and they are, well, evil, and I try to avoid them on principle. Glad to hear it's Infinity, although I don't know much about them.

I like the music, but the "we play what we want" schtick bugs. It's a radio station run by a media conglomerate just like every other station- who, exactly, are they rebelling against? They're not being hassled by the man, they ARE the man. It's a complete affectation. But the music is good, so I still listen.

If you live in the NYC/Northern NJ area, WFMU is what you want to listen to. You can listen to it anywhere on-line, but that doesn't work in the car, yet. This is what it really sounds like when they "play what we want to play". The format is so varied that there has to be something for you at some point in their schedule and everything is archived on-line so if you want to know what band and song was playing and you miss when they announce it (and they do announce all of it unlike the corporate stations) you can go look it up!

http:\\www.wfmu.org

I have an MP3 CD player, a 20 gig Sony MP3 Walkman, and a Sirius receiver. If I remember to bring my equipment with me in the car, and all the stuff that runs on batteries is charged, I can really listen to whatever *I* want. But if I forgot the Sirius and the batteries ran out on the CD player and the Walkman... well, two or three years ago the classic rock station turned into smooth jazz, and recently the alt rock station turned into Latin music. There is exactly *one* station left in Baltimore that plays rock (at different places in the state you can pick up DC or Delaware rock stations, but not if it's raining.) And that station is obsessed with its obnoxious radio personalities yammering instead of playing some damn music -- especially in the morning. I hate hearing people talk on the radio. Hate, hate, hate. If I wanted talk, I'd talk. Or I'd talk to myself. Or I'd listen to my passenger talk. Shut up and play some music already. So I like Jack because, while half its playlist is crap, it has far, far less DJ patter than less automated stations do, and at least so far it has fewer commercials.

Truth is, though, I do try to be careful to charge and bring the rest of the musical equipment. Because after spending $250 on MP3 players and $13/month on Sirius, I really should *never* have to listen to what other people want to play. Or what computers I don't own and program with my playlists want to play, either.

I switch to Jack when I get bored with NPR (especially during this long siege of Supreme Court confirmations) but it makes me nostalgic for the days when you could hear something that surprised and delighted you on the radio. In the halcyon '80s, I lived in Berkeley and still remember the shock and awe of first hearing KALX broadcasting "Brass in Pocket" and heading immediately down to Telegraph to buy it forthwith. The problem with IPOD and its ilk is you have to find the music to download it. No anonymous broadcaster on Jack or elsewhere ever turns you on something edgy or unexpected, which is why the metaphor of random sex is only partly apt.

Yeah, we got Jack in Music City, too. I've always felt the problem with radio was too much computer programmed, recycled junk I've already heard a thousand times (when I might have been into it a few decades ago), and too few personalities that know music, have eclectic tastes and are into turning people on to new stuff. So Jack ditched any personality at all and went with the computer program, with some pre-recorded attitude for flavor. Wrong direction, and certainly not revolutionary. Not even worth an article.

Thank God KCRW offers podcasts.

Of the occasionally moronic articles on Salon, this one takes the most recent cake.

Thank god there was no waste of paper. Only a few electrons and two minutes of reading what effectively is a corporate puff-piece.

"Death throes of my 30s." Jesus.

I enjoyed the JACK format for a few days after it first replaced the classic rock station here in Southern California. It was nice to listen to a wider variety of music than is usually allowed within the standard classic rock format, which seems to require that “Stairway to Heaven”, “Hotel California” and “Sweet Home Alabama” are played a minimum of once an hour.

After awhile, though, I found JACK epitomized the cliché that the surest way to please nobody is by trying to please everybody. While I like to think my musical tastes are fairly diverse, chances are if I’m in the mood to listen to Metallica, I’m not in the mood to listen to the latest Kelly Clarkson hit immediately afterwards. Similarly, I question whether those whose musical tastes lean in the direction of Led Zeppelin or The Who would want to sit through songs from Madonna or Destiny’s Child just in hopes that a song they actually like might be coming up soon.

While I’m in no way a fan of the narrow formats used by many radio stations that result in the same small number of songs being played repetitively throughout the day, JACK, if anything, is almost *too* diverse. Radio as a crapshoot, where there is only an off chance the station might be playing something you like, doesn’t sound like a format with much chance of long-term success.

In her pean to Jack frat, Mary Elizabeth Williams reveals more about the limits of her own musicial taste rather than the power of a shuffle station.

Maybe it's just Chicago, but Jack's so-called variety is extremely familiar jukebox standards, most of which fall within the Classic and New Rock playlists, even the new wave stuff. If including a few established hits from other formats (i.e. black music) seems deliciously inventive, this might indicate whitebread laziness on behalf of the listener. If one operates that thing called a dial, you discover how ubiquitous Jack's music is. An occasional channel switch reveals how Madonna, for example, crops up all over from adult contemporary to the alleged DJ mix station. Elvis Costello is slightly less obvious, but how many times does Radio Radio crop up on the station for real? Not as much as "Pump It Up" I'll bet. Hearing Jack, and reading odes to Jack, is like meeting the one guy in the superwhite fraternity who is considered radical because he listens to Prince and Peter Gabriel, but he can't name a single track beyond the ones in the top ten.

The most appealing aspect of Jack is advertising breaks which remain below the threshold of irritation. Which says a lot of the general stupidity of the radio business that something so obvious is considered a major innovation.