I am damn glad that ‘Classic Rot’ is dead in Toronto. Good riddance!

This unnecessary and unneeded format has killed all innovation in music for years and years, forcing those of us who are open-minded to new music to watch as new rock/R&B/funk/punk/soul/dance electronica groups/artists are passed up and pushed off the commercial airwaves in favor of old music and older groups/artists whose albums made back their commercial costs a long time ago. The radio stations in Toronto are an example: once the gateway for new sounds coming in from the UK and the EU, as well as new homegrown sounds, Toronto has instead become the receptacle/jump-off point for music from the USA only. Instead of being innovative in the field of having an ‘ear to the ground’ and making sure that new groups/artists are discovered that way, most of the big radio stations (1050 CHUM/104.5 CHUM FM, Q107, CFNY 102.1, etc.) have just decided to become bland purveyors of ‘the best of the old with the best of the new’-which means stay-at-home Mommy/Grandpa/Grandma music like Celine Dion, Whitney Huston, Kenny G, John Tesh, Britney Spears, Pink, Avril Lavinge(sp), etc. …all the overproduced commercial crap of the 80′s &’90′s with all of the overplayed classic music of the ’50′s, ’60′s, & ’70′s. No really innovative stuff like what we had from the mid-to-late ’70′s /early ’80′s music explosion (punk, new wave, Eurodisco/New Romantic, funk, electronica et al), no new groups/artists to replace the old, and no way for anybody new starting out to be heard so that they can prosper…no, just the same **** heard over and over again because lazy baby boomers can’t get off of their spotty behinds to go down to the record store and buy the same albums that they head before when they were younger, plus crappy, Disney-orientated pop music made because these same people can’t stand to hear anything harder on the air anymore, nor can they allow their kids to hear it! No, thanks to this format, I have to download my music from off of the Internet, or to hunt for it like a bloodhound on hard to hear college radio because it isn’t ‘like it used to be’.

Maybe now, it will be truly ‘like it used to be’, and we can hear new music if CP24 doesn’t work and CTVglobemedia decides to try a new format (hopefully playing a format called ‘Contemporary innovative music’, which would play Third World sounds, electronica, heavy metal, punk, dance, (house, acid house, trance, drum & bass), jazz (classical and modern), alt-country, R&B, and some oldies-NOT all oldies everyday, but once in a blue moon), and in AM stereo to boot. That’s what Toronto really needs, not a regurgitation of the past for people who can’t live in the present.