I have discovered a new favorite half hour of television. The Dive, weekends on Fuse. A half hour of indie videos of indie music featuring indie boys....hubba. Videos sans fx and disco lighting and scantily clad barely-legals. Videos that harken back to an era when video could have, in fact, killed the radio star. I only wish it were on longer and every night.The problem with The Dive, however, is the same problem with MySpace. It is making indie and underground culture accessible to the masses. Yanno what! I don't want Polly Pigtails, the 16-year-old hip hopster cheerleader princess gaining access to my beloved Decemberists. The whole situation makes me feel dirty. I need to bathe because of it. Besides, I dig when people ask about my music and I totally stump them. For me, it's not about being an elitest bastard, although it does come to that occasionally. It's about finding music that I enjoy that isn't played 600 times a day, every day. I have listened to a lot of Top 40 radio over the last seven months, probably more than in the seven YEARS before that. And even on the relatively agreeable station I found which plays a lot of 80's and 90's rock (like 60-75% of their playlist), I find myself hearing the same songs over and over and over again. It's terribly frustrating.I turned my radio off a long time ago because of it. Because I was sick to death of being sick to death of songs I really dug, sick of "approved playlists," sick of playlist loops. I am soooooooooo not even kidding when I say I could walk to class and hear a song on the college station over the PA then hear the exact same song on my way back from class, fifty minutes later. And this wasn't some freak occurance. It was an every day, every class sort of thing, and others I spoke to noticed it as well. Miraculously, no one I knew who worked for the station ever noticed it. But it doesn't really even matter anymore. There are indie bands on MTV and VH1, on the sales racks at Target, on the whoop-de-doo, pay attention to ME, sales racks at Target, and, to a lesser extent, WalMart, headling major concert tours (Fall Out Boy and Cobra Starship on the Honda Civic Tour...), Portions for Foxes was on the last stupid Lindsey Lohan movie and the new Meg Ryan vehicle, In the Land of Women, and the trailer song, nonetheless... Now, granted, once upon a time, when the M in MTV still implied MUSIC rather than "Much crap," there were lots of "indie" bands on. Kennedy loved obscure bands. And I'm not strictly indie.....that would mean giving up my Death Cab, my Kill Hannah, my AFI * shudder * But I am a little, I guess you would say, possessive of my music. I share it with the people I know will appreciate it and beyond that I keep it under my hat.* sigh * I guess that's it for my musical rant for today. Peace.