No Alternative

Radio programmers have officially given up on rock and roll in New York City.

WNYL-FM, the alternative-rock station in New York that went on the air in 2017 on the 92.3-mhz frequency, signed off this past month and became WINS-FM, a simulcast of  WINS-AM, which switched from Top 40 to news back in 1965. 

The format flip allows WINS to reach more listeners on the stronger FM band, but it also makes it clear that rock and roll radio has no place in New York.  All of the great FM rock stations in the Big Apple are gone, with only a couple of rock stations with spotty reception in the northern New Jersey and Westchester County suburbs.   In the city, rock is down to WAXQ-FM, a classic rock station that is putting way too many eighties hair bands in its playlists.

Rock, of course, has been in trouble for years, many because its demographic matches that of the folks who voted for Donald Trump.  (Many political reporters have made note of Trump's heavy use of rock songs at his rallies, even as Joe Biden has hosted Olivia Rodrigo at the White House to encourage her to spread the word about COVID vaccines to young people; I would note, in addition, that he didn't send for Greta Van Fleet to publicize the vaccines.  Yeah, yeah, I know - Greta Van Fleet? Who's she?)   Rock became associated with aging white people who never changed their tastes even as tastes in popular music kept changing, which only allowed rock to calcify rather than remain open to new bands and new innovations.  It thus became so irrelevant that, if not for the rock category at the Grammy Awards, rockers wouldn't win any Grammys at all these days.   

It makes sense that, whenever YouTube guys like Rick Beato comment on whether or not rock can come back, they look like they're going through shell shock.

And although black people invented rock and roll, and despite the presence of predominantly black bands like the Alabama Shakes and TV On the Radio, as well as Gary Clark, Jr., people of color these days would rather not bother with guitar-driven blues-based numbers you can't dance to.  Among female acts, it's no accident that Taylor Swift is more pop than rock - so much, in fact, that she named one of her albums 1989 not just because she was born in that year but because 1989 was a year dominated by pop divas like herself and a year in which only one rock album - Dr. Feelgood by Mötley Crüe (one of those cassette-era bands that reaffirmed black people's decision to by and large disown rock and roll and create rap) - topped the Billboard album chart.   

And so, even an alternative-rock station in the country's biggest metropolitan area couldn't save rock and roll radio.  Or rock and roll itself.  (What, you thought they were going to flip a hip-hop FM station to simulcast WINS?)

Aah, I've long since given up on terrestrial radio, which is dying faster than rock and roll is.  Sirius XM satellite radio's rock channels have all the songs you love.  The Spectrum channel promotes new bands and plays a few classic rock songs, and the classic-rock channels Classic Vinyl and Classic Rewind are there for all of your favorite tunes.  And the Deep Tracks channels plays rock songs that may have never aired on terrestrial radio at all.   Sirius XM isn't cheap but in today's declining and falling terrestrial-radio environment, it's worth it.  In fact, it's essential.

Let, then, New York rock radio pass.  It's a pity that this song has lost all of its relevance and meaning.