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What it is: “Around the Dial”, the opening track from the Kinks’ 1981 album Give the People What They Want.

Why it interests me:

1) My brother must have bought this one around the time it was released, which would have made me about 12 when I was listening to it. We probably had 20 or 30 LPs in the house total at that time, including the few records my brother had and the small handful of things my dad had picked up over the years (Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Elton John’s Greatest Hits, The Best of Loud Reed, amazingly, NO idea why he had that). Because we had just these few albums, I started with the assumption that there was something special about all of them. I heard many of them over and over, and without thinking about it too much, I figured that they were all the best of their kind. Why else would someone have bought them? So I grew to love this album, and then I didn’t listen to it for probably 20 years, and then I bought it for a buck or so a few years ago. Did it hold up? Not really. Not in terms of sounding like what I would now consider “good music.” But it doesn’t matter. It’s like looking through a scrapbook—fun to do once in a while, regardless.

This song, which kicks off the album, seemed to me in 1981 to be this huge, heavy thing with a crushing riff, but now I mostly notice how lame the drumming sounds. But there’s still a reptilian brain thing happening when I hear it, where I can be swept away by my memory of the song’s force.

2) I’ve always wondered if the Flaming Lips’ “Turn It On” is a reference to this song. Certainly the radio static bits sound very similar. They both start their respective albums. They both have great riffs. They both talk about the weird connections that happen with new technology. I can’t hear one without thinking of the other.

3) The most significant development in radio in the last 15 years or so has nothing to do with music—it’s the rise of talk radio as a political force. What I read suggests that people have a strong connection to the format because radio fosters an intimacy other media can’t touch; this song is about the airwaves connection taken to an extreme. The narrator of the song had a particular DJ change his life and now he can’t find him anywhere: “FM, AM where are you? You’ve gotta be out there somewhere on the dial.” Maybe the DJ was fired because he wouldn’t sell out and play trendy music; maybe he was depressed. The important thing is that he’s gone, and the dude in the song doesn’t know what he’s going to do. He’s frantic. I listen to this song and wonder what the DJ might have played.