Essayist can't escape Top 40 radio

Minnesota Public Radio has the news station, classical music and The Current. But these days when essayist Peter Smith is in the car, he often finds himself listening to none of those options because he's not in control of the radio.

Smith: Our youngest has discovered Top Forty radio. Riding shotgun to and from all those appointments and social events on his calendar, he jabs and pokes his way up and down the dial, changing stations three notes and a whim into every song.

It's three notes and click. Then three new notes and another click until he finds a song he likes. He'll know it when he hears it.

Listening like this, you become very familiar with a handful of seventh-grade-soundtrack song-songs that are on the air somewhere on the dial. 24 hours a day, seven days a week-songs that are never more than five minutes and a click away. En route to the orthodontist, you find yourself backstroking through an audio melange. Click... Song... Click... Click... Song segues into song. Sound melds and blurs.

Between my own Top Forty phase and those of this child's older siblings, I am pretty much inured to it all. But these days, the "hit makers" cram everything through something called an auto-tuner.

Designed to winch off key pop stars back onto pitch, the auto-tuner has spawned an entire generation of tedious, synthesized, semi-melodic Top Forty hits. It's as if Peter Frampton were channeling Mitch Miller and the Gang singing hip hop. And everything, absolutely everything, sounds auto-tuned.

Driving Junior and a friend of his home from a party the other night, I remembered my father and the way he controlled the AM radio in his nine passenger Chevrolet station wagon. He was scornful. An audio autocrat. He made scatological phrases out of the call letters of Top Forty stations and reached over and turned the radio off as quickly as we turned it on. His car radio was for news on the hour and baseball. That was it.

Now there I was, a father myself, two increasingly-gawky adolescents aboard, cruising dark, rain-slick suburban streets, listening to click after click of auto-tuned Top Forty inanity.

I could have made scatological phrases out of call letters. I could have reached over and turned the radio off. I didn't. This is my last time through the Top Forty radio phase. It'll get sadly silent soon enough. So, lord help me, I reached over and turned the radio up.