Flush It Friday: That One Radio Station
Some of the younger readers might not know it, but there was a time when the unused feature of modern car receivers, the radio, was actually utilized! We were subjected to listening to the most popular 20 songs of the time over and over; there was never an intention of showcasing new and interesting music. Well in the late ’90s I discovered an absolute gem of a terrestrial station: KNSX 93.3FM.
Background: my first car was a 1983 Honda CRX with 380,000 miles on the odometer. It did not have power windows, the transmission was manual, it had no power steering, but it played radio and had decent speakers. I could tune in to the station that played Green Day or the station that played REO Speedwagon… or I could set the dial to a low-power radio station from Steelville, Missouri, roughly 90 miles away from home. The signal did not come in very well and so I had to purchase a signal booster to make it listenable. From the day I discovered this station, til the day I sold the car, the dial stayed on 93.3 FM.
This was also the heyday of the compact disc, a format that helped usher in the age of the fucking hit radio single. Remember “Walking On the Sun” by Smash Mouth? How about “Fly” by Sugar Ray or “Chop Suey” by System of a Down? Those bands did not sound like that prior to stumbling upon the radio biscuit, but once the song gained massive popularity they shifted direction and any subsequent albums ended up being just 12 version of said biscuit. It was a music wasteland and my savior was the station of today’s topic.
KNSX played the occasional big hit, but those were the exception rather than the rule. The majority of the songs played were from bands none of you have heard of, or singles from an album that you didn’t hear on popular stations. For example, everyone knows “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve, but how about “Sonnet” (which I highly recommend)? The big stations would keep hammering us with the former and sleep on the latter. I had discovered so many indie/alternative bands in the ’90s that basically disappeared after an album or two because they never got the same airplay as Incubus or Matchbox 20. Occasionally I would find CDs from these little-known bands at the local record store; and if you can believe it, all of the songs on a given album were just as good – if not better – than the single played on the radio. I mentioned The Verve before, which is a great example of a band whose biggest single was the worst song on the album.
So yeah, that station was near and dear to my heart for many years, and I still think of it fondly. It was a formative part of my teenage years. Recently, in a St. Louis subreddit, somebody mentioned that there exists a Spotify* playlist with most of the songs that were in rotation at KNSX. If you’re interested, click here to listen to some radio that’s not “one big pile of shit”. And lastly I want to share with you one of my favorite discoveries that still holds up amazingly well: “Truck Lover” by Trunk Federation:
*Fuck Spotify.
Now let’s revisit some of the week’s Toilet hits and share our respective Good, Bad, and Uglies. Do feel free to share some of your favorite ’90s hidden gems as well. May you all have a terrific weekend, celebrate tomorrow’s holiday (if you’re into that), hold your furbabies and/or skinbabies tight, and forget about work for a few days.
Stick news‘t it, and Hans Tues‘t it.
Tha Boiz got a bunch of neckbeards rill mad by pointing out the obvious irony of Helvete burning to a crisp in this ‘sode of Toilet Radio:
Bob Genghis Khan had to accept that he liked the latest Accept:
BREE-BREE-BREE-BREE-BREE that’s all, folks!
