Name: Jason Aldean
Age: 46
Occupation: shitty country singer
Last Seen: Nashville
Bee-otched For: being the new Johnny Rebel
October 1, 2017, will be a day that will live in infamy for country music fans.
Jason Aldean was on stage in Las Vegas when a gunman opened fire from his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay next door. Over a thousand bullets were sprayed onto the crowd, killing 60 people.
I fondly remember keeping my opinions about country music to myself since some took to social media to say that the victims probably all voted for Drumpf. One person allegedly got fired. A few days after the melee, Aldean appeared on Saturday Night Live, singing the Tom Petty standard "I Won't Back Down". The song had a double meaning; just a day after the mass shooting, Petty passed away, so Aldean did it as a tribute. But, Aldean sang it because he didn't want this tragedy to end his career. Since then, he recorded four more albums and had several more hit singles on the country charts, including a few that cracked the top 40.
Bear in mind that gun violence is not cool, but I do make a few exceptions. It's too bad that the shooter that night in Vegas missed the stage.
Recently, Aldean shot the video for his latest single "Try That In A Small Town". Unfortunately, the video was filmed in front of a courthouse in Columbia, TN, where 18-year-old black man Henry Choate was lynched in 1927 for allegedly sexually assaulting a 16-year-old white girl, though there was no real proof he did it. The video is loaded with footage of blacks rioting, robbing liquor stores, and stomping on the American flag.
The lyrics of the song pretty much tie with what I said in the last paragraph. With the fact that it shows the site of a lynching, you can pretty much call Aldean "Johnny Rebel Lite". One person, Adeem the Artist even recorded a response to 'Small Town' called "Sundown Town", referring to all-white communities that warn blacks that they aren't welcome there.
Aldean, who named his last two albums after his hometown of Macon, Georgia, is standing by his song. However, CMT has banned the video. But, country fans are standing up and supporting Aldean by buying the song, the leadoff single for Aldean's next album. It's already impacting country music radio.
The song is now a bona-fide smash, reaching #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Ironically, another controversial country artist, Morgan Wallen also hit the top recently with "Last Night". Wallen made headlines a few years ago when a neighbor filmed him intoxicated with friends calling them the n-word.
Thankfully, the hype behind 'Small Town' has dwindled to the point that the song is no longer #1. It has fallen to #25 on the '100 while Wallen has took the top spot away from him. Since then, the new #1 in America is by some dipshit named Oliver Anthony and his POS tune called "Rich Men North of Richmond" that's become a viral sensation. In the song, he claims that the politicians only care about fat people using EBT to pay for "bags of fudge rounds". The song has been praised by right wingers like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Dan Bungholio, and Matt Walsh. Of course, anybody with an IQ over room temperature knows that the eight wealthiest people in America are wealthier than all Americans. That ghetto queen with the Bridge Card is not sucking us Americans dry.
I'll betcha that because of all this, if he was still the host of American Top 40, Shadoe Stevens (who has a black wife) would be walking off the job in a hurry.
In years past, it was rock music that was more controversial than country. Now, the tables have been turned. Granted, the world of rock has the band Ghost, whose video for their cover of Genesis' "Jesus He Knows Me" depicts a megachurch pastor who does drugs, gets a blowjob from a hooker and is in the middle of a circle jerk of men who ejaculate all over him. Had this been the 1990s, the religious right would have put Ghost in the same vein as Marilyn Manson.
But, times have clearly changed. If a rapper releases a record loaded with profanities, the n-word and in Cardi B's case, references to her wet ass pussy, no biggie. Part of the reason for "WAP"'s success might be due to the fact that right-winged loons like Fucker Carlson credit that tune and others to the fall of humanity. Of course, when someone bans something like "WAP" or Howard Stern or in the case of the 1920s, booze, people will want it more, even if they have to break the law to get it.
Some have cried that liberals like to censor, but the right has tried to ban everything from rock 'n roll to porn to the aforementioned Stern. Now, many in the country community are crying that their voices aren't being heard and they're being replaced with (heaven forbid) anything woke.
Take Bud Light, for instance. It's always been a beer for the hard-working, blue collar man. But, ut-oh! All a sudden, they slap a transgender dude on their cans. Now, we have people like Kid Rock and Brantley Gilbert shooting and stomping their product because heaven forbid that the MTFs should enjoy it. Hell, in Gilbert's case, he had to destroy his packages while singing "Another One Bites The Dust", a song originally sung by a gay man. Same with Jack Daniel's and other products enjoyed by angry old white dudes for generations.
But, that's the country music way and it always has been. If you're not white, Christian or straight, don't expect room at the table. True, not long ago, the genre had its first-ever #1 song penned by a black woman (Luke Combs' rendition of Tracy Chapman's 1988 hit "Fast Car"). But considering that country music has been around for 100 years or so, it shows how little it has evolved in terms of inclusion. Chapman - who has long been rumored to be homosexual, but is not open regarding her sexuality - even admitted that she was a giant country fan as a little girl. She watched Hee Haw religiously and her mother even bought her a mandolin to play along with the show. Of course, Chapman was too black to be country, so she had to settle with folk and blues.
You see, I'm from a small town. Kinda. I grew up way out in the middle of the country. I grew up with a lot of "insteads", as in, instead of going to the movies every weekend, I spent many Saturday nights being forced to watch British comedies on PBS, like Are You Being Served? Why? Because instead of having cable, I got stuck living in a place where no cable operator would dare touch us due to financial reasons. I was also the last kid in my neighborhood to get a Nintendo. Instead of investing in the things that kids like me wanted, my parents smoked. Instead of going to school smelling nice, I reeked of stale Marlboros.
I wanted to go to concerts every summer. Instead, Castle Farms in Charlevoix closed the second I turned thirteen. The Cherry Festival tried concerts at the Fairgrounds, but it got complaints from neighbors over noise and profanity. I loved hard rock and metal. Grand Rapids, Detroit, Flint and the Tri Cities and Lansing all had kickass rock stations. Instead, I was stuck with a flaming pile of shit called KLT that mostly played annoying, overplayed boomer music all because it was owned by a family from North Dakota that put profits over quality. We did get an alternative station, The Zone in 1998. Instead, it was mostly into shitty soccer mom music.
I wanted to hang out with the cool kids. Instead, they rejected me, so I became a loner. True, there were people who liked me, but I didn't like them because I saw them as stupid and not being equal to me. I wanted to take a hot chick to the prom. Instead, I got stuck with a hambeast who lived in a trailer because her idiot mother spent more on feeding her fat ass and televangelists over investing in livable housing.
After high school, I went to a vocational school. I graduated, but there were no jobs for me at first. Instead of having a good-paying job in the Grand Traverse region, I got stuck going back to my high school job washing dishes. And instead of being a valued employee there, they cut me down to two nights a week because they hired a douchebag incapable of keeping a job to take my hours away. So, I found work stocking shelves at a gas station that ended up changing owners. Instead of being a valued employee there also, once again, they cut me down from 40 hours to 25 so another lowlife could work. Of course, this was also just after 9/11, which made me get a real job harder.
But, two Beatles were mostly right. It was George Harrison who said "All Things Must Pass" and John Lennon who proclaimed that "Instant Karma's gonna get you", though he was only half right on that one. Many of those "insteads" have long been fixed. My old neighborhood has cable. The Cherry Festival has rock concerts again, plus, for many years, Traverse City did have Streeters, which brought decent rock shows to TC (though, sadly, it's now a church). Thankfully, Cadillac now has The Venue, which is now booking some mostly has-been acts, but it's better than nothing. The Zone has long-morphed into one of the best active rock stations in Michigan, Rock 105 and 95-5. KLT has long realized that they've abandoned anybody under 50, which is why they're mostly classic rock now. But, they're #1 in the radio ratings up north. Not only that, they were sold to the same owners as WTCM and WCCW because of bad business decisions the Minot people made.
It's too bad that my sliver of northern Michigan fixed their problems AFTER I moved to the Grand Rapids region in 2002. There's much more to do now than when I was young. In the 90s, it was Grand Traverse Mall and virtually nothing else if you were under 21. Today, Traverse City has much more to do. There's Great Wolf Lodge. The former Younkers at Cherryland is becoming an indoor go-kart track. Plus, Grand Traverse Mall is still there, but it's a shadow of itself 30 years ago. There's even a place in Traverse City that you'll no longer find in Grand Rapids (thanks, DeVos family) that allows 18-year-olds in: Fantasy's. Plus, every company I've ever worked for up north had either gone out of business or switched hands. One ex-boss even ended up in bankruptcy and lost his house.
And yes, there's the movies. For decades, Traverse City was stuck in a monopoly in terms of theater ownership. Thankfully, Michael Moore knew that northern Michiganders deserved better. When he bought the long-dormant State Theater, the sole cinemas in town were charging big city megaplex prices for two theaters that had no stadium seating. Now, those cinemas have been shuttered and in 2015, the shiny new Cherry Blossom 14-screen theater was built by Carmike, complete with an IMAX screen showing its first film. Today, it is owned by AMC.
In 2004, Moore released "Fahrenheit 9/11" to the world. However, one chain refused to show it, and it was GKC, which had a cinema monopoly in TC. What had happened was that the circuit's owner, George Kerasotes had passed away. It was alleged that George was a racist; he refused to show films with black-heavy casts, plus the family admitted that the 1915 KKK propaganda film "The Birth of A Nation" was one of his favorites. When George died, the chain's ownership was gifted to daughter Beth.
In an interview, Beth Kerasotes proclaimed that her parents raised her to love America and love the president, no matter who was in office. Well, 'F9/11' grossed over $200 million and the sole GKC screen that showed it was the Horizon in Traverse City. What might have happened was that it booked the film before Beth's edict was thrown down. Members of the Kerasotes family were angry at each other over the 'F9/11' ban, which lead to its sale to Carmike and then AMC.
Moore started the Traverse City Film Festival in 2005 to not only bring more sophisticated films to the Cherry Capitol but celebrities as well. Madonna, Jeff Daniels, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and legendary guitarist Tom Morello all attended the festival.
Sadly, because of the pandemic and the aftermath of a lawsuit between them and the company that helped to convert spaces into makeshift cinemas, TCFF was scaled back in 2022. Early this year, Moore announced that TCFF was no more, though the nonprofit would still continue to operate the two theaters in downtown Traverse City.
The reason why Moore started TCFF was simple: he loves northern Michigan, but knows it's far from perfect. He knows that there are people who work 40 hours and live in the poor house because wages are low. Some of those people have kids and can't afford $10 movie tickets and $5 shot glasses of pop. At his theaters, he shows children's matinees for $1. For other shows, it's $7 for children and matinees and $9 for adults. At AMC, however, it's roughly $10 for children and matinees and $14 for adults.
And yet, some folks up north still hate his guts.
Let's remember something: Michael Moore INVESTED in Traverse City. He made something out of two long-abandoned buildings and turned them into places where everyone has a seat at the table. Yeah, I've heard it. "miChAel mAdE hIs thEaterS nOn-pRofIT bECauSE hE doESn't wANT tO PaY PeOple".
Ok, do any of Moore's haters know a goddamned thing about owning movie theaters? Granted, big cinemas are profitable, but tiny ones in smaller communities are a different story. Nearby Suttons Bay almost lost The Bay Theater when the longtime owner couldn't pay the bills. A group of community organizers bought it and TCFF is a non-profit. Theaters in Manistee and Frankfort are also now non-profit. Charlevoix's Cinema III has switched hands many times since its longtime owner defaulted on his mortgage 15 years ago. The Elk Rapids Cinema was one of the few independently-owned theaters in the country that didn't beg for money for a new projector when Hollywood abandoned traditional film nearly a decade ago. Then again, the Cinema stayed afloat in part because longtime owner Joe Yuchasz had various other jobs such as town mayor and substitute teacher. Sadly, he died in January at age 83 and now, his neices and nephews run the Cinema, also born in 1940. Like Joe, his nieces and nephews also have real jobs; one's a college professor and another's a nurse at Munson Medical Center. However, it was recently announced that Yuchasz's survivors have put the Cinema up for sale for $500,000. There are talks that members of the community want to buy the Cinema to continue showing movies.
According to Moore, if his theaters were for-profit entities, he would only be open on weekends. Simply put, he would have trouble competing against the Cherry Blossom and their oversized owners. Yes, Michael Moore is worth $30 million, but AMC is worth over $9 billion. AMC also shuttered most of their theaters in northern Michigan that aren't in Traverse City, such as Big Rapids and Alpena (though one of their closed cinemas there has reopened; Big Rapids had two theaters, but both closed during the pandemic).
Maybe another reason why people hate Moore is the simple fact that he likes one type of person that many up north hate: young people. On Larry King Live years ago, he proclaimed that people of his generation needed to apologize to those in generations X, Y and Z for what they did to ruin them. Today, college is too expensive, jobs don't pay as well as they used to and because of all this, people are holding off having children. Because of low-paying jobs, expensive housing, an aging population and the lack of new people born, the overall population of northern Michigan is dwindling. Some towns have lost over a thousand people in just a decade. As a matter of fact, my old school district has lost student population since 2008.
Folks, I'm Facebook friends with a few people I've known since i was a young boy. One of them was a guy I went to school with. As a boy, he was quiet and pretty much a loner. He also talked with a lisp. He graduated high school, but I don't think he went to college. He ended up becoming a line cook at several restaurants in the area. He never married and lives alone with a cat. Recently, he admitted that he battled alcoholism for many years and it almost killed him. He posted a cryptic message on Facebook five years ago and one of his coworkers noticed. She called 911 and a wellness check was performed on him. He was rushed to the hospital and suffered a seizure. He almost drank himself to death. He's sober now, but his cry for help cost him $40,000 in medical bills.
And then there's my former stepsister. She has an alcoholic mother and a father who is a right-winged nut job. She's had her demons and part of it was due to small-town life. When she was a high schooler, she had a relationship with another girl. They were holding hands when a boy called them "dykes". She went to her principal in tears and reported him. The principal's response was that it was her fault he called her that.
That episode of childhood trauma wafted well into her adult life. She - like a lot of her family - battled alcoholism. She survived a failed marriage and recently, a car accident that left her with a brain injury. Not long ago, she attempted suicide. She started taking medication, but it screwed her up to the point that she ended up back in the hospital, causing her to miss her grandfather's funeral. When she made the announcement regarding her absence, her father replied with "see you on the other side."
Now, she's struggling to get disability because she cannot work. She's begged for money and she's even written a book published on Amazon in hopes of making enough money to support herself. Yet, her dead grandfather was a multimillionaire and I'm sure he gave a lot of his wealth to his idiot children, including his son who destroyed my family and his relationship with my mother with another woman.
When I see commercials for northern Michigan on TV, I sometimes nod my head. They show people golfing, swimming, skiing, boating, taking wine tours and so on. Sadly, there's a dearth of good-paying jobs. The big automakers never built a factory up north and many of the machine shops all shut down or in the case of the one my mother worked at when I was a child, moved downstate. If you want to get paid welfare wages and not be able to have a decent place to live, northern Michigan is just for you.
Granted, I, too have my gripes about Michael Moore. One of them is that he's buddies with KLT. Case in point, when "Barbie" debuted at the Bijou By The Bay, TCFF had a special guest MC the movie's debut in the Cherry Capitol: none other than Terri Ray.
As we all know by now, we recently lost the brilliant and hilarious Paul Reubens, aka Pee-Wee Herman. He was one of the top comedy stars of the 1980s until his infamous bust at an adult movie theater in 1992. I was thinking that if he died earlier and I was at that theater at the time, I would pay tribute to him by wrapping my dick in a condom, jerk off into it, and then take the condom and throwing it at the bitch. Hey! It helps that the movie stars Margot Robbie, who showed the world in "The Wolf of Wall Street" that she and Barbie herself have similar vaginas. Plus, with so many celebrities getting hit with cellphones, water and so much more, it would be quite fashionable.
Real Rock fans in northern Michigan simply can't stand her because in the 90s, KLT was the only true rock station in town and they refused to play the bands that truly defined the times, like KoRn, Rage Against the Machine (whose guitarist, Tom Morello is a frequent guest on their shitty Stern clone morning show), Tool (whose lead singer, Maynard James Keenan was raised partially in northern Michigan) and even Metallica, with the exception of "Enter Sandman". While the WRIFs, the Z93s, and KLQs if the world had zero problems with keeping things modern, Terri, KLT, and their asshole owners from Minot, ND made sure that they kept playing the same five shitty butt rock songs over and over.
Years ago, I was told about a conversation Terri had while KLT was playing Guns 'N Roses' "Patience". As the song was playing, Ray said, "I wish he would eat a cracker", referring to Axl Rose's whistling.
Granted, Ray had every right to trash Rose. After all, another track from the album where "Patience" came from, "G 'N R Lies", was "One in a Million", a tune loaded with racial and homophobic slurs. Rose was inspired to write the diatribe after he was assaulted by a group of black people when he walked out of a charter bus after he moved from rural Indiana to California in the early 1980s. For years, Rose defended the tune, crying about rapper using the n-word all the time, to John Lennon having a song called "Woman is the Nigger of the World" to the fact that his guitarist, Slash, is himself black.
But, it took a depressing song by a gay-friendly pop group to help change his mind.
In 1990, the Pet Shop Boys recorded "Being Boring", a song lead singer Chris Tennant wrote after losing a childhood friend to AIDS. As a matter of fact, it was 'BB' that helped to inspire Axl to write the band's 1991 hit "November Rain". Because he has been able to step in other's shoes, the band did not issue "One in A Million" in a recent collector's edition of their catalog.
It's a known fact that many in the LGBTQ+ community have contributed to the mostly-hetero world of rock. People like Freddie Mercury, Rob Halford, and Lzzy Hale have helped reduce the stigma of being anti-gay. Rock has also done a better job of giving African Americans a seat at the table, especially since many of its innovators were black themselves, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who himself was gay.
When I think about "Try That In A Small Town", I would imagine that someone would create an answer song, i.e. Jody Miller's "Queen of the House" was to Roger Miller's "King of the Road" or Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" to Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady". Well, three gay men from England did so 39 years ago.
The synth-pop trio Bronski Beat gave the world "Smalltown Boy" in 1984. It was a song about what really happens in a small town: a gay boy gets attacked and flees to the big city where he's happy. But, he doesn't want to tell his mother why out of fear of revealing his sexuality to her. The song was a worldwide hit, reaching the top ten in their homeland and even Canada. But, there was one country where it only peaked at #48: America. Granted, this country was more conservative than others at the time, thank you Reagan.
If I was in a town that had just two radio stations and one's playing Jason Aldean and another's playing Bronski Beat, my heterosexual ass would be on Bronski Beat in a hurry. Even before Aldean's scandal, I would be far, far away from whatever station was playing him.
Granted, "Smalltown Boy" is about a gay man. But, like Axl Rose was to the Pet Shop Boys, I can put myself in the shoes of the song's protagonist because I've been there. It pisses me off that both my parents had happier childhoods than me. They both lived by Detroit, had far more friends and did more things. Hell, they both still talk to their old friends on a regular basis. Me? Different story. Hell, if I ever needed to stay up north, there's only one person I can think of, and she's the only friend my mother made in the 25 years she lived there.
Even my mom's friend has long felt royal fuck-ups living up there. Back in the 1960s, her father was the superintendent of my childhood school district. Back then, they only had two schools: an elementary (K-6) and a junior/senior high school (7th-12th grades). Both schools were built in the 1950s. Even back then, the town had already outgrown them, partly because of the migrant population. Well, he proposed building a high school then, and people laughed at him. He ended up resigning as superintendent and spent the rest of his life as a truck driver. Because of the bullying he got from the community, he ended up as an alcoholic.
Even worse was that some five years after my mom's friend's dad's resignation, the district hired a new superintendent who also proposed a new high school. End result? It got built. That superintendent served the district for 30 years. Under his aegis, the district built a second elementary school and the other schools expanded their buildings. However, he was an asshole. For starters, the district has a radius of 20 miles. He only lived a few miles from his office and drove a four wheel drive vehicle. The roads would be caked with snow and ice, but he didn't care. My district would be one of a small handful that didn't close that day. Buses would slide off the roads with kids in there. My father was a bus driver for the district for 21 years and the winter roads were beyond treacherous. It was like he didn't truly care for his drivers or the kids.
A number of years ago, he hired someone would should have never been a teacher.
In the 1980s, he averted a scandal after he hired a high school teacher who got fired from a district downstate for allegedly abusing a student. He simply swept it under the rug. He was also known for kissing the ass of one of my district's richest men: the local grocer.
When the high school opened in 1971, the lunchroom was VERY tiny. The original thought was that the students would probably go home, eat out, or brown bag it. However, the grocer complained for years that high schoolers would come to his store and shoplift it since there would be long lines. So, he made a deal with the superintendent: when the school expanded the lunch room, it was now a closed campus for freshmen and sophomores. So, because of one of the wealthiest men in town, someone who got wealthy from screwing over the real people who bought his grocery store for him and slaps on a mini ad for his gun shop on the back of his stores' flyers, 14- and 15-year-olds are treated like children. As much as I hate billionaires, some of the shit this guy has done makes the Meijer family look like saints. Yet, it's a sin to talk smack about this individual because he donates a lot of money to the schools and community groups all in the name of free advertising. Kinda has a Jimmy Savile vibe to it, doesn't it?
The superintendent was there until 2000, the same year I graduated high school. Both my parents hated him and I hated him worse because he acted like he cared more about the community's wealthy over the students. I had to be there daily and endure the bullying, the name-calling, and the embarrassment. By the time I graduated, I avoided extracurriculars like the plague. I simply didn't belong there.
Even more tragic was that the district named their new auditorium after him. Groan.
I know, I bitch too much about northern Michigan life. But, I can blame one person for my problems: my dad's cousin. You see, my dad and his cousin have always been close. My dad grew up near Detroit while his cousin lived on a cherry orchard some 15 miles from Traverse City. Both the cousin's parents - who are sadly still alive - were vicious racists. A few years ago, I talked about another cousin of my father's who went to jail because he shot at some black gang members at a Detroit Farmer Jack some 40 years ago who shot at him first. Well, those vicious racists raised him because the mother's sister was caught smacking him in the face as a child.
One horrible thing about those old racists were that I used to visit them if I went up north. The last time I visited, they were nice enough to compare Obama to disgraced Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Funny, since it was their boy Drumpf who got him out of jail 17 years early.
In 1977, my parents were married for a year, were living in a duplex in downtown Detroit with a black family on another flat and were laid off from their jobs. Then, my dad's cousin came on down for the weekend. He was not happy about their living conditions. He promised my parents that the next weekend, he'd be down with a trailer and they would be out of there. Well, he didn't lie.
And tragically, my parents and I had to pay the price.
You see, both my parents' siblings all lived in Detroit or Grand Rapids. Most of my cousins did the things I wanted to do. They had lots of friends. They went to the movies. Hell, they went to concerts. Three of my cousins were lucky to have a father who worked for a record company. He gave his kids the world. My uncle took his kids to movies, gave them CDs, and flew them around the world. One of the family's proudest pictures was when my uncle and his two sons posed with Adam Sandler as he was promoting one of his albums. He took them backstage to concerts. Hell, one of my cousins shared a beer with the late, great Dimebag Darrell, and he wasn't even 21 yet. Dime didn't care. Sadly, I got stuck in a part of Michigan where the sole rock station wouldn't touch Pantera with a 40-foot pole.
My cousins were lucky to have a father who gave them all a happy childhood. Maybe that's why when he died last year, they were all in tears, making it the saddest funeral I ever attended. I'm lucky I still have my parents, though who knows how long they'll have on this orb. They both still smoke and my dad coughs a lot from it. It will be a sad day when they die, but, I'll have to remind myself of what they devoided me from, and it was a happy childhood. They divorced when I was 12 and I spent my teen years listening to them blame one another for causing it. I was an A student in my early middle school years, but that slipped big time because my father didn't want to help me study. He was a high school dropout and hated school growing up. I was on my own as a result. If I had a bad report card, it was all my fault.
One good thing my mom did was give me a WebTV when I was in high school. Eventually, they were allowing users to create their own websites. So, I did. The original prototype of this here blog, "Bring Howard Stern to Northern Michigan Radio and TV" was a perfect example of something born from someone who had no seat at the table, so he built his own. I knew there were other people like-minded like me, and I was right. Just two years after creating the site, the wussy modern rock station, The Zone started playing harder rock. Hell, they even had Mudvayne's "Dig" in regular rotation for a while! If I heard correctly, for a while, The Zone was actually kicking KLT's ass in the ratings!
Funny story about The Zone: The woman who was responsible for that station finally growing a pair was a woman named Kimberly Fox. The Zone's ratings were in the shitter, so she convinced the station's owners, one of them being a former NFL player named Palmer Pyle, that harder rock would give them and sister classic rock The Bear a 1-2 punch against KLT.
And boy howdy, she was right. However, not everyone was happy at The Zone's success. One person even wanted me to libel her on this very site.
This twatnozzle claimed to be Kim's ex-husband. He wanted me to give Fox the BOTD. He claimed that she was a junkie and claimed that she added the nu metal because she was into younger men. I refused. Why? Because I didn't want to spend time in a courtroom being sued by someone I considered a savior.
The Zone obviously became Real Rock 105 and 95.5 in 2009. In 2013 the "Real" part was dropped and for a while, 95.5, which serves the Grand Traverse region. Despite being neck-and-neck with KLT, yes, the station had their haters who tried to kill it. Del Reynolds, who owned the station at the time was responsible for dropping 95.5 so he could gift the area with an easy listening station no one listened to. Then, his wife had a stroke and was forced to sell his stations to Black Diamond Broadcasting, who killed EZ 95.5 and flipped it back to rock in 2017.
And yes, there are those folks in Grayling and that dipshit from Petoskey who was KLT's afternoon jock who worked together to get Smitty fired from the station. That's another long story in itself.
Recently, the latest radio ratings book were released, and KLT leads by a mile. Rock 105/95-5 is in 7th place. Smitty's departure, a voicetracked morning show, old has-been WRIF jocks, and competition from digital media may be hurting Rock 105's ratings.
And yes, the lack of a good amount of younger people might also be hurting the station.
"BuT chUcK! detrOIT iS lOADed WiTH hoOdLumS aND CRimE!"
Every municipality has its good and bad. No town's perfect. There's towns in northern Michigan where their downtown is a ghost town. Before they allowed recreational cannabis sales, Kalkaska was a prime example. Ditto for nearby Mancelona. Some towns have the same exact problem that many big cities have, and it's being food deserts. In the 1930s, a grocer in Ellsworth named Tony Shooks formed a co-op with a daisy chain of other grocers. Throughout the early 20th century, Associated Grocers supplied everybody from modern, self-service supermarkets to tiny general stores. In the 1950s, they merged to become Spartan Stores (now SpartanNash) and in the 70s, they were privatized. Over the years, Spartan weaned out less profitable stores from their system, and in the 90s, Shooks was dropped. At the time, Ellsworth had another grocer in town, and even they had trouble staying in business. Shooks shuttered and the other store in town struggled to remain in business with multiple owners, multiple names (Ellsworth Village Market, Big George's, Ellsworth Grocery, and Ellsworth Market), and multiple closures. Today, that store is now a storage facility. The old Shooks building was everything from a resale shop to a wooden furniture store. It was recently demolished.
Like many food deserts, Ellsworth does have a Dollar General. And guess what? There's many DGs in the ghetto, too! Some of them were old supermarkets. I live in an area that lacks traditional supermarkets. There's a SpartanNash-owned Family Fare a few miles from me, but I only go there once in a blue moon. I live near two former Spartan Stores; one was another former Family Fare that's now a Planet Fitness and a former Family Foods that's now a Big Lots. Otherwise, it's either Meijer, Aldi or Target for me. And yes, DG or Family Dollar.
Yeah, I've heard it. Big cities loaded with colored folk have more crime. Lori Lightfoot was called the Murder Mayor because of Chicago's gun crime. Of course, most of the guns come from gun-happy Indiana. You've seen videos of people ransacking department stores, jewelry stores and another person robbing a Walgreens on a bicycle.
San Francisco is losing retailers left and right. A high-end shopping mall closed there recently because of break-ins and robberies. Then again, look at California in general: if you make $100,000 per year, you're in the poor house!
And the average Rethuglican will cry, "iT's PelOSi's fAUlt!"
Granted, I'm no total fan of Pelosi, either. But in reality, it's greed that's causing people to act like this. There are hard-working people who don't make enough to supply their families while their bosses bitch about wanting to reach sales quotas and profits. They're mega-rich while you have to choose between food or paying rent. Not long ago, WOOD-TV here in Grand Rapids interviewed a woman who only made $12 per hour at a factory and lived in a tent. Meanwhile, my retired mother lives in one of the cheaper apartments here in town and pays over $1,000 per month. I have a friend on disability who also lives in a cheap apartment and might have to move into a Section 8 hovel.
You see, the real reason why we have all the problems on earth can be pinpointed to one class of people: THE WEALTHY! Let's look at wages: federal minimum wage is still $7.25 per hour and it has been since 2009. Sadly, there are people who make less than $10 per hour. If you live in a $1,000-per-month apartment, it will take you 2 1/2 weeks just to afford it, minus taxes. Plus, there's those other bills, like electricity, heat, food, and so on.
Maybe that's why there are more country stations out there than any other radio format out there, followed by conservative talk, religion, and Christian music. Radio is a business that tends to attract the lowest common denominator possible. Instead of intelligent talk, they would rather air fake conspiracy theories that have long been proven false. It's like the time when I heard Rush Limbaugh proclaim that lab rats who smoked tobacco were healthier than ones who didn't. And yet, Lardass died from lung cancer.
At the end of the day, that kind of logic led to Alex Jones losing a billion-dollar lawsuit and Fox "News" losing $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems for claiming that their machines were flawed. Misinformation will be the end of us all. If you're the type of moron that thinks that anything that Drumpf or any of his minions spew out is truth, chances were that you slept through social studies and history class. And now that we have Nazis like Ron DeSantis forcing schools in Florida to censor the truth about that and science, prepare for a dumber future.
I've come from a small town and now live in a metropolitan area of over a million folks. Stupidity doesn't know color, sex, religion, sexuality or creed. If you can contribute to society, awesome. If you can't, fuck you. Up north, I had to deal with assholes who used me by having me drive all over for them. Sadly, it's the same here. I even love to tell people to Uber it. Small towns are the same shit as bigger cities but with fewer people.
Some white people, like Jason Aldean never die, they just smell that way.
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