SO LONG, HFS

And hola, el zol. (I don't speak Spanish, but I'm guessing that, loosely translated, "siempre de fiesta" works out to "music everyone can agree on--even the boss.")

Long before the airwaves were paved over and strip-malled, WHFS was a legendary alternative-rock station. I remember listening to it when I was in high school, back when it was still on the trailing edge of being "cool" (the trailing part, though, is probably why I had actually heard of it). It had an awful signal back then, meaning that tuning it in from the Virginia suburbs was something of an accomplishment that, in its own right, gave one some limited hipster cred.

Of course, if HFS hadn't spent the past decade trying to attract a sliver of that lucrative 15-to-17-year-old skateboarder demo by playing Lincln Park (or whatever 3l33t misspelling they chose for their moniker) on the half-hour, maybe it wouldn't have come to siempre time. Of course, the same could be said for almost every cookie-cutter station out there. A few years back, I agreed to periodically listen to snippets of new "hot rotation" songs as part of an ongoing automated survey purportedly used to refine playlists at Top 40 and AC radio stations. A robotic voice would call, play six seconds of some crappy, angry-but-not-angry-enough-to-worry-the-parents Matchbox 20-sounding song and ask me to rate it from 1 ("like") to 6 ("really, really like"). The song would invariably suck, so I'd stab my phone's zero or star key until they'd pipe another snippet of an identical-sounding song down the line, which would also invariably suck.

Not surprisingly, the robot stopped calling me after a handful of times and, as we all know, Matchbox 20 achieved its longstanding goal of world domination shortly thereafter. Hey, don't blame me -- I tried.