As you've gleaned by now, music is one of my main reasons for living. On this day 15 years ago, however, most music suddenly seemed insignificant to me.
I had to attend a staff meeting at a previous job during the afternoon of September 11, 2001. During the ride into work, I kept listening to coverage, mainly on NPR's KWMU, of the fallout from the horrific terrorist attacks and kept listening even after I'd parked. It took some time before I finally emerged from the car.
For two weeks after the attacks, when scanning the AM and FM dials, I treated music as a hot potato. It's one thing to avoid heavy metal tunes on Christmas Eve because they don't fit the mood. When nearly 3,000 lives have been snuffed out for no good reason, though, it's perfectly reasonable to think that music, aside from Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings or Sting's "Fragile," is intrusive. Even when there was no new information about the attacks and the news was repetitive or incorrect, I still thought I should hear the coverage. Listening to most forms of music, even cerebral ones, felt inappropriate.
About two weeks later, I got back into a music-listening routine. I heard a well-programmed 5 a.m. hour's worth of singer-songwriter tunes on KDHX's former program, "It's Late," and thought, "I guess this is as good of a way as any to ease back into one of my passions."
On this blog, for the most part, when I write about radio stations, I mostly tout the great, diverse music I've heard. If I'd been writing this blog on September 11, 2001, however, I would have been praising KWMU and KMOX for their news coverage. Of all the days in my life, 9/11/01 was the most conspicuous one in which radio news justifiably took precedence over music.
