Kassia is fond of saying that around ‘Loper HQ, April Fools isn’t a day, it’s a season. However, this year, real life has gotten in the way, so in honor of that, I’ve decided to point out a few actual real things that are far more absurd than most of the jokes you’ll see today.

Let’s begin, shall we.

• Continuing Record Company Cluelessness About the 21st Century
  Last week, there was an article in Entertainment Weekly about the rush-release of the new Gnarls Barkley album. Apparently, the fact that it leaked online a few weeks early caught Atlantic records by surprise.

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“Certain songs,” Craig Finn sang on The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, “they get scratched into our souls.” That’s the basis of our latest feature: a look at the songs that have done just that. These aren’t necessarily our favorite songs or the songs that we think are the best, but rather songs that — every single time we hear them — instantly transport us back to a place and time in which that song is forever intertwined. This is one of the reasons we so hate the RIAA’s attempted stranglehold on the dissemination of music: you never know where that next certain song is going to come from.

You know how sometimes you hear an album — or even a song — for the first time, and without even realizing it, by the time its over, your whole perception of the world has forever been changed? That was what hearing The Clash for the very first time did to me. It was late 1978, I was a junior in at San Joaquin Memorial High School in Fresno, California, and I pretty much liked what other white, suburban males my age liked: Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Yes, etc.

But, something had happened: about a year before, I’d started reading rock magazines — Circus, Rolling Stone and most especially, CREEM. And those rock magazines were all buzzing to various degrees about something called “Punk Rock.” Punk seemed strange and weird, and it was very much unheard on Fresno radio. So even though the Sex Pistols had already crashed and burned on American soil, I actually hadn’t heard a note of their music.

But I had heard The Cars, and their debut album was the very first punk-associated thing I ever bought. But of course, The Cars were really “new wave,” which was a totally different head, man, so I finally took the Punk plunge with Rocket to Russia by the Ramones and Marquee Moon by Television. Those are still two of my favorite records, and they just whetted my appetite for more.

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I’d like to wish a happy 25th Birthday to KFSR, 90.7 FM, the radio station at California State University, Fresno.

I know that if you check their website, it claims that they went on the air in the evening of October 31, 1982, but that’s dead wrong.

I can totally see how the mistake happened: in the early days, it always made total sense to combine the anniversaries with Halloween parties, and over the years, it just became accepted that the station was born on Halloween.

But it wasn’t: KFSR went on the air at noon on Saturday, October 30, 1982. I should know, I was there, having been looking forward to it since I got involved with the station in early 1981. And a quarter-century later, here’s what I remember for sure:

• It had been raining really hard.
• The first song played was Ramones “We Want The Airwaves.”
• Nothing was ever the same.

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It was just a bit of serendipity that it even happened, actually. It was the day before the Super Bowl, and Rox was at the store, picking up supplies for our yearly way-too-much-food party. Normally, I’m conscripted to go to the grocery store with her, but since I’d been out of town of a couple of weeks, she felt pity on me.

Which is a short way of saying that I shouldn’t have even been there when the phone rang, and since I thought it was her calling from the store, asking about whether or not we had enough brown sugar or something, I actually answered the phone. Which never ever never happens.

But it wasn’t Roxanne at all, it was Arbitron, and they needed me. It was about fracking time.

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Obviously, I’m thankful for family, friends, health, employment. But forget all of that, because here is my list of the Medialoper-y things for which I’m thankful right now:

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I’m probably opening myself up for non-stopping ribbing by admitting to this, but I listen to country music radio. At least I did until KZLA — who have always called themselves “America’s most listened to country station” — abruptly became “Movin 93.9″ last Thursday.

I listened to KZLA’s morning show on my way to work Thursday morning but when I got back in my car to head home that evening I was shocked to hear “Mambo #5″ coming out of my speakers. My first thought was that it was on the wrong station, however a quick glance and the pretty purple LCD screen told me that I was still on 93.9. Something was wrong. Very wrong. I promptly turned the volume down and called my husband on my cellphone. When I got home, I checked the headlines online only to find that it was even a surprise to the station air staff.

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So there I was, sitting in traffic, round about where the 110 meets the 5 and everybody seems to think polite merging involves cutting off other drivers, when I heard the opening riff of “Marquee Moon”. On the radio, because you know, it’s not so unusual for me to hear that song on a mix CD. But on the radio? During a radio show about money, markets, and business?

Anomaly, I thought. Until the Luna song. At least I’m pretty sure it was Luna. They definitely played Wilco, and I’m almost positive I heard a bit of Bob Mould. Alas, Marketplace from American Public Media isn’t a show about music. It’s a show that takes a daily look at the news of the world from the perspective of how it impacts business. The centerpiece of every show is “The Numbers”, a wrap-up of how the various markets did that day, though you can guess because they play happy or sad music as an intro, depending. Yesterday, by the way, was the sad music.

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According to today’s LA Times the RIAA is suing XM over it’s new device which allows subscribers to record up to 50 hours of XM broadcast on a portable player. It’s sort of like TiVo for radio, but it’s also the digital equivalent of what many of us did as kids back in the pre-digital era.

You’d think that the battle against taping music off of the radio would have been settled long ago but, as we all know, content is so much more valuable once it’s been digitized. Apparently all pre-existing licensing and copyright law must be abandoned in an effort to save content from pirates consumers who simply want to time-shift and consume content on their own schedule.

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Way back when, I wrote about the future of radio (there was a Part Two as well), and I discussed how services like Pandora are opening up new ways to find cool new music. I also discussed some of the regulatory issues that make services like Pandora…frustrating. Let me quote from a Chicago Tribune article on the topic to remind of just a few:

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A recent article in the LA Times asked the question: where have all of Howard Stern’s listeners gone? As Howard himself complained to Entertainment Weekly, not enough have followed him to Sirius, and as the early ratings have shown, many didn’t stick around to listen to Adam Carolla or David Lee Roth.

I can’t speak for the 9,999,999 listeners who didn’t go to Sirius, but as a Stern detractor who became a listener who became a fan over the past decade, I can tell you why I didn’t go to Sirius and why I’m probably not helping Adam Carolla’s ratings.

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