We got Jacked

The radio idiocy devolution that was 105.1 "The Buzz" (WBZU) has reached its primordial blob endpoint as WCHY "Charlie" FM. I have disgustedly tracked WBZU's decline via personal email rants for years. The reason I had taken any interest at all in the station was because of their once-exclusive devotion to 80's hits. Their haste to abandon a pure eighties format and obstinate refusal to ever backtrack from their compounding programming missteps earned my undying scorn.

Format-wise, WBZU had pretty much completed its transformation to the new, faddish Variety Hits by February. The call-letter change this month just formalized things. The ridiculous "Charlie" moniker is part of the format: Variety Hits is known as the "Jack format." As this newsletter explains:

The JACK format debuted in Vancouver, B.C., three years ago, but in the U.S. it began on 105.5 FM in Denver a year ago on April 14. The format was created by Bob Perry and named after his radio alias, "Cadillac Jack" Garrett...

Apparently it is mandatory that every station of that format be a Jack, Joe, Dave, Doug, or some such. This site has a rather extensive listing of the spreading plague.

The mercy killing of 105.1 was announced in a chirpy, upbeat manner:

Eighties-formatted WBZU (The Buzz) made the move at 1pm today, becoming "105-1 Charlie FM," with the slogan "We play anything!"

Most of what you need to know about what was wrong with WBZU can be mined from that one sentence. I would sooner call Michael Jackson "child-safe" than I would have called the remaining, gutted shell of BZU "eighties-formatted." As early as 2002, less than two years into their existence, The Buzz was losing its focus, playing "The eighties, and more!"

The absurd conceit in play here can be described as follows: First is the notion that in order to get a solid listening bloc among age demographic X, you have to play music spanning time period Y, with the spread of years covered by X and Y being comparable. By itself, that's a perfectly reasonable notion. The problematic, follow-up notion is that X can be as large as a 20-year bloc, or that Y can span any contiguous set of years seamlessly. Combine these ideas and suddenly we have asininity on stilts. In my opinion, there are some pop music boundaries that are unbridgeable. The beginning of the video music era is one such boundary. The onset of the grunge era is another.

Consequently, The Buzz crafted atrocious playlists that had eighties standards rolled in with Margaritaville, Lying Eyes, The Boys are Back in Town, and Crazy Love (Buffet, Eagles, Thin Lizzy, Poco respectively). Unwilling to limit themselves to straddling just one gigantic musical gulf, they also played Melissa Etheridge, Hootie and the Blowfish, and other contemporary pop. I feel a little bit sorry for the poor on-air bastards that had to cue such jarring lineups, but if a guy is unwilling to take a stand and say "I will not in any way segue from Billy Idol into Deep Blue Something," then really he's become part of the problem.

The fact that management, as late as this year, persisted in calling WBZU "eighties-formatted" just confirms their cluelessness and denial of how far they had drifted and how thoroughly they corrupted the original concept. Quite obviously, the trend toward "we play anything," has been there at least three years already, chipping away at the station's identity before it had matured, and assuring that a reliable listener base would never take root.