Everything That’s Wrong with Classic Rock Radio

Or, Why This Guy in His Middle 40s is Nostalgic for Something He Didn't Live Through

For Tommy and the Hooligan

I still love FM radio. I know this makes me sound like someone who still owns a VCR and refers to the internet as “the information superhighway,” but hear me out. Terrestrial radio still has extraordinary power, especially in the Detroit suburbs (the actual city is teeming with excellent new hip hop, soul, and jazz), where we cater to the classic rock demographic — the boomer who still thinks getting high from time to time is sticking it to the man, while simultaneously yelling on Facebook about Democratic hoaxes to strangers they’ll never meet. It’s a beautiful contradiction, really, like watching someone in a Che Guevara t-shirt complain about property taxes.

But classic rock radio is broken. Not just a little broken, like when your check engine light comes on and you just put tape over it. I’m talking fundamentally, structurally, cosmically broken. And the worst part? Everyone involved seems content to let it die a slow death by a thousand cuts of Takin’ Care of Business.

The Morning Zoo Apocalypse

Morning shock jocks are the absolute fucking worst, and I need to get this rage out early. These people have never been entertaining. Not once. Not ever. Not even accidentally. They exist in a weird space where they think making fart noises and talking about their failed marriages between songs (if they play songs at all) makes them Howard Stern, when really they’re just three divorced guys named Brad who peaked in high school and somehow convinced a program director they had “chemistry.”

Everything becomes about them. You get Brad, Brad, and Lady Brad doing a twenty-minute bit about Brad #1’s colonoscopy. They laugh at their own jokes like hyenas choking on helium. They do “pranks” that would make a middle schooler cringe, and most of those pranks are pre-recorded by a shitheel company that realized sister-humping greedheads at soul-sucking establishments like iHeartRadio would pay absurd amounts for terrible shit. And somehow, inexplicably, they have listeners who call themselves part of the “morning crew family,” which is the saddest phrase I’ve ever typed.

The Playlist Problem, or: Why We Don’t Need Eddie Money

The repetitive playlist issue is where classic rock radio truly reveals its contempt for its own format. These stations play the same 100-200 songs on a loop so tight you could set your watch by when Free Bird comes on. You know what’s wild? There are literally thousands of incredible songs from the classic rock era. Deep cuts. B-sides. Album tracks that would blow your mind if you’d ever heard them. But instead, we get Hotel California for the forty-seventh time this week.

Do we really need Eddie Money? I’m asking this as a genuine philosophical question. Do we need Two Tickets to Paradise ever again? And more importantly, do we need Loverboy’s Working for the Weekend on a Saturday afternoon? It’s the laziest possible song choice. It’s radio programming by Mad Libs. “Let’s see, it’s Saturday, people are stuck working, so let’s play the song about... being stuck working! Johnson, you’re a genius! Give yourself a raise and play Margaritaville next!”

And fucking Bad to the Bone. Every time George Thorogood’s guitar riff starts, somewhere a boomer with gout and high blood pressure convinces himself he’s still a badass. He’s not. He’s an old man who needs to take his blood pressure medication and stop pretending he was ever actually dangerous. The most rebellious thing he did last week was park in a compact car space at Costco.

The thing is, these stations have access to Led Zeppelin’s entire catalog, but they act like Kashmir and Stairway to Heaven are the only songs that ever existed, or (more frequently) they slam the needle the other way and give us something usually called “Get the Led Out” in which they play three or four Zep tunes in a row, but never When the Levee Breaks or The Rain Song. Pink Floyd made more than three albums. The Who wrote songs besides Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again. They could serve up incredibly cool punk songs that exist smack in the middle of the preferred timeline for these stations. New Wave? Not a chance. Fuck off. That music never sees the light of day because some algorithm decided that Smoke on the Water tests better with the 54-year-old male demographic.

Corporate Consolidation: The Death of the DJ

Here’s where things get truly depressing. Most classic rock stations are owned by massive corporations like iHeartMedia, which treat radio stations the way McDonald’s treats hamburgers — maximum efficiency, minimum variation, everything focus-grouped to death. They use research-driven playlists designed to attract the largest, most homogeneous audience for advertisers, which means playing it safe to the point of musical cowardice.

Remember when DJs had actual power? When they could say, “You know what? Today we’re playing side two of Abbey Road all the way through because it’s a masterpiece and you need to hear it”? Now they’re glorified button-pushers, reading scripted banter between songs chosen by an algorithm in another state. They have no autonomy, no ability to share their knowledge, and certainly no permission to take risks.

Local radio used to mean something. The DJ knew the city, knew the audience, knew what would work on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Now it’s all syndicated, homogenized, pasteurized, and lobotomized. The same playlist in Detroit as in Denver as in Dallas. Radio as beige wallpaper. And the true crime? The true crime is homogenizing all of it to fit into the same open space in the vast monoculture wall. There’s no good fucking reason whatsoever that radio in L.A. sounds like radio in Austin sounds like radio in New Orleans sounds like radio in Chicago. All these places have their own culture, and culture is a small word that encompasses more than I have room to write about, but I fucking assure you, they DO NOT SOUND THE SAME.

The Diversity Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Classic rock radio operates like a men’s club that time-traveled from 1973 and decided to just stay there. The lack of diversity is staggering on every level. Where are the Black artists who literally invented rock and roll? Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Jimi Hendrix (who gets played, but not enough), and countless others shaped the genre, but you’d never know it listening to most classic rock stations. They act like rock started with white British kids in 1965.

And female artists? Forget about it. Heart and Joan Jett get token plays. Stations treat women in rock like they’re exotic specimens rather than fundamental architects of the genre. Female DJs are equally few, which creates this weird echo chamber where everyone sounds like the same middle-aged white guy doing his best Casey Kasem impression.

The Forgotten Eras and the Refusal to Evolve

Classic rock stations have decided that rock music happened between 1968 and 1989, with maybe a grudging acknowledgment that the ‘90s existed if they absolutely have to play Interstate Love Song. Everything before 1965? Doesn’t exist. The ‘50s and early ‘60s, when rock and roll was being invented? Not classic enough, apparently. The 2000s and beyond? They’d rather play Freebird twice in a row.

This creates a bizarre situation where “classic rock” is frozen in amber, never expanding, never evolving, just slowly dying as its core audience ages out. Meanwhile, there are incredible bands making music right now who could use radio support, who could help prove that rock isn’t dead, but classic rock radio ignores them completely (and I fucking understand what the word ‘classic’ means). It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: by refusing to play new rock music, they ensure that rock stays culturally stagnant, which they then use as evidence that rock is dead.

The Technical Insults

Here’s a small thing that drives me absolutely insane: DJs talking over song intros and cutting outros. I understand they do this to squeeze in more ads, to maximize revenue, to keep things moving. But Slash wrote that guitar intro for Sweet Child O’ Mine for us. It’s not background music for your self-promotion. Let him cook, goddammit. Stop walking the ramp.

When you fade out Layla before the piano coda, you’re literally cutting off half the song. When you talk over Roger Daltrey’s scream in Won’t Get Fooled Again, you’re committing a crime against rock history. These aren’t just songs — they’re carefully constructed pieces of art, and radio stations treat them like ring tones, which makes want to check to see if flamethrowers are legal in Michigan (and it turns out THEY ARE!).

The Creativity Vacuum

This might be the saddest part: classic rock radio has no imagination. None. They could do literally anything and they choose to do nothing.

How hard would it be to let listeners call in with their “perfect album side” — five songs from their favorite artist — and just play it? Or dedicate one hour a week to playing a full album, start to finish, the way the artist intended? Remember when albums were coherent artistic statements instead of just collections of potential singles?

What about a “ridiculous request hour” where the most absurd, off-the-wall song request gets played? Or an “After Dark” program with darker, heavier material? You could play the weird stuff, the experimental tracks, the deep cuts that never see daylight.

Instead, we get Alice Cooper hosting a show where the programming is identical to the regular station programming. Alice Cooper! The guy who bit the head off a bat (no wait, that was Ozzy), who pioneered theatrical shock rock, who made his career being weird and dangerous — and now he’s playing The Boys are Back in Town in the same time slot it played yesterday. What’s the fucking point? It’s like hiring Gordon Ramsay to microwave frozen dinners.

The Endgame

Classic rock radio is committing slow suicide, and everyone involved seems fine with it. They’re so afraid of losing their core demographic that they refuse to take any risks, play anything interesting, or acknowledge that the world has changed since 1987. They’ve confused “classic” with “unchangeable,” turned “proven hits” into “funeral dirge,” and transformed what should be a celebration of rock history into a sterile, corporate-controlled museum where nothing lives and nothing grows.

The tragedy is that rock music is incredible. It’s powerful, diverse, emotional, complex, and still being made by talented artists. But classic rock radio treats it like a corpse to be preserved rather than a living tradition to be celebrated and expanded. They could be introducing new generations to deep cuts, showcasing how rock evolved, supporting new artists, taking risks, and actually using the medium of radio to create something meaningful.

Instead, they’re playing Here I Go Again again. And again. And again.

Until one day, we’ll all realize that classic rock radio didn’t die— it just faded out during the outro while the DJ talked over it, trying to squeeze in one more ad for a local mattress store.