J-Pop After Midnight: Best Idea I ever Had

Recently, I decided to alter the programming on Radio Free WNOHGB. This came after there was some email furor over the whole decision to start varying the five o’clock hour. It used to be the James Darren hour, then I tried to fit an hour of Robin Williams Live at the Met. But it was always four hours of anime in the morning, an hour of all domestic stuff, four hours of J-Pop in the afternoon (when I usually woke up), an hour of James Darren, Frank Sinatra, or Tony Bennett, and then for fourteen hours it was pretty much anything and everything I had in my archive. It made for a slightly chaotic schedule, but people seemed to enjoy it. However, when I removed the James Darren & Friends hour, I got feedback. Negative feedback. Amazing, since I didn’t get a whole lot of feedback when I ran the station in the beginning, or up until then. So, I was making slight changes and adjustments to the lists, but I never switched the times around. Suddenly, one list drops off the face of the earth and then I get emails.

Wow.

Anyway, as I was saying, I shook the schedule up and created twelve distinctly different playlists to run throughout the day, giving a little more variety and just trying to give listeners a better understanding of what I consider to be good music. While I was going through and recataloguing everything, I noticed something. I had over 11 hours of J-Pop in my archive (live365 only gives me 1.1 gigs). So since I had this five hour hole in my schedule from 2am to 7am, I decided that I was going to take advantage of that and run a playlist I called J-Pop After Midnight from 1am until 7am. It was original a one hour show, but then I just ran out of stuff to play. Pretty much, my schedule from midnight goes like this:

0000 to 0100: Midnight Domestic Hour
0100 to 0700: J-Pop After Midnight
0700 to 0800: Waking Up with Dennis Miller
0800 to 1000: Morning Anime Show (Opening Songs)
1000 to 1100: The Comedy Hour
1200 to 1300: Lunchtime Domestic Hour
1300 to 1500: J-Pop in the Afternoon
1500 to 1700: Afternoon Anime Show (Ending Songs)
1700 to 1800: The John Williams Hour
1800 to 2000: The Three Crooners (Darren, Sinatra, and Bennett)
2000 to 0000: The Anything-Goes School of Music

The playlist titles are just on-the-fly things I came up with, but it’s a pretty accurate cross-section of what I like to listen to at any given moment. At 12 midnight and 12 noon, listeners are treated to a slim selection of tunes put out here in America. It’s kind of like a cleaning of the pallette before we dive back into the Japanese groove. I inserted Dennis Miller, America’s Favorite Sarcasmoblaster right befor ethe morning show, and I split all the anime tunes up into opening songs and closing songs, since most people have a preference for a particular type of song they like to listen to. Some people like Kenshin’s opening song, but hate the ending song. I’m of a similiar disposition. And the interesting thing is, that most of the lists are set to randomly shuffle everytime it gets played. So no show is the same every day, with the exception of the domestic stuff. That’s pretty much going to stay the same list, without shuffling. Since I put these new lists into motion on Friday night, I hadn’t really had much opportunity to sit down and listen to my adjustment. Now that I’m sitting here and listening to the show, I’m thinking that it was a pretty fucking brilliant idea to have 6 hours of straight J-Pop. Why? For some reason, the best time for me to listen to J-Pop is at night. I don’t know why, but it just seems like I love listening to it while I’m feeling the creative juices flow, and that happens to be at night. When I’m at work, I usually just have my playlist set to random and I fast-forward through most of the anime tracks. Also, I uploaded a whole mess of new stuff from some of my favorite artists, including Utada Hikaru and aiko. aiko went and slipped a new single by me, naughty girl! Grabbed that right before Audiogalaxy got hamstrung by the all-powerful anal retentive RIAA. Let’s hear it for facist litigation!

I think I’ll just groove to J-Pop for a little while longer, before I decide to collapse into bed.

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