Good And Gone

XM Satellite Radio recently announced they were eliminating their punk channel, Fungus 53, from the company's programming lineup. When you tune in to 53 now, there's an all AC/DC format which is being used to pimp the Aussie metal legends' latest album. You know, the one only WalMart gets to sell. I know all the morons in my hometown will flock to Sam Walton's place to buy the thing, whether or not their white-trash girlfriends have been treated badly while working there.

But this entry isn't about AC/DC, retail giants that crush small local businesses or any of my ex-girlfriends. Nope. This entry is about how the folks behind Fungus were cut from the same kind of soiled adult-diaper cloth that gave us the ball-sniffing palm-phuckers who run commercial radio. Consider XM's Lou Brutus, your typical "radio dude" whose penchant for self-promotion is inherent to his being the way breathing is to you and I. If you visit Bruto's website, you'll see him posing with a plethora of stars (Look! Lou with Jonathan of Korn! Lou hanging with Dave Grohl!). You'll also see him posing with folks with real cred, like Jello Biafra, a guy who, in the past, might have written a song or two about the very cesspits LouLou calls his kingdom. No kidding: On the off-chance when there are no celebrities in the room, Lou wants you to know that the guy who's taking his picture just happens to be from Rolling Stone. (Attention Expectant Mothers: If you don't breast-feed your children enough, your children may develop the exact same behavior.) It should be noted that Lou-Lou has never exhibited any real kind of vision for music like, say, KEXP's Kevin Cole or Nic Harcourt. Loobie raved about Goldfinger's "FTN" and became a massive bore about it to some of the unfortunate folks in his circle, raving about the song to people who were already in the know about the track four years prior. (Jon Zellner, XM Senior Vice President of Programming, is probably too busy drinking diet soda and watching his deluxe box set of Friends DVDs to ever care about music in the first place.)

Of course, you might say this blog sounds like sour grapes, due to the fact that The AP Show (the podcast you can download from our site, as well as iTunes), started out as a piece of exclusive XM programming. AP's association with XM lasted for over 30 shows from August 2006 to March 2007, where we featured exclusive interviews and acoustic sessions featuring folks like Paramore, Chiodos, Sparta, Gym Class Heroes, Strike Anywhere, Head Automatica and many others, as well as the charming/annoying repartee you've come to love/hate from Scott Heisel and myself. At no point did XM offer any kind of financial restitution to AP to offset the cost of producing the shows; our show cost XM nothing to run. In response, XM did nothing to promote the more exclusive aspects of our show to the world at large, but they were fond of sending press releases discussing their latest plans for world domination. Hell, we couldn't even get mentioned in their fucking newsletter.

It should be stated that we were approached by XM because their operatives knew virtually nothing about the whole pop-punk/emo/screamo culture and frankly, wanted no parts of it. They knew how to program every band that ever rocked a Pennywise sticker on their road cases, and little else. They wanted us to cover the stuff they didn't care about that was gaining traction with listeners.

When we were given our termination notice after seven months, we obviously asked Brutus why. He said, "We got some email complaints." We asked him to forward them our way, but he said it wouldn't matter because the decision was irreversible and "we didn't fit." (Duh.) When we pressed him for more details, he threw a hissyfit about how a Sirius-related boombox was featured in one of our product guides in an issue of AP, and that the three-line item (with accompanying photo), "has people here pissed." (The ones who should've been pissed were the XM publicists who didn't think to send us deets on their company's products in time to be mentioned in the column in the first place.) When we asked him about the lack of support from XM regarding promoting the show, he did that little "what did I do?" dance similar to the way a sociopath child torturing animals acts when he's discovered. (In all fairness, there were times when we were late delivering the show to XM due to our personal ineptitude, but that seems like cookie crumbs to the bigger picture.)

So what happened after we got fired from XM? We offered the podcast for free via iTunes and the AP site. You know what happened then? A huge influx in download stats, reader mail and interest from bands and labels wanting their music heard on the show. Being tossed off of XM was one of the best things that ever happened to us. That's not sour grapes; that the freshest nectar you can get.

It's just naivete on behalf of AP (back then) and XM subscribers (especially the AP-hatin' ones) to think that punk rock (in all of its misnomered myriad subcultures) was going to be given a fair shake by a clueless overpaid corporate lackey. I might've considered going down "to corporate HQ" to find Brutus and drain the blood out of him so people in remote arid regions could have some kind of fluid to make their toilets flush. But he seems pretty blood-free and soulless in the first place.

So RIP, Fungus 53. But cheer up, XM listeners: There's a new Nickelback disc coming out, and Lou can't wait to show you some pix of him bro-ing down on, er... with Chad Kroeger.