#plj

.07 

Inktober 2017 

A lazier one bc I'm tired from drawing all day 

While I don’t give my location because of safety concerns, I am willing to say I’ve lived in the Tri-State Area all my life.  And thus...NYC Radio Stations!  I’ve seen my fair share of stations come and go in my life.  However, it was normally due to unpopularity of the genre (Country Music is one of my go-to genres and it wasn’t really popular when I was growing up so any station we got was gone very quickly).  But tonight, at 7, we will be saying goodbye to PLJ, a station I grew up with!  The company that owned it ran into financial trouble and sold off some of their assets.  And while the Country station they owned was sold to another multi-genre radio company and has been kept as-is (considering they own other Pop stations in the area, it would make more sense for them to NOT oversaturate their own market), PLJ was sold off to a religious radio company.  So...keeping it as its normal Rock/Pop/Contemporary was never in the cards.

Growing up, my father listened to a station that I can barely remember as it went off the air when I was pretty young, and my mother listened to a Country station that became a Spanish station, then another Country station that became a Rap/Hip-Hop/Pop station.  But when Dad needed another go-to after his first station went away and Mom was going between periods in which we actually had Country stations...we defaulted to PLJ!  It had just the right mix of eras and didn’t stray far into some of the less savory genres, so it was a station that everyone in the family enjoyed.

It’s from Saturday Night 80s and the 80s at 8 Weekday shows that I learned to love the music of that decade, despite the parts of it I did live through being too young for me to remember.  There were many happy times of me listening to the radio in my room (which I still have...although it’s broken and collecting dust) and singing along with Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Pat Benetar, and basically any Rock or Pop artist from that era that you can think of!  Of buying recording tapes and recording the songs to play on my Walkman.  I discovered Evanescance through them in the early 2000s, and through that and Pandora I learned of my real love of Goth and Symphonic Metal.  And they were normally what I defaulted to in the car going home if I had my choice of stations that weren’t on commercials.

In recent years, I’ve listened to more Country, but that’s because I was just happy to have a station again and wanted to keep it.  That and commercial breaks weren’t agreeing with my drive (I’d be more likely to get Lite FM or Fresh FM to be playing actual music when others had commercials).  And my MP3 Player for those longer trips/mornings when music isn’t on.  However, I’ve always gone back there when the stars aligned and I wasn’t being hounded with commercials.  And being able to hear one of my old favorites that were still being given occasional air time since they were well loved by the demographic.  So it is quite sad to see them go all the same.

Yes, there are other options.  Both the Oldies and Classic Rock stations are more about the 80s and 90s nowadays than the 60s and 70s they were playing when I was a teenager.  And both Lite FM and Fresh FM DO have a similar play field to PLJ.  However...this is still a piece of my childhood with so many memories attached that will be going away forever.  After 48 years of being on the radio...I didn’t realize the station was THAT much older than me!