I had this seventeen-year-old kid call into the station tonight…
“You guys play Sufjan Stevens?”

We don’t.  We play a lot of cool shit at this station, but Sufan is not one of them.  And that’s okay, because…well..you don’t just play Sufjan Stevens…especially for this target demographic. This kid was so proud that he had just discovered Sufjan, and I suddenly became very elitist, because I was introduced to him years ago (which, to the indie crowd, is even still too late).  He continued to name off artists that he thought we should play.

“Have you ever heard of Regina Spektor?”
“…Ryan Adams?” (to which I thought, are you fucking kidding me, everyone’s heard of Ryan Adams.)

And I suddenly felt bad for feigning shared excitement of his having revealed these new artists to himself.  I felt guilty for being so snide about it.  I realized I was the music-equivalent of the PC-Gamer guys I work with, who call me “nub sauce” or whatever because I play Sims2.

1337!

This listener guy went on a short-lived rant about how artists like these don’t come to Indiana, and are never played on Indiana radio.  “So get out your fucking iPod,” I almost said.  But then, there will always be people who want to hear their favorite artists played on the radio. What is the phenomenon that a song is made more special because it is played somewhat randomly on a radio station?  I’m would mock this, but I have fallen victim to this with Sirius satellite radio many a time. [Tupelo Honey by Van Morrison? WEEEEE! Even though I have it on my iPod, my computer, and every mixtape I own! Weeee!!!]

But I digress.  After working at Best Buy for a year, I’ve realized where my elitism shines the brightest:  people who have the internet and have no idea how to use it to its full potential.   The early twenties-something crowd is totally exempt from this.  I’ll go into IE to look up something and they will immediately interject: “Don’t worry about it, I can look it up when I get home…”  And really old people don’t count because, seriously, we let old people get away with everything.  Maybe it’s just me, but Baby Boomers are, perhaps, the worst with the internet.  Yesterday, my mom went on about some recipe she wanted to send me.  “I’ll mail it to you,” she said.  I replied,”Or you could just e-mail it to me.”  “Yeah..but, well — by the time I have it typed out and everything…”   Yes, exactly, by the time you have it typed out and everything, you can just click a couple buttons and send it and save yourself a stamp. Many Baby Boomers with whom I’ve interacted seem to be in this internet usage limbo — they have it, and they kinda get it, but they really have no idea how much it can help them.

I bring this up because I spent fifteen minutes with a couple in their late-fifties from Long Island trying to find a CD that:
a) had Doo-Wop in the title
b) had people dancing on the cover
c) was 9.99
d) had a song called “Trickle, Trickle”

Also? I had a lady come in and ask if we, little Bloomington Store 858, carried an instructional wakeboarding video. C’mon, people.
There is a reason “Google” is now a verb.