Sound of Silence
Ah, Good Friday. The day everything seems to be, um, dead (including Jesus Christ).
I tried staying away from my laptop and the Internet, really I did, even foregoing breakfast and lunch because I wanted to fast. But while I was napping around 1 p.m. when I realized in horror I had tons of work pending. So I got up, ate a hurried meal (there was tuna and soft taco wrap on the table), threw on some clothes and caught a jeep to the Our Lady of Light Parish in Cainta. Yes, I covered the crucifixion re-enactment in Church for one of my current rakets. Don't worry, it wasn't particularly bloody/gory.
Anyway, since I couldn't stand any of the shows being aired on television, I switched to radio. This, I understand, was a challenging task on my part considering that compared to TV, there were less stations on auto-pilot that were up and running even on Good Friday, with a majority of Metro Manila stations promising to go back on air on Easter Sunday.
So I scanned the entire FM band and took note of the radio stations that, bless their souls, were on-air during Good Friday, and got the following:
1. 93.9 iFM. This otherwise noisy, irritating station was unusually subdued. They were playing "Out of the Blue" by Michael Learns to Rock and "After All" by Chicago. It was not the last time I would hear Chicago that afternoon.
2. 95.5 Pinas FM. I didn't even know this station existed. According to Wikipedia, this station (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWDM-FM) officially went on-air this week. Awesome. Nothing impressive with this station, really, except...they played "Eye of The Tiger," Time After Time" (acoustic, prolly by Matchbox Twenty), and "Why Not?" by Hilary Duff, one after the other.
That left me confused. I understand these radio stations are fully automated, i.e. there's a set playlist, with canned spiels in the middle, correct? But how random can they get? Did someone mix up the playlists? How did "80's Rock" get mixed up with "Early 21st Century Facepalms"?
After that Duff ditty I heard the Hannah Montana theme "Best of Both Worlds" by Miley Cyrus. It creeps me out how she sounds so much like Hilary Duff, who despite being blonde by the way earns my respect for not doing drugs or basically ruining her life like Lindsay Lohan has done.
My sister has Lizzie McGuire cassette tapes. I should tease her about this in the next few days.
3. 97.9 Home Radio. Pretty safe radio station, playing "Long and Lasting Love" by Crystal Gayle. Although it gets pretty annoying with the way they have canned spiels after every three songs declaring the station's observance of Holy Week. K. See if you don't crazy hearing that on loop for more than an hour. Now I know why the shuffle option was invented for radio.
4. 98.7 Master's Touch. Classical music. Scary, if you ask me, since all I could hear were ghostly cathedral voices, they were prolly playing the royal wedding's musical repertoire. Yes, the kind of music you would hear in Lord of the Rings. Or V for Vendetta (last scene). I can tolerate classical music, alright, but not what they were playing yesterday.
5. 101.9 Tambayan. I remembered this station mostly for their slogan "For Life!" when I was in grade school. Their latter slogans "Alam Mo Na Yan!" and "Bespren!" sealed their jologs reputation for me. Anyhow, ABS-CBN's flagship FM station was on-air (unlike GMA 7's Barangay LS 97.1, which is equally jologs) with "Will You Wait for Me" by Kavana. It was a pretty tame playlist, I suppose, subdued like the others that were on-air yesterday.
6. 107.5 Win Radio. Yes, NU's replacement on radio was on-air. I guess at this point nostalgia over the old beloved NU Rock station overcame me, I wasn't able to note what song they were playing at the time. Haha.
7. 107.9 Underground Radio. This station had no concept of Holy Week, apparently. An insane house technomix that would surely earn a tongue-wagging from Oscar Cruz. So un-Holy Week, the most different from all the other FM stations. But no different from their normal non-Holy Week playlist, actually. Life goes on.
Only did I realize that there was nothing to listen to on Good Friday. Really.