MattMaroon.com

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to my favorite daily NPR show, Marketplace, and I noticed something hilarious. They were doing a segment about people selling their hair to be made into fertilizer, and when it wrapped they segued into the next bit with a little instrumental portion of a song. That wouldn’t be notable, except the song was “Cut Your Hair” by Pavement, so the effect was hilarity if you knew the song well enough to recognize it from a few bars, which I would guess is true of less than 1% of Marketplace’s audience.

I thought it was hilarious (not an emotion usually evoked on NPR, especially during their “comedy” shows) for a minute, and didn’t really catch what came on next because all I could think was “I don’t care, I don’t care, I really don’t care/did you see the drummer’s hair? Oooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooooo.” And then I promptly put it out of my mind and tried to get home before I had to listen to any of “Fresh Air”. One of my pet peeves is when radio shows play movie clips, and that show does it enough that I shouldn’t listen to it while driving.

So the next day I was driving home again, and listening to Marketplace (sponsored by Thrivent Financial for Lutherans) again, and up popped auditory Easter egg. This time the segment was the normal “numbers” and it’d been a bad day on Wall Street. Again an instrumental portion of a song, “Feel the Pain” by Dinosaur Jr., another in-joke aimed squarely at some subset of my generation.

I debated whether or not to write about how someone with my taste in music, sense of humor, and admiration for Kai Ryssdal (guy’s got the best voice on radio) seems to be in charge of the switchboard over there at American Public Media. But twice is still a coincidence, and over the next week or two I missed or only half heard a few episodes, and it slipped out of my mind.

But they got me again on the way home today. The lead-in was a segment about the drop in consumer spending, and ended with a bit about how people were moving away from places like Saks and Banana Republic (which they’ll pry out of my cold dead hands) and toward places like Kohl’s (where you’ll find me right after the prying) and the song at the end was “Undone – the Sweater Song” by Weezer.

Granted, that one wasn’t as impressive as the first two since it was a pretty big hit and a lot more people were probably in on the joke, but it does make me wish I had a phone capable of Shazam. And three times is a trend. So here’s to you mister plays-instrumental-portions-of-appropriately-titled- ’90′s-rock-on-public-radio-financial-shows guy. If this were a radio program right now I’d be torn between playing the breakdown of “You Oughta Know” and the intro to “Interstate Love Song”.