Why do I still dislike UB40 so much?
I don’t know what it is, but that thought popped into my head as I was playing one of their songs yesterday. I’m sure the members of the group are (or were) fine individuals, I’m sure they are (or were) talented musicians, and I know that many people here in Upper Michigan enjoy their music, but for some reason, UB 40 seems to have become, at least for me, the musical equivalent of a cold winter day.
And we all know how much I like a cold winter day.
For those of you who don’t know who UB40 was (and, believe it or not, they’re still around in an altered form), they’re an English ska-pop group that’s been together since the early 1980s. They had a string of top ten hits over here in the late 80s and early 90s, mostly with remakes of songs like “Red Red Wine”, “The Way You Do The Things You Do”, and “I Can’t Help (Falling In Love With You”). Now you know who I’m talking about, right?
When I first started doing this job back in 1988 the station was what was known as “Hot Hits”; they’d play the same 20 songs over and over so you were guaranteed to hear the same songs every 75 minutes or so. And one of the songs that was massively popular at the time was “Red Red Whine”, which means that I got to hear it four times every 6-hour air shift. And since at the time I worked 6 days a week, that means I heard the song 24 times a week, whether I wanted to or not. Multiply that by the 12 or 14 weeks the song was massively popular, and, well, that’s a lot of times to listen to a song, especially one that I didn’t like in the first place.
The more singles the group released, the more I seemed to not enjoy them, even though, like I said, a lot of people did. And a lot of people still do like their work, based on requests we get and audience research we do. That just proves again, I guess, that I’m a little out of the mainstream, as if, of course, we needed any further proof of that. But to me, the songs all sound the same, and most of their U.S. hits were what I considered to be wimpy remakes of songs that probably didn’t need to get remade in the first place.
However, my taste in music doesn’t have a lot with what we play here on the radio. And that’s a good thing, because while I don’t like UB40 most of you do, and since we program for you, and not for me, that’s why you’ll keep hearing it. After all, as a wise philosopher once said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. Or, in my case, the needs of the one, at least as far as taste in music goes.
So if you want, keep requesting UB40. We’ll keep playing their songs as long as you wanna hear them. I, personally, may be turning the speakers down, but that’s my problem, and not yours, right?
And on that note, have yourself a great weekend!
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