{"id":4683,"date":"2009-05-18T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2009-05-18T17:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4683"},"modified":"2009-05-18T13:15:14","modified_gmt":"2009-05-18T18:15:14","slug":"things-im-supposed-to-hate-but-dont-the-kq-morning-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4683","title":{"rendered":"Things I’m Supposed To Hate, But Don’t: The KQ Morning Show<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been over twenty-two years since Tom Barnard took the helm of the morning show at a formerly-sleepy Minneapolis “classic rock” station and made it into the most successful local <\/em>morning show in America.<\/p>\n

We’ll come back to the numbers.<\/p>\n

It’s considered a faux pas <\/em>in polite Twin Cities society to admit liking the KQ Morning show,which is into its third decade of dominating the ratings like no other radio show in the country, including <\/em>Howard Stern at his peak.\u00a0\u00a0 Oh, the show does the nuts and bolts of radio really, really well; the interplay between Barnard and his huge cast is smooth and polished, in a completely amateur-sounding way.\u00a0 And some of his supporting cast are excellent in their own right; Mike “Stretch” Gelfand, the show’s adenoidal Jewish horse-handicapper is hilarious, and engineer Brian Zepp is to straight lines what an all-star NHL goalie is to pucks; he never lets one past him.<\/p>\n

But it’s easy to see why the show doesn’t get any love from the Twin Cities’ self-appoitned intelligentsia.\u00a0 Even leaving aside the show’s occasional contoversies<\/a>, the show is often described as a junior high locker room, with the sort of potty mouth language that only Al Franken can get away with, the crude, catty peekaboo sexual banter that only Chelsea Handler is allowed to do, and the sort of constant pr0n references that Twin Cities hipsters will only accept in a Diablo Cody book or in a performance art piece at the Bryant Lake Bowl.<\/p>\n

But it’s not a junior high locker room.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s more like one of those beer commercials that you see around super-bowl time.<\/p>\n

Work with me, here.<\/p>\n

On the show, you have a cross-section of America like you see nowhere else in the Twin Cities media.\u00a0 I mean,\u00a0 nowhere<\/em>! Quick; name an audibly-African-American voice on MPR? An identified “out” gay, anywhere in the Twin Cities media?<\/p>\n

In those Super Bowl beer ads, you see a vision of superbowl parties around the country, each of which shows a perfect racial cross-section of this nation,with black and hispanic and the occasional asian partier joining all us crackers – a heartwarming vision of racial harmony in 2009 that also exists very rarely in nature<\/em>.\u00a0 And it is a rarity in nature at least in part because Americans are panicked at the notion of offending each other; race and gender orientation in America isn’t just a third rail, it’s a foggy midnight in a Newell Park Transfer Yard full of third rails.<\/p>\n

And yet Barnard’s show is <\/em>like that fictional party, with a middle-aged white guy, a “dumb blonde”, a black guy, a left-leaning Jewish guy, a schlemiel from Jersey, a redneck, a slumming news anchor, a dizzyingly-obsessed pr0n nerd and – for a few years – an openly gay guy,\u00a0all\u00a0doing what real people would <\/em>do if this society were remotely grown-up about race, gender and gender-orientation; bagging on each other constantly, with a nudge and a wink and the subtext that we’re all grownups, so just relax and get over yourselves.<\/em><\/p>\n

If the whole nation got along like the KQ Morning Show does, it’d be a better place.<\/p>\n

Plus, all those whinging libs who’ve been threatening to move to Canada probably would have to shut up and just do <\/em>it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But they’re not, which brings us back to the numbers.\u00a0 Barnard’s show gets, literally, the best market share of any major-market morning show anywhere in the country.\u00a0 He was the first person since the Great Depression to upset WCCO in the mornings.\u00a0 In an era where music radio’s audience is collapsing, he and only he still gets Golden-Age-of-WCCO-type numbers.\u00a0 Which means that it’s physically impossible<\/em>, in one of the most “liberal” cities in the country, to make up those numbers entirely of third-shifters, white trash from the Brooklyns and Shakopee and Newport\u00a0and the other usual clich\u00e9 closet crackers.\u00a0 It means that some <\/em>of that audience has <\/em>to be those irritating, preening libs sitting next to you who claim <\/em>they listen religiously to Cathy Wurzer or Jim Ed Poole or podcasts of Prairie Home Companion <\/em>on the way to work.<\/p>\n

So now you’re onto them.\u00a0 So if you’re chatting with ’em by the water cooler, and they make some statement you agree with, just respond by saying “Ex-ACT-ly”, or “HEY now, ain’t nothing wrong with that”, or “EVERYONE’S a winner!”; if you see that muted, panicky, “I’ve been made” look in their eyes, you’ll know it.<\/p>\n

And what a wondeful world that’ll be, huh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been over twenty-two years since Tom Barnard took the helm of the morning show at a formerly-sleepy Minneapolis “classic rock” station and made it into the most successful local morning show in America. We’ll come back to the numbers. It’s considered a faux pas in polite Twin Cities society to admit liking the KQ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}