My Letter to The Spy

Below is the email that I just sent to the program director at 105.3 The Spy.

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Suggestions for The Spy

Hey Ferris,

Thank you very much for bringing The Spy back to OKC. Having the station back has brought an incredible breath of fresh air to the extremely stagnant radio dial. And while I am really enjoying what you are doing, I have a few suggestions to make the station even better.

The thing with alternative music is that it is a huge catch-all that incorporates all of the genres that followed the punk movement of the 1970s (including the bands that influenced the bands of that movement). This includes things like punk, goth, oi, hardcore, psychobilly, industrial, indie rock, and so on.

Up to this point the Spy has focused on certain aspects of what is alternative music. Case in point, nearly every time that I have listened to the Spy I have heard a song by either Morrissey or The Smiths. Now don’t get me wrong…I like The Smiths and all but if I am hearing them that often (and I only get to listen when in my car) then that means they are in massively heavy rotation. And while The Smiths were hugely important to alternative music, there are other bands that were just as important that don’t get played on the Spy. I have yet to hear anything by The Replacements, Descendents, Husker Du, Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Minor Threat, Bad Religion, Big Black, or Concrete Blonde played on the Spy. I could just be missing them but I think that they deserve as much play as The Smiths and just aren’t getting it.


I first came into the alternative music scene about 20 years ago and cut my teeth on episodes of 120 Minutes hosted by Dave Kendall and rocked out to bands like the Charlatans UK, The Soup Dragons, R.E.M., and The Cure. That was a great time for music and it seems to me that you were obviously very active in the scene at that time based on the songs and bands that I hear on the Spy. This is not a bad thing, but there is more to alternative music to that time and bands that sound like those bands.

One of my dream jobs is to run a station like the Spy, but I know that I am not an expert in all things alternative. In my pipedream, I reached out to experts of the various subgenres of alternative music to get an idea of what those folks are into and make sure to add those bands to the playlist. For example, I am not an expert on industrial music but I know that there are industrial fans out there and I’d want to have them as listeners to the station and I know that after a while they would probably want to hear something other than KMFDM, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, Ministry, Nitzer Ebb, and Nine Inch Nails (the only industrial bands that I know).

I think that it would be great if you expanded what the Spy plays to include more of these subgenres and one way of helping do that would be to reach out to those who know the music. Get with the guys at Size and Guestroom Records to see what the big sellers are. Find people who know punk and indie rock and psychobilly and goth like the back of their hand and mine them for band and song suggestions. Expanding the station to embrace all of the facets of alternative music would not only expand the audience, it would make this really great station into an effing fantastic one.

Thanks for listening and please don’t think that I don’t appreciate what you guys are doing, because I do. I just think that it could be even that much better.

Take care,
Dave