Z100

The Trail of a Song Heard on Z100

• 6-8 months before hearing it on the radio, you will have found this song either on your own or by the suggestion of a close friend with good taste in music.
  
• The actual song was released about a month before that.
  
• About a week before hearing the song on the radio, the song has faded from the top of your “recently added” list on itunes.
  
• Upon hearing the song on Z100 at work, in the car, or somewhere else in public, you proceed to do one of two things; you either:
  
• 1. Immediately exclaim that you’ve been listening to this song for “SOOOOOOO long” and have tried to get everyone else around to listen to this band for a couple months (they obviously refused because of their crappy tastes in music. If they had good taste in music, Z100 would NOT be playing.)
  
  OR
  
  2. Purposely sing every word to the song as if it’s just another song on the radio and wait for someone to eventually ask how your are cool enough to know this seemingly brand new song.
  
• For the next 4-5 months, the song will be played around 12 times a day, every day. This amounts to AT LEAST 1,440 plays. Odds are, if you’re still hanging out with those friends, you will hear about half of those plays. After the first 6, you will grow to hate the song, fearing the other impending 1,434 plays. You may hate this time during your life, but it will be tremendously valuable later on in this explanation, and in your life.
  
• Once the song has reached the end of its radio life, you may have even deleted the song from your itunes entirely. Another couple of weeks after the 1,440th play, the radio will play it for about a week, thinking it’s a “throwback” to earlier in the year (no.).
  
• The last time you will hear the song on Z100 is at the end of the year, when they do their countdown of “The Top Songs of 20XX”. After that, Z100 kicks it to the curb.
  
• About a year later, the song, depending on the genre, will resurface on 95.5, 102.7, or some other station that isn’t a slave to the hands of the Billboard Top 5. The song will never play more than once in a week, but will always play at least once a month.
  
• At this point, even your friends loyal to the ten different songs being played on Z100 will hate this song. Any time it comes up on itunes shuffle, it will be immediately skipped, as per the request of the groaning audience.
  
• The next few years go by, and almost all memory of the song has faded; but then comes that one party.
  
• One of your friends will decide to let you make the playlist for his/her next party. Scrolling through your itunes, you put a mix of the standard, current pop hits and lesser known bands that you know just sound good. Then you get to an artist you haven’t listened to in a while, and you stumble upon a song. A certain song that you all of sudden fall back in love with. You forget all knowledge of ever hating it and realize that it is and always has been an amazing song.
  
• About halfway through the night, when everyone is decently buzzed, the song comes on. You immediately recognize the intro, having been the one who put the song on the mix, but the rest of the crowd collectively stares at speakers as if there was a billboard with the song’s name.
  
• Slowly, but surely, one by one, you actually see light bulbs flicker on above people’s heads. There’s a collective round of “NO WAY”s, “OH MY GOD”s, and “YESSSSSSS”s, reassuring you that everyone has just shit themselves.
  
• And remember when you had to listen to that song 720 times on Z100? Secretly, they were preparing you and all your friends for this moment. Everyone and their mother now knows all the words, and the next 3 minutes and 22 seconds will turn into a hysterical lyric screaming match to see who can drunkenly sing the loudest. It will be the highlight of the night and you will be praised.
  
• It may seem like Z100 was butchering the song way back when, but they were just subliminally implanting the lyrics in your brain.
  
• Ten years after this party, some singer will stumble upon this “oldie” and decide to make a remix of it. The song will once again find its way to Z100, but this time it’s actually been butchered.
  
• This new song will then go through the same cycle again; forever to be played and replayed, known and forgotten, hated and loved, until the original sounds are lost to the musical black hole that is Z100.