XM-ining Reverend Strube: How One Man and Two Satellites May Save Modern Rock
by Jay Ferrari

Strube is sick, fighting through a triple-digit temperature and a raw cough - typical summer-cold symptoms. Out of courtesy, he will not offer his hand. He apologizes for his drained demeanor, claims he's not his usual, energetic self. Then, with the conviction of a street-corner prophet, he launches into a two-hour tirade against the evils of corporate radio and the head-up-the-ass condition plaguing major record companies. If this is Strube suffering, woe to anyone who would endure his wrath when he is in good health.

Strube is Scott Struber, the programming director and focal personality of XMU - the XM Satellite Radio channel that champions new alternative music. XMU offers the fearlessness of college-radio, tempered with just enough professional polish to keep it from sounding like it's run by kids too busy scraping resin out of their Dugout bats to change the records. Call him Strube. Everyone calls him Strube.

Strube is everything you want in a music-obsessed deejay, He bounces in his chair along with favorite hooks and riffs. He mouths lyrics, squinting and snarling, then lets his head roll back, unable to withstand a crescendo. And while the music is throwing his body around like a rag doll, he can still manage a giant control board crowned with a trio of flat-screen monitors. Each pulsates with data: indecipherable columns of song-titles, fluxing numbers and oscillating electronic graphs. The amount of information seems staggering, but Strube assimilates it all. In one elegant movement, he's tapping a button and rolling his headphones across the top of his tightly clipped cranium. Then, he leans into his microphone to tell a nation-wide audience what Ian McCulloch has been up to since the demise of Echo and the Bunnymen. Another tap, and we get to hear it for ourselves.

All this would be unremarkable -- acknowledged simply as the prowess of a broadcast veteran who knows his equipment -- but prior to and immediately after that intercession, Strube is speaking with the fear-and-damnation conviction of a fundamentalist minister. Hell, brothers and sisters, isn't fire and brimstone. Hell is an endless stream of car commercials interrupted on the hour by the thousandth playing of some unimaginative alterna-pop anthem. Hell is today's FM rock radio. Deliver us, Strube. Deliver us.

"I don't give a crap about record company priorities," he says, bouncing along to a Gomez cut. "I care about the artist and the fan."

Sure. We've heard that before. And we want to believe you, Strube, but the next thing we know, you've got a pair of Limp Bizkit lawn seats for the first fan that can make it to the Circle K on Fairfax County Parkway. We want to believe you, but you'll have to prove it.

This is when Strube shows his scars. For years, he fought for FM radio, hoping to preserve some thread of its origin, preserving the might it used to vanquish both the ultra-bland programming and tin-can sound quality of AM.

But that battle is lost. Tours at radio stations in Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami and Albuquerque ultimately imploded. An FM radio DJ, he learned, was not someone who could pick and play music he or she thought deserved some airtime. Rather, a DJ was someone who had to cycle through the same 50 songs for three months at a time. He was just about through with radio when XM Satellite Radio came calling. It is XM that deserves the credit for saving Struber. Now, Struber is determined to save us.

"Terrestrial radio [the neologism for all things FM] is all about research and replay," he explains. "If they could play polka music backwards 24/7 and make more money, they would."

To reinforce his point, Strube becomes a history professor.

Prior to the mid-90s, he explains, alternative emerged in response to hit-heavy FM radio. Much like today, even stations that weren't Top 40 were still strangulated by a relatively small on-air library that concentrated on only the most familiar songs and popular artists of a particular genre. Indeed, why did classic rock stations never tire of Pink Floyd's "Money"? How often have The Pretenders or Talking Heads been positioned as the masthead of hipper-than-thou post collegiate rock?

By the 90s, excellent music that had thrived below big-radio radar for more than a decade finally got its nods. Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots, which should have been getting played right along with AC/DC, Led Zepplin and Black Sabbath, forged a new category, a trademarked, capital-A alternative that would become both a blessing and a curse. This breakthrough brought older, more formative bands in tow, from the basement jangle of The Violent Femmes to the inspired synth of The Cure to the concussive commentary of Suicidal Tendencies. Suddenly, good music was no longer the domain of high-school uber punks.

Enter the big boys.

Gutting the musical goose, they steered alternative stations away from the diverse, reactionary nature of the music. It became fixated with the pissed-off, down-toned sound singularly espoused by Beavis & Butthead. Rock, in short, had to rock. By the new millennium, alternative had devolved from an inclusive, cross-genre musical category to a hyper-aggressive, monotonous rumble. Just how pissed off at their parents could America's teens be? Radio stations seemed to think they had hate by the bucketful.

"Alternative radio should not be about a 'sound'", Strube emphasizes. "It's about a willful and intentional disregard of the mainstream. Today however, it's about a sound."

Reducing alternative music to that single sound should cost radio and record companies dearly, Strube believes. "There is a trust that has been lost," he says, his neck reddening. And here comes real rage, the stand-back-he's-gonna-blow moment: "FM radio consistently leads kids to 19-dollar CDs that have one song and the rest is dogshit. There is so much good music out there. So much." He hangs his head for an instant, but then snaps back with twice the fire in his eyes.

"Radiohead goes, what double or triple platinum with 'The Bends' and you hear maybe one song on FM radio? That's how completely fucking out of touch they are."

They, of course, are the giant broadcast conglomerates. The ones who, according to Strube, use evil techniques like phone-based research to determine whether or not a new song deserves airplay. It has little to do with the tastes of an active, intelligent listener.

In diametric opposition to that anonymous research, Strube and his cohorts at XM are known to spend hours setting up his programs, listening to new music, brainstorming with other DJs, and answering listener e-mail. A day that could be as brief as a 5-hour program often stretches to 15 or 17 hours. And at no point during that span has he yet been asked to open a new Wal-Mart, or appear at the Eastern Seaboard's largest Honda dealer.

Strube's fanatical (there really is no other word) devotion to seeking out and sharing new music is what preserves XMU's appeal. Songs, even those in the heaviest rotation, will last at best about 18 months. After that, the deck is cleared for something new. The advantage of this non-existent half-life is listeners will hear an entire album. Unlike FM rock stations, which will play the blue shit out of a record's first single before daring to play a second track, XMU is playing albums in their entirety.

"Right about the time terrestrial radio gets to the 'second' song by the White Stripes," Strube notes, "we're done with the album."

Is this unwavering devotion to new music worth the investment? Joining the Church of Strube isn't free. It sets you back about the price of a CD per month, plus the initial equipment investment. And it's not completely commercial free. The Pep Boys will make an occasional pitch, and that goddamn Carrot Top still screams about how to make a collect call. But these interruptions are rare at best, and are quickly followed by Jurassic 5, Guster, Cat Power, Natasha Atlas, The Libertines.

A few weeks on-board with XM, bouncing among the 100 channels while keeping XMU as home base, has proven to me that radio could return to its former glory. Just as FM saved us from AM, XM could deliver us from FM, which today sees us as nothing more than consumers of prescription medication, submarine sandwiches and motor oil.

It won't be an easy fight, but in Northeast Washington D.C., there is a clutch of clear-thinking souls, armed with a few billion dollars worth of computers and satellites who are trying to pull us out of the mire. And the one reaching for our hands with the most hope and desperation, the one begging, pleading for us to take hold before we go under -- that's Strube.

Jay Ferrari is a free-lance writer and playwright living in Washington, D.C. His past contributions to Arriviste Press include the stark short story "Where You Find It."