I was driving forty minutes to campus last night and fiddling with the radio. The CD player is broken and there’s no mp3 or satellite radio hooked up, so it was radio or nothing. Panicky and distracted, I remembered reading earlier on cracked.com that listening to music can help calm down people with brain issues, and I was feeling like I might as well give it a try. Commercials, static, country music, Democracy Now… there was nothing on. In resignation I let the Toadies serenade me, thinking that any music must be better than no music. I had a lot of things on my mind, too many things, and as I listened to the formulaic pop rock that is the Toadies and every other band on mainstream radio from the beginning of time, I felt a sudden urge to swerve my car off the road. I panicked harder, and then slapped myself hard. I turned the radio off until Democracy Now was over.

At 6:01 I flipped back to the college station. Lou Reed’s “Rock ‘n Roll” was playing:

Jenny said, when she was just five years old
you know there’s nothin’ happening at all

Every time she puts on a radio
There was a nothin’ goin’ down at all, not at all
Then one fine mornin’ she puts on a New York station
She couldn’t believe what she heard at all
She started dancin’ to that fine fine music
Her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll

Instead of flipping the station, or flipping out, the song flipped me back right. Anthony Jurado writes, “Listening to actual non-terrible music has an…effect, since pleasurable music releases dopamine that simply makes certain parts of your brain function better (particularly if they were damaged before).”

Contrary to some beliefs, I do not have brain damage, or at least, enough to affect my daily habits. But my brain wasn’t working right. After listening to Lou Reed and some similar artists (God bless you, college DJ), I began to breathe normally again, to regain mental acuity and relax my white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. By the time I got out of the car I felt that I could, if not embrace, at least deal with what the evening held for me – arguing my way out of a parking ticket, turning in late assignments and writing for six hours straight, not to mention hiking all over campus in the dark and the cold. Unbelievably, almost everything went right for me. I got out of the parking ticket and did all my work, though the building was locked by the time I got to my professor’s office to hand in my work. Two out of three ain’t bad.

It wasn’t only the “non-terribleness” of Lou Reed’s music that grounded me. It was hearing exactly the right words at exactly the right time. I was the girl in the song, disillusioned since the age of five and angry at the state of popular music. My local college radio station was Jenny’s New York station, saving my life with genuine rock and roll.

It’s really an amazing station – different shows feature bluegrass, hip hop, ambient, metal and indie rock, and not a single song you would hear on mainstream radio ever plays. The DJs are painfully awkward college kids (except for the savvy hip-hop guru who runs “Flava Lab”), struggling to operate the technology, remember what songs they played and read the PSAs without tripping over each word. My husband loves my deadpan imitation of the female college radio DJ: “Before that, we heard…. Mona Stickshift and the Harpies, with ‘Orange Fish Paste;’ before that, we heard… Legal Weapons for Illegals, with ‘I Can’t Date You if You’re Not Vegan…’”

These awkward kids, I’ll argue, are saving America, one crazed woman at a time. Pop music vs. underground has been a theme practically since the radio’s invention. Pop music obviously has a critical role in American culture, and some pop songs are, in fact, “non-terrible.” Lou Reed’s music is as formulaic as anything else (verse-chorus-verse-reprise), but it’s the gritty substance of the music that makes it good. The very fact that underground music is not over-produced makes it more real. In Come As You Are, the first Nirvana biography, the album Nevermind was described, to paraphrase, as a jagged stone encased in Lucite. I read this book almost fifteen years ago, but that phrase has resonated since then because it is so inherently true. It’s the archetypal story behind all music that makes it to a major record label – no matter how good the music is, its integrity is compromised so that it can reach a larger audience. Never would I suggest that Nirvana should have been kept underground so that only the cool would listen. It takes a revolution to change music, one that needs to happen publicly. I’ve always liked Nirvana – but yesterday, Lou Reed was the only man on earth who could have saved me at that intense moment of despair.

Radio, many argue, is in an imperative state of both crisis and change. Sirius XM (or whatever the latest merger is) and Pandora have forever altered our concept of a radio station. Personalized, customized, only for you – just another aspect of a culture with more options than we can handle. I love Pandora and Sirius, just like I love Nirvana. But I love equally, maybe more, the flawed college radio station, broadcasting out twenty miles and sometimes broadcasting dead air. I suppose that Sirius could have righted me yesterday – but it was more meaningful that a girl in a DJ booth, a girl like me, chose to play Lou Reed right when I needed him most. Overnight I’ve become conscious of the way music affects my brain. It’s probably time to scrape together the money and spring for satellite radio in the car – no more toxic junk when the college station is out of range (or playing “Democracy Now”).

Here’s my local station’s website: http://www.guilford.edu/wqfs/

Here’s the station I grew up listening to: http://www.wprb.com/

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Her Life Was Saved by Rock’n'Roll – by TickleSpot Magazine.