To me, dance-pop music has a specific function: something to dance to. Just like I wouldn’t buy an album of ad jingles or listen to boring church hymns if I’m not in a pew, I don’t want to hear dance music if I’m not on a dance floor. I think that seems fair enough considering I’d never expect to hear Metallica in a club.

So why does the radio play this music for people at work or in their cars? The simple answer is because it’s popular and it’s popular because the radio plays it.

This cycle can go on forever, but in the end it doesn’t matter which came first. What matters is the problem of where we are now: a society where mind-numbing pop garbage is being force fed to the ears of coming generations.

I’ve been disc jockeying dances, weddings and parties for over three years now and have seen this problem firsthand. In fact, parental concerns regarding the amount of 12-year-old girls that know every word to risque songs like The Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” and 3OH!3’s “Don’t Trust Me” have resulted in these songs being banned from junior high dances.

Keep in mind that these complaints are coming from the same worried parents who often have done nothing to prevent their kids from listening to this music in the first place.

But it’s not just the number of youth being exposed to this music that bothers me. Older teens and adults choose to listen to it on a day-to-day basis. This makes me wonder whether people actually enjoy this kind of music, or if they listen to it because it’s available and they don’t know of anything else.

Now, I may be a music junkie, but I’m not a music snob. I’m not one to look down on people for their opinions, but I do expect those opinions to be based on something more than what the media feed them.

The important thing to me is for everyone to be knowledgeable enough to decide on their own. Much to my dismay, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

One of the first questions I always ask people after meeting them is what kind of music they listen to. About one-third of the time the response I get is “whatever’s on the radio.”

It’s a pretty vague response when you think about it. You can find a large variety of music on the radio, so do they mean classic rock? Rap? Jazz? Rush Limbaugh?

What I’ve found is that every person who gives me that answer listens to the pop stations. If someone typically listens to country stations, they say “I listen to country music.”

The people who listen to pop music and call it “whatever’s on the radio” are the people who don’t know what else is out there. Otherwise, they’d realize that by saying they listen to whatever’s on, they’re actually saying they listen to just about everything.

In the online age, there’s no excuse for limiting your musical diet to pop radio. There are online radio stations such as Pandora that expose you to new music based on your tastes, Web sites like allmusic that give great information about artists and the iTunes Genius Sidebar that recommends artists you might like.

Beyond this, there’s always MySpace and YouTube, where you can find recordings of just about any band in which you could possibly be interested.

Mark Twain once said that “tastes are made, not born.” People aren’t wired with preset values, and opinions are relative to our life experiences. For example, if you grow up eating nothing but dry cat food, I’m willing to bet that a cold hot dog would seem gourmet.

We all know it gets better than that because we’ve experienced it. In the same way, I’m telling you that it gets so much better than the cold hot dog of pop radio.

It’s time we all take control of the music we listen to. If you feel like you’ve heard a little bit of everything and prefer Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, I respect that. At least you did your homework. To those of you who haven’t bothered to see what else there is, I urge you to take the time and look for something new.

– Thomas Hummer is a junior in English from Ames.