The phones are small and in your pockets. The music is beamed to your car from outer space. Sure, not all the music, but the music on XM radio is, which is kind of weird and fun at the same time. Not that we normally have XM radio, because we normally don’t have a car. This year’s holiday rental car was kitted out, though, and we had a surprisingly positive experience with XM radio, for all that it’s an expense I would never in a million years incur in my own vehicle. In addition to the cost, satellite-based systems are something I wouldn’t sign up for because I happen to agree that the man can track you like a dog with GPS. If you know me, you know that would definitely be a bug, not a feature.

Since I discovered the radio setup before we left town, we drove completely CD-free this year. This turned out to be a little bit painful at times, as I had been planning to bring my favourite holiday CDs to pep things up a bit during the lows. The main low being, of course, the snail trail that was the Cross-Bronx Expressway. I know, I know: people in a hurry make an end run around the Bronx through New Jersey. Having lived in New Jersey for two summers in a row, I am always in a supreme hurry to leave the state, even if that means sitting in the Bronx for a while. I like the Bronx. I like the Cross-Bronx. I like the rivers and the locals and the emergency-use-only steps up to the streets. Also, this year we were driving a car with NY plates, so everybody let us into their lanes on the Cross-Bronx. We joked that NY plates worked for us in all locations: in NYC, drivers cut off the people with out-of-state plates and let us in; outside of NYC everybody gave us lots of room, perhaps out of fear that we’d haul off and bust a cap in their…rear. And, once we got to Westchester the traffic cleared up and it became clear that no one was actually going to grandma’s: everyone was instead going to the mall just outside of the city. Huh.

Getting back to XM radio: it turns out that some stations actually play the music we used to listen to. I say ‘used to listen to,’ because XM radio was (for us) a ginormous 1990ish nostalgia ride. Since my traveling partner is organized in some ways that I am not, he looked up XM stations online before we left, thereby being able to point us directly and smoothly to the single station that broadcasts the overlap in our musical tastes: Fungus. Unfortunately, it also broadcasts the sole category of music that lies outside of both our musical tastes: anything in those genres post 1995ish. Which meant we needed a backup plan. My backup plan included Lucy, which was a total sausage-fest but played all the things I used to listen to with the boys back home in 1990 yet never owned, and Sunny, which played all the hits of my childhood spent putting myself to sleep with the radio. My copilot’s backup plan included Fred and Ethel, which played all the more electronic and (I would say) whiny contemporaries of my beloved alt-rockers on Lucy.

For the most part, these stations came through and we were able to select music much more agreeably than on previous trips. I took a free pass on The Smiths and Smashing Pumpkins, he got a free pass on Creed and 80s duets, and both of us eventually agreed that there was such a thing as too much U2. As an aside, the love for U2 of the boys who program these stations was a bit beyond my ken. I don’t think of U2 as alternative at all, and yet they were the single most played band on every station (except Fungus, bless their hearts). We heard the hits on the more mainstream stations and the ‘obscure’ junk on the more alternative ones. Personally, I think this latter effect was an attempt to justify the jockeys’ love for such a mainstream band, but there’s a reason why the obscure stuff has remained obscure (I’m just sayin). In the beginning this worked out semi-well: I like the sing-along tunes, my partner likes the less well-known stuff. By the end of our trip, though, we were both totally full up on U2 and were changing the station before Bono’s first melodic groan could kick in.

Besides the U2 issue, the only other problem with the radio was that it cut out in the tunnels. Radio does that, you might say. Yes, that’s true, I would agree, except that this radio is coming to us from OUTER SPACE. Surely radio from OUTER SPACE can bust through a few puny feet of concrete and several tons of water, right? Apparently not. Even this had a bright side, though: we discovered that while I can’t always carry a tune or remember the real words to a song, I can keep a beat and hum a guitar like nobody’s business. Being able to do this to ‘Jane Says‘ on the Cross-Bronx was fun but not all that impressive; anyone in their 30s can do that, and since the Cross-Bronx isn’t actually underwater, the radio kicked in periodically to help us keep on track. No, I really impressed us both by being able to sustain ‘Glycerine‘ — a song whose name I wouldn’t have even been able to come up with absent the XM info feature — through the entirety of the Fort McHenry Tunnel without error. Granted, the riff is a pretty familiar one, but still: clearly I spent way more time sitting around doing nothing in the 90s than previously believed.

And, when we got home we threw on a CD and rocked out to my favourite Christmas song, and all was well in the world.