I don’t know about you, but if there’s one thing I like to do for fun on a Saturday night, it’s drive around in my car listening to the radio while an old man in a lonely control booth far, far away pretends that his studio is actually the site of a raging party. I especially like it if that DJ mostly plays songs that are in the current top 40–even slow ones like that crappy new Lifehouse song–mixed in with every clubby top 40 hit ever, from Cascada to Calabria to that one instrumental song that was really big like six years ago that I don’t have the energy to locate the name of right now.

Luckily, to fulfill those wishes, there’s Open House Party With John Garabedian, a nationally syndicated show helmed by a seventy-year old man from Worcester who has been literally broadcasting from his basement every week since 1987 . Garabedian, who is approximately four times larger than Rihanna in every direction, plays more or less the same songs every week, while teeny-boppers who aren’t really into the internet call in and request Flo Rida over and over. Of course, why the hell anybody would call to request Flo Rida when he’s all the damn radio has played for the last three months anyway is unimportant. The point is that the kids care, and young hearts and bootays in baggy sweatpants from coast to coast start thumping in unison when faced with a song that–let’s be honest, people–totally sounds like Nelly did seven years ago.

At the end of his Saturday night broadcast–which in Providence sort of seamlessly goes back into 92 PRO-FM’s regular playlist without any kind of formal goodbye or anything–Garabedian counts down the top 3 requests of the week. And this week, for the first time in half a year, the top 3 did not contain “Crank Dat”, the dopey yet enormously popular hit by the dopily named Soulja Boy Tell Em. Seriously. Six months. Since September. The beginning of the school year. Every single week. Day in and day out, boys and girls across the country have been so enraptured with that song that they aren’t just downloading the song, and the ringtone, and watching the Youtube video and doing their stupid little dance or whatever. They’re doing more than that. They are calling a seventy-year old man from Worcester to express their love for the song.  That’s nuts.

I’ll ignore the fact that the decline probably just has to do with the fact that Soulja Boy’s “Yahhh!” is hastily oozing into the top 10 and just say that, oddly, I never thought I’d be so excited by a situation where the three most requested songs in the country are by Flo Rida, Chris Brown, and, um, whatever that lame country ballad thing was at #2.

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