What the hell happened? I grew up in central Texas, in a town that for some reason had no real "rock" stations (we could occasionally pick up KLBJ, out of Austin, on a good, clear night) but plenty of country or hip-hop. Not being a country fan, I gravitated towards metal and hip-hop; nearly everybody I knew listened to some combination of the three. When I got my first boombox, I spent my weekend mornings taping Casey Kasem's countdowns, just so I could catch a decent cross-section of what was out there. Even still, though, I knew there was more music than I could hear on our local top-40 station, so when I got older, I watched MTV religiously, reveling in shows like "Headbangers Ball" and "Yo! MTV Raps," plunking down in front of the TV for the after-school video countdown, and being blown away by bands like Living Colour, Metallica, Fishbone, Midnight Oil, Social Distortion, and Public Enemy. I'd catch "120 Minutes" every once in a while, seeing and hearing bands like The Replacements, The Pixies, and Sonic Youth for the first time.

So, is MTV still the answer to the dearth of decent music on the radio? Nope. These days, I scan down the MTV schedule, and there's Punk'd, Pimp My Ride, True Life, Road Rules, Next, and I Want a Famous Face, every single freakin' one of 'em a reality show. Other than Advance Warning, MTV After Hours, MTV Video Wake-Up, and MTV Hits, all of which are on between 4 and 10AM, the only video show is, yes, TRL, the hour-long video countdown. That's one whopping hour of music from 10AM-4AM, on a channel billed as "Music Television". And yes, I know this is why MTV2 exists, and that's great, but does that come on basic cable? Not where I live -- you can only get it on digital. That means that the MTV I grew up with, the place I turned to to hear and learn about music, is unavailable to a large chunk of the population. Not only do we Houstonians get no radio, but a lot of us get no videos, either.

Now, despite my grousing, I've come to a kind of strange realization over the past year or so: who cares? We live in an age of increasingly varied ways to get your musical fix, whether you buy an XM radio receiver for your car, listen to streaming indie "radio" on your home PC, or buy MP3s online. Me, I tend to dig around online for tracks to slap on the ol' iPod, and then I plug the 'pod into the Griffin iTrip mini-broadcaster that plays over unused FM channels on my car stereo, hit "Shuffle Songs," and away I go. Presto -- no more radio, except for KPFT's morning shows.

Not everybody's as lucky as I am, though. As with the digital cable bit above, what about all the poor schmucks out there who've got no choice but to find their music through the radio or MTV? Well, they can change away from MTV, but they should probably leave the idiot box on. Why? Because these days it's television, not radio, that's truly breaking new ground when it comes to music. I'm talking mainstream, big-network and small-network, drama and comedy TV. That's where the kids are learning about music they can't hear on the radio.

Take Alias, for example. I'm sadly addicted to that over-the-top spy thriller, and one of the main reasons is because of the music -- they use a large amount of it, albeit in short little snippets, and it's surprisingly good and amazingly varied. It's gone downhill in the music department recently, but in past episodes they played stuff like Ryan Adams's excellent "La Cienega Just Smiled," obscure Canadian rocker Matthew Good's "Weapon," Thievery Corporation's smooth future-lounge electronica track "Lebanese Blonde," music genre-bending Kinky's "Noche de Toxinas," and Rosie Thomas's bittersweet indie-folk ballad "Farewell." Through the show I've gotten into Eastmountainsouth, Boomkat, Supreme Beings of Leisure, Cat Stevens (whom I'd previously written off somewhat as another example of my dad's questionable taste in music), and Lizzie West, among others. And how many of those songs have ever made it on the radio here, barring maybe KPFT? Not a one.

Not that this kind of thing's new, mind you. Shows as far back as the '60s were featuring bands actually playing in various episodes, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The O.C. have both updated that in recent years -- Buffy had bizarre vampire-Baroque musicians Rasputina on the stage of The Bronze at one point (along with a bunch of other bands) and the ever-underrated Aimee Mann at another ("I hate playing vampire towns..."), and The O.C. made indie-hipster jaws drop all over America when it not only had characters name-check Death Cab for Cutie but featured them playing at a local club. Over the years, though, the inclusion of less-mainstream music seems to have filtered out through the television ether, to the point where nearly every show you can think of incorporates music by at least a band or three you've never heard of but who happen to be darn good. Some even appropriate known songs for their themes, like The Dead Zone (Jeff Buckley's "New Year's Prayer," for those who wondered what that "feel no shame for what you are" song was), Third Watch (The Crystal Method's "Keep Hope Alive"), Las Vegas (Elvis, natch), and the recent hit, medical drama House (Massive Attack's "Teardrop").

I can't speak for everyone out there, but this shift has made a pretty big impact on me. I first heard Bill Withers' incredible "Ain't No Sunshine" via an episode of CSI, of all things, was mesmerized by Lisa Gerrard's "Sanvean" in a funereal ep of The West Wing, and immediately became addicted to Azure Ray after hearing "Displaced" in an episode of Buffy. The first episode I ever saw of Third Watch, way back when the show started, hooked me in by using Massive Attack's ultra-creepy "Angel" as the background music for a tense, claustrophobic search through an abandoned hotel. I've gone out and bought CDs specifically because of a ten-second clip of a song I happened to hear in a TV show, and I've watched a handful of shows in large part because of the music.

I don't think I'm the only one, either, because the creators of a lot of these shows seem to have started to clue in. The Alias Website has its own music page, as do Lost, One Tree Hill, Joan of Arcadia, 7th Heaven, and, of course, The O.C. Heck, The O.C. is now on the fourth volume of its "Music From The O.C." series, which features music by folks like Sufjan Stevens, Pinback, and Aqueduct...none of whom you're likely to hear on "The Buzz" anytime soon.

Of course, even when there's no "official" Website for the music from a show, people find a way -- there are excellent music resource sites for Buffy, Third Watch, CSI, and Veronica Mars (the latter run, incidentally, by our very own Marc Hirsh), and those are just three that I've run across recently. Google your favorite TV show, and you're bound to come up with a "Music" page for it.

And then there's the commercials. Believe it or not, commercials have become one of the best opportunities for an unknown band to get heard. Look at the success of retro-rockers Jet after their song "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" showed up in an iPod ad or the current fascination with The Concretes, whose song "Say Something New" is the Target theme song du jour. Dozens and dozens of indie-ish, mostly underground bands, the kind who couldn't otherwise get radio airplay to save their lives, are popping up on television, not in videos but in ads. And we all take 'em in, even if we don't realize it. Remember that "Days Go By" song in the Mitsubishi ad, the one where the girl's popping and locking in the car? That's Dirty Vegas. How about the commercial where the kid's waving out of the window of his car to everybody they pass, while a warbly voice sings "Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face?" The Flaming Lips. What about the cheesy Dentyne Ice commercial where the girl on the subway writes her number in the frost on the window as a slinky bass lurks in the background? That's Papas Fritas, "Way You Walk." And the car commercial (Mitsubishi, again), where the guy looks like he's rocking out but is just singing his grocery list? That's Radio 4, "Dance to the Underground."

Again, this music exposure makes an impact. Hearing Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" in a recent Sony PSP ad made me actually like a band I didn't really care for. I fell in love with "That Great Love Sound" by The Raveonettes after hearing it in a commercial for KMart (the one where all those WB stars dress up in various KMart clothes). My very first exposure to The Polyphonic Spree was from that now-infamous Volkwagen commercial from a few years back. I've heard the Von Bondies "C'mon C'mon" on no fewer than four different commercials for totally different products (Chevy, GM, the Olympics, and Pepsi), and each time, I like the song more and more. As with the music-on-TV-shows bit above, I've literally bought CDs because I liked the music I heard on a commercial -- I got Modest Mouse's The Moon and Antarctica, for one, after hearing "Gravity Rides Everything" in a Nissan commercial. This goes for older bands, too mind you -- I recently put vintage garage-rockers the Sonics on my "CDs to buy" list after hearing "Have Love, Will Travel" in a Land Rover ad, and hearing The Kinks and Queen on TV commercials recently (HP printers and Coke's godawful C2, respectively) made me remember how much I liked those two bands.

If you think about it, it's pretty crazy. Radio programmers and record label people have determined that bands like, say, Goldfrapp and Kings of Leon are too "weird" for mainstream radio to touch...and yet, at the same time, advertising people think they appeal to enough people to sell Diet Cokes and Volkswagens. We've gotten to the point where mainstream radio is safer and stodgier than Madison Avenue adverising firms.

This brings me back to my very first point, above: screw radio. Forget them, because they think they know what people want to hear, and they're wrong. Why else would people have started going nuts for the Caesars following their song "Jerk It Out" being used in an iPod commercial? Hell, I'm not sure anybody would know who The 5,6,7,8's were if their song "Woo Hoo" didn't pop up in commercials from time to time (you know the song; it's in that commercial where the two Chevys are bouncing a ball back and forth across the city). Advertising, somehow, has shoved radio aside to become the cutting edge of music, exposing audiences to everybody from The BellRays (Nissan XTerra) to 50 Foot Wave (Pepsi) to Rufus Wainwright (Canon).

According to What's That Called?, a handy little Website that catalogs songs used in commercials, ad execs have even been brave enough to use stuff from really off-the-beaten-path bands like Cop Shoot Cop (Nike), Alec Empire (Acura), Amon Tobin (BMW), and Panjabi MC (Mountain Dew) -- what would happen if The Buzz took risks like that with the music it played? Ah, who cares; turn off the radio and turn on the TV instead. Maybe they'll figure it out, eventually.

Take care,