“Popular is not the same as important, or often, not the same as good.” — Seth Godin

Yesterday, sitting in the boiling cauldron that is Los Angeles traffic, I tuned the radio dial to 88.9, which is KXLU, a tiny independent radio station broadcasting from the campus at Loyola Marymount. It’s not world famous and it’s also not predictable.  It sometimes doesn’t come in well unless you’re in the hub of LA (but you can stream it anytime here from a computer) but sitting on the steaming freeway it came in just fine. And thank God. While the popular stations played popular music, racing for the bottom, doing what the masses and the squeaky clean majority tell them to do, this tiny radio station gracefully introduced me to Nothing, Whirr, Tender Age, and then played Adolescents and some crazy drum and bass shit I’m still trying to track down it was so amazing.

After sitting through enough meetings with surf industry execs, surfers, and people in safety stances trying to maintain their jobs, unwilling to risk a scraped knee in this day where marketing is monitored and we’re all scared of losing our monotonous schedule, it’s nice to know that despite our culture’s click-happy, “sort by popular” click-bait enthused existence that there are still people trying a little harder, willing to fail, willing to risk something in their pursuit of making our lives more interesting. We appreciate that.

Have a good weekend. Don’t do what everyone thinks you will. —Travis