Very few radio stations worry about music anymore. Most are built around "personalities," DJs and boring rant-talk-show hosts who do nothing more than spew banality for fours hour a day. Those stations that do play music program by focus group or by imitation, although it's hard to tell the difference anymore. One seems to beget the other, and any sense of a station's identity is lost. Really, what is the difference between The Wolf and KSCS? Merge and the Edge? KISS-FM and TRL? The Talk that Rocks and three boring drunk systems analysts from Garland? We'd rather listen to a radio station that has a clear voice, one with old-school rock-and-roll DJs who sound like they enjoy only aural, carnal and illicit activities, in no particular order. Where else can you find such an anti-teenybopper playlist: Tool followed by Godsmack followed by Mudvayne followed by Tantric followed by Linkin Park. Do we listen to, or even like, or even know how to spell any of these thrash-metal bands? Hell no. That's the point. We're old. We like wussy smart-rock written and strummed by bespectacled private-school kids who think angst and a slight paunch equals sexy. But for all you future tire repairmen in Mesquite who tell your parents "F-you" every morning before you ingest crank and floor your El Camino down I-635 on your way to DeVry, there's a station for you, and we're honestly thankful. The last thing the world needs to hear on the airwaves is more of the crap we bob our heads to.

While all the other talk jocks seem to be collapsing into a single personality and voice, Mark Davis gets more distinctive. First of all, he actually knows some stuff and appears to have a life, something beyond skimming the front page and then trying to channel Rush Limbaugh. Some of his tangents are arcane, like his passionate interest in the sport of curling, but at least you know he gets out of the sound booth once in a while. His callers are often an intriguing lot, like the woman who, while calling, was being attacked by a basset hound, a toy poodle and a dachshund/Chihuahua mix but wanted to keep talking to Davis anyway. That's animal magnetism! Generally speaking, Mark Davis provides a uniquely engaging perspective on the city's everyday life.

Readers' Pick

Russ Martin Show

Live 105.3

KERA-FM 90.1 is truly a great station for news and sane talk-show programming. But let's face it: They can't do everything, and hence, they don't play music. That's where KNTU 88.1 fits in. This public radio station, which transmits from the University of North Texas, is one of the coolest in the Southwest: Its mix of jazz, classical and world music can't be beat, if you're into such things. (We are. We're nerds.) Like Jerry Maguire without Dorothy Boyd, we would not be complete without this cultural treasure, although we surmise some UNT students would rather be listening to Radiohead or Pavement than Dizzy or Miles. (Though they can do that for a few hours on Sunday nights, thanks to Russell Lyday's "The Show That Fell to Earth.")

Overheard at Best Buy last year: "I'm into all kinds of music. I listen to Nelly and Limp Bizkit." Right, buddy. Now, granted, everyone winds up claiming musical impartiality at some point in his life, but there's no way a person can like every single genre in the world. Do your tastes honestly jump from Tejano to punk rock, from mainstream rap to lo-fi folk, from electroclash to country? If so, you must be one of the five fortunate souls in Dallas who can actually hear KTCU 88.7's The Good Show on Sunday nights. Tom Urquhart's wholeheartedly anti-commercial blast of musical variety will test both your claims of musical appreciation and your radio's antenna, but if you can pick up an effin' signal without driving west on Interstate 30, you're in for a sonic range unavailable on any other frequency in town. Watch out for the DJ banter, though, because when Tom, Chris and Tony aren't interviewing local musicians, they're wasting precious minutes on debates as odd as, say, the superiority of Nelly over Limp Bizkit.

There's no science to this choice. This is as subjective as "Best of" gets. Here's the story: Many, many years ago, in a time known as "the '80s," there was an amazingly handsome young man who had a crush on the eighth-grade bad girl. She smoked, she had big, wild hair, she cussed a lot. And she liked to rock. She loved Kiss, Judas Priest, Ozzy, anything that qualified as metal-rock back in the day. She wore nothing but black concert T-shirts to school, and she always got backstage. She was also extremely smart, one of the top graduates at her high school who got a full scholarship to college. But she dropped out to become a DJ at the rock-and-roll radio station she grew up listening to. Years later, her secret crush, this handsome young man, would become a famously successful writer, so successful that he now writes "Best of" items for a weekly alternative newspaper. Is that bad little girl Cindy Scull, the whiskey-voiced DJ who spins hard rock from 3 to 7 p.m. every day and puts up shots of herself in bikinis on the Eagle's Web site? No. But she sounds just like her.

Here's yet another reason to feel guilty about not pledging, or not paying your pledge, to public radio. Glenn Mitchell's noon-to-2 p.m. show on Dallas' public radio station, KERA-FM, is not only wildly entertaining, dastardly informative and harpooningly to the point, it's the local intelligentsia's preferred manner of intercourse. It's conveniently scheduled as well, while we're mad-dashing around town at lunchtime trying to find any parking space on Commerce or Elm. Content of the show defies categorization or even adequate description, but Mitchell's first hour is usually programmed for audience call-in or e-mail participation with a celebrity, notable, topical or otherwise interesting guest in the Dallas studio. The second hour is often one-on-one interviews he conducts with authors, poets, politicos, historians and others with something to share. The variety of the guests and topics makes Mitchell's show the best; and we like the soft, Jimmy Stewart-like Everyman quality of his voice, too.

Readers' Pick

Kidd Kraddick

Back-alley cockfighting is deplorable. Good can come from it only if it's out in the open, broadcast even. And without using roosters. In fact, the best cockfights involve no cock at all. We prefer head-to-head combat between two new songs, instead of poultry, and each weeknight at 9, 102.1 the Edge provides that battle and right on our FM dial. Now hosted by Ayo (he took over for Josh Venable in August), the competition is decided by phone-in and e-mail votes from listeners. No throwing down crumpled fivers, no feathers flying. It's good, clean radio fun inspiring rabid debate among listeners. And no cocks are harmed on any of the broadcasts.

This is not a slight to Mitchell, who conducts sometimes-thoughtful, sometimes-whimsical on-air chats with a wide array of guests every weekday from noon to 1 p.m., but can we get a little competition here, please? This is such a no-brainer even we couldn't screw it up. Dallas-Fort Worth is such a barren wasteland for talk radio, we've actually had to start listening to music stations again. With the glaring exception of Mitchell, if it ain't sports talk, it's bad talk. (For proof, see KLIF-AM 570 or, if you must, KYNG-FM 105.3 "The Talk...that Rocks"...shudder.) Mitchell is a natural interviewer, curious but focused, a serious talent who doesn't take himself too seriously. It's the one hour in our day we feel there's hope for talk radio outside of the sports realm.

Public art in Dallas often falls prey to being overlooked or hard to find, which is why the city's newest addition is also the best. Sitting at the intersection of Young and Akard near City Hall, the Dallas Police Memorial is a breathtaking edifice that effortlessly blends Dallas' best assets--our reluctant postmodernist slant and ample sky. Forged of stainless steel, this deceptively simple yet elegant design features the badge numbers of fallen officers etched into its canopy, such that their shadows are cast on the ground during North Texas' many sun-filled days. We're hopeful that it represents the first step to beautify our city with works that intelligently and seamlessly complement Dallas, though the threat to litter the streets with Pegasus statues may stop that effort before it even begins.

We hope that KLIF's perpetually dismal ratings are a good sign people have grown tired of the elitist, moralistic, free-market-at-all-costs bullshit masquerading as anti-government populism that talk radio regularly spews out. And the brief reign of puny führer Tom Kamb, a self-described "homo" who pushed himself to ever-lower levels of provocation to presumably outdo his straight-boy colleagues, makes us positively giddy--mostly because Kamb's relentless race- and gay-baiting never succeeded in provoking anyone. He'd taken talk-show conservatism into the caricature it often threatens to become. He returned to San Francisco, reportedly because of a personal tragedy, although his low-even-by-KLIF-standards numbers gave him little impetus to grieve here. We say auf Wiedersehen to Kamb because, to paraphrase Molly Ivins, his rhetoric always sounded better in the original German.