Songs brief on RadioSASS.com

If a defining feature of our time is too much information and too little time, then perhaps what the world needs now is a good, old-fashioned, two-minute pop record.

So argues George Gimarc, a veteran radio programmer in Dallas who is beta-testing an Internet version of what he says will change the way we listen to the radio – whether online, off a satellite or over the public airwaves.

“There used to be a 2:30 (time) barrier that artists were limited to,” he says. “But pop got fat.”

Gimarc’s solution is RadioSASS, which will air what he calls a new radio “protocol” that cuts popular hits down to size: an average of two minutes per song. (The SASS stands for Short Attention Span System.)

“I watched how people listened to the radio, or their iPods, and found that people were punching from station to station about two minutes into each song,” he says.

“They (radio consultants) used to tell us that people changed because they didn’t like the songs, but I found that people would invariably say, ‘I just wanted to see what else was on.’ It was two verses in, when the big guitar solo came on.

“We are in such a high-speed society, we’re ready for the next one.”

Though Gimarc has been working on RadioSASS for seven years, he still hasn’t found a station “willing to go first.”

But he has edited down about 1,500 songs already, and says he has a team of seven “musician-editors” standing by for his first client.

Listening to the two hours of sample programming at radioSASS.com is a disorienting, but not unpleasant, experience.

Gimarc has little trouble trimming excess choruses and refrains from such songs as “Build Me Up Buttercup” by the Foundations and “I Feel the Earth Move” by Carole King. On the other hand, just as you’re getting into the percolating groove of Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” it’s over.

But there are some classics he says he won’t touch.

“I won’t do (Queen’s) ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or (Led Zeppelin’s) ‘Stairway to Heaven’,” Gimarc says.

Apparently, even in our efficiency-obsessed culture, some things remain sacred.