Move over John Kerry, there's a new flip-flopper in town.

You may remember about a year and a half ago, when Infinity Broadcasting became CBS Radio, it forced a great number of it's affiliates to change formats. The affiliates hit hardest by this format change were rock stations such as KROQ (New York), KITS (San Francisco) and WYSP (Philadelphia). The format changes were in response to several key events that had occurred recently. Examples are the move of Howard Stern to Sirius Satellite and the decline in the ratings of rock stations in general. A further catalyst, which is entirely based on opinion, would be the declining quality of new rock music and the increased popularity of rock sub genres (emo anybody?).

CBS forced many of it's most popular rock stations to change to the FREE format, which was primarily based around talk-shows.  It had it's successes, such as Kidd Chris in Philadelphia, but was ultimately deemed a failure.  New York switched back to a rock format earlier in the year, and was apparently successful enough for Philly to follow suit.  We here in Philly have been hearing "The Rock Is Back" for the last week, but it doesn't feel much different.

WYSP has been flaming it's main competitor WMMR for playing artists such as Huey Lewis and the News (during an A to Z countdown mind you), while claiming themselves to be only playing rock.  Here is a random sampling of some of the rock that I've had the pleasure of hearing over the past week: