TRAFFIC STARTS. It stops. It's been 20 minutes and I'm still at the Rainier Brewery. It's early morning and raining hard. Those commie pricks in the HOV lane go speeding by, washing my car in road water. I need to get to Renton, but no one cares, and no amount of desire will spring me from the trap of I-5 anyway. Angry words start collecting up inside me: They tighten and squeeze and press against my chest, harder and harder until I finally give in and scream.

"My name is Kiiiiiiiid Roooooock!!! /I am the bullgod! /I am free! '/Cause all I do is curse and fuck./So you all better give me two rooms/'cause I'm fuckin' the first one up." -- Kid Rock and Slim Shady, from Devil without a Cause.

The radio has magically ushered me into a world of white guys doing nothing but balling and smashing 40s, smacking their bitches up and rapping about their friends in jail. In traffic like this, that's my "happy place," and FM104.9, "The Funky Monkey," is taking me there.

It took me longer than most to get there, mostly because of equipment failure. Back in California, some cop snapped the antenna off my car, and he must have followed me to Seattle to finish the job, because my stereo was stolen on Westlake last month. So when I found out that FM104.9 was now "The Funky Monkey," blasting Kid Rock, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and the Beastie Boys from a transmitter in Eatonville, I needed an equipment upgrade. I borrowed a plastic boom box, complete with digital tuning and neon buttons, and got ready to rock.

Unfortunately, by the time an FM signal from the Monkey's hometown of Eatonville gets to Seattle, receiving the weak waves on a boom box is about as effective as wrapping my left hand in tin foil and sticking my right thumb in the cigarette lighter. And even if I could get the signal here, I would never be able to truly understand the Funky Monkey's messages of white rage and suburban anger in, say, the parking lot of some PCC in trendy Seattle. I needed to go to Tacoma.

"It's not a tough decision, as you can see / I can blow you away / or you can ride with me." -- Beastie Boys, "Paul Revere."

In late July, when Bob Case and his partners bought 104.9, an underachieving contemporary R&B station, their first move was to rename the station after the lyrics from "Brass Monkey" and play an entire week of uninterrupted Beastie Boys cuts. Just the Beastie Boys. For a whole week. After that first week, they promised to play at least two Korn songs every hour -- a promise they seem to be keeping. Case says that he saw a gap in Puget Sound radio coverage, and the Funky Monkey wanted to hit that untapped market hard. The result is like a looped immersion course in rap-metal and hardcore alternative: almost nothing but Rage Against the Machine, Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, and early Beastie Boys, from the start of Aaron the Pimp's Wake Up Hard morning commute show until long after nightfall.

Once the exit for Ikea siphons the last yuppies off of I-5, I begin to imagine the Funky Monkey's target demographic. They must be young white males from Orting, Fife, Renton, Kent, or Tacoma. They have jobs that are just okay, and feel like affirmative action or Indian welfare are keeping them underpaid and overtaxed. They probably smoke, and either live with their parents, date teenage women, or both. They still feel close to their own high school days, in which small larcenies and fist fights gave them a Chuck Palahniuk-like sense of their saltiness and free will. But now, like me, they're stuck in traffic on I-5, watching life go by.

Bob Case says that these young people want "passion" in their music, but "passion" suggests a united cause. From Korn's screams of "faggot!" to Kid Rock's call for color-blind sexism to Rage Against the Machine's more thoughtful anti-consumerism, the anger itself is the only constant. However, it's an anger I'm beginning to understand. I've chased 104.9's signal all the way to a strip mall past Tacoma after driving for over an hour and a half. In the mall's parking lot, I tilt my seat back and drink some Rainier Ale to get an authentic Tacoma buzz. The hooch just makes my head hurt, though, and the clatter of shopping carts and yelps of spoiled children only make it worse. And as the radio spits out Limp Bizkit, lying to me about things they've done, I feel my first real connection to the Funky Monkey: With my overheated car, cheap beer, and deep, inarticulate frustration, I have finally joined the target demographic.