Radio Romanticism in the iTunes Era

I made an awesome discovery the other day: every Saturday from two to four, KPFK (90.7 FM for you Angelinos in the audience) has a program devoted to African music, from classic Afrobeat jams to the crazy new stuff that I, as a fledgling student of modern African music, have never even heard of. I stumbled on this while driving around town without music of my own, and was shocked and amazed that such a program could exist magically in the nether regions of scan-over frequencies, unnoticed until now. Possibly more amazing is that this program is actually good—the DJ was balancing classic tracks and new releases nicely, as well as occasionally stepping back to interview musicians passing through town and to plug Afrobeat-variety concerts. Also cool was that this dude, judging from his accent and then later confirmed as he stepped up to the mike at a Seun Kuti concert, was himself African, and occasionally uses his show to encourage his listeners to take musician X or notable person Y into their communities and show them some Nigerian hospitality, say, implying that the show serves as a sort of grand voice for the expat African communities present in our fair metropolis.

So the show (officially titled Afro-Dicia, with DJ Nnamdi) does three notable things, one indirectly: it brings awesome African music to the airwaves in a dedicated and comprehensive manner (i.e. a knowledgeable guy spins variations on a theme for two hours each week); it serves as an expression of unification and community in what could otherwise be a very lonely city; and it just sort of sits there, unhyped and unnoticed, until one happens to be skimming stations in that two-hour block. These three principles/characteristics/things are, in my humble and subjective opinion, what radio is supposed to do. We can think of it almost as the two primary rules in a charter, complimented by an intrinsic purpose: radio is supposed to disperse new music to the masses, and radio is supposed to be this strange fifth-business sort of community via communication, a one-sided relationship dictated by a schedule that nonetheless inspires a devoted following (we’ll get to ironing out the weird specifics of this feeling in a bit). The corollary to all this is that when you take all the stations in your area and consider all the different possible shows that one could listen to, the process of actually ferreting out the good stuff becomes daunting, so (unlike with television, where critics preview and analyze what is worthwhile and what isn’t in a way that becomes a part of the pop cultural conversation) an element of exploration enters the picture, and each show (that weird community-thing) exists as a sort of oasis of like-minded folks in the geographic vastness of the radio ether. We’re getting carried away with that analogy, but the point remains, and directs us to our line of inquiry for the day: if radio exists as a form of invisible community/a way of spreading new music to the masses, what does it mean that nobody listens to radio any more?

Because it’s true, as far as my observations of American kids roughly in my age range inform me. Radio, formerly the hip alterna-voice of the underground (demonstrated gloriously, if dramatically, in “Pirate Radio,” which is worth a watch), has now become that thing that you listen to in your car when you forget your iPod. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and doubtless many more exceptions to these broad proclamations about a media form that actually isn’t faring as poorly as others, thank you very much. But here’s a personal anecdote that’ll frame things nicely: back when I did my college radio show (back a few months ago, ancient history), I had one hell of a time getting people to listen in. I took umbrage until I realized that it wasn’t just my friends—almost nobody listened to the radio back in college. In the dorms, nobody had radios unless they were combined with alarm clocks, and instead of identifying the quality programs in the area and listening to them, everyone just played their own music. So when I’d do my show, I had some inertia to work against, namely that I was attempting to introduce new behavior to my friend group, unaccustomed to having to sit down by the computer at 10 pm on Wednesdays and listen to my unfettered genius for an hour. And then, once I used the bonds of friendship to get people to listen, I was perplexed that people wouldn’t take the initiative and listen to other radio shows. Admittedly, we were way out in the sticks, where the only decent station was our little ramshackle college station (if I don’t say so myself), but through the miracles of modern Internet technology it would have been easy for people to tune in to the programs they listened to at home.

But, of course, nobody listened to the radio regularly at home. And this is where things start to get weird. I do understand that even back in those idealized glory days of yore folks didn’t listen to their radios exclusively—there were CDs and tapes and records and, taking it back to the ways we used to listen to music, live concerts—but radio, from its inception, served those two principles that we mentioned way up at the top, music and community. As a sidebar, it seems odd to reduce an entire medium to two points that don’t even address what it is that makes radio so special, namely the transmission of the human voice to provide the illusion of true personal human conversation, but I’m sticking to my guns on two grounds: 1.) that the human contact element of radio is ultimately most important in that nebulous community sense that we still need to nail down in a future paragraph, and that said element even accounts for certain ways that we respond to news via radio that renders radio’s purpose of informing on current events just another part of that community, and (deep breath) 2.) that music, being of bizarre and hard-to-quantify importance to us as human beings, demands equal footing with that community-idea we have yet to hammer out, and yes is distinct from that community-feeling because music, while being vitally important to humans, is nonetheless distinct from human-human interactions, meaning that the dissemination of music serves a different purpose, the near-instantaneous and quasi-globalized spread of musical ideas. Does that make any sense? Basically, all human-human interactions through radio (news, DJ banter, the sound of another person’s voice) can be grouped in my Grand Organizing Theorem under the category of community, while music is different and equally vitally important because we as people need music, and non-italics need (or perhaps just like) to hear new music in the same way that we sort-of-crave new ideas. New music did travel before radio and recordings, but it was just a slower process, and that entire world of thought about the implications of music-idea-transmission is fascinating but has successfully derailed our current train of thought, so perhaps we can return to it another day. But, for sake of repetition, remember: as music-loving beings, it is and has always been important to us to hear new music, and radio has been a vital tool in this pursuit since roughly the time of its inception. 

Moving on, the fact that nobody listened to radio at home troubled me initially on musical grounds, doubtless because this is how I primarily learn/learned about new music, both new-recent and new-to-me. I understand how this entire process has come about, and can even accept it on some level: we have entered what I like to call the iTunes era. Remember how kids these days only really listen to the radio when they leave mp3 players behind? This is because the advent of personal digitalized music libraries has led to the astounding phenomenon wherein every young soul with a bit of discretionary income can easily carry with them up to… 120 gigabytes of music is it now? Something in that range, all in a device about the size of a deck of cards. And the fun doesn’t stop there if, like some of my friends, you have a separate external hard drive devoted entirely to your music library. By point of comparison, I consider my library to be, if not totally comprehensive, at least consequential, and well-curated so that it only contains music that I still enjoy listening to (in theory). My idea of the well-curated library clocks in at 459 albums and 5298 individual songs, amounting to an astounding 14.5 days of music. The total gigabyte sum? 21.48. So yes, mp3 players are mind-boggling in the sheer amount of music that they allow one to comfortably carry around (gone are the days of CD wallets filled with strategic mix tapes, for the most part), and the idea of a dedicated drive for a music library vastly exceeding the capacities of even a 120 gig device is sort of terrifying. Most significantly, what this allows is for kids these days to play whatever they want, whenever they want it. Thus you can, on a single journey, craft your perfect soundtrack as you go, and from conceivably any/every band, album or genre that you have ever heard of. This liberates us from the pre-arranged structures of albums and allows us to combine songs on the fly, giving us the power formerly reserved for… radio. We are our own DJs now, thereby explaining the fall of radio. 

Well, sort of. Yes, the mp3 player/digital music library makes each man a walking radio station, but I don’t think that the infinite music library aspect of the iTunes era is totally responsible for the decline of radio. I love having a digital music library almost as much as radio shows (apples and oranges, really), but still manage to enjoy the two together. The real problem for radio here, sociologically speaking, is the fact that mp3 players free us from radio, implying that there was something to be freed from. And there was, in a way—while superlative DJs can be a transcendent pleasure to listen to, there is no way for them to read the mind of each individual listener and play, for that listener, exactly what they want to hear, when they want it. Mp3 players grant the same intoxicating ability that the Internet and DVR grant, namely instant gratification. It’s hard—inhuman, really—to not enjoy thinking of a song, then playing it off a thing in your pocket, and knowing that all the music you could ever want exists on that same thing too (or can be pulled off of your dedicated library-drive in 120 gig combinations), waiting to be played at your command. Thus radio’s real weakness is in some ways painfully simple—why would anyone listen to music that somebody else plays when they have all the music they need right here? The iTunes era even solves the problem of learning about new music nicely with its deep involvement with the Internet. One can read reviews, listen to samples, and download songs (hopefully legally, you punks) in basically no time at all, and all without being subjected to anything that could possibly change/alter that decision.

This means that the only thing that radio has that mp3 players don’t is the influence of an actual person sitting there and spinning tracks, and this is what will ultimately save radio. For while it seems that there’s nothing lost by eliminating the DJ, who is really just a dude trying to appease his audience to the best of his abilities, the DJ is a human being, and as we all remember, human interactions form the second founding principle of radio goodness, community. Now would be the time to hammer out our definition: what could community even possibly mean when applied to a largely solitary or small-group medium? Even in the golden days of gathering the family together to listen to radio dramas, no “community” was created in any sense other than that of the community of people who tune in to watch a TV show every night. But television is actually the perfect point of comparison because it creates a very different sort of community for strange psycho-social reasons. This is sort of building off of an essay by David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Plurum,” but I’ll go over the necessary details. Basically, TV-watchers constitute and interesting audience because of the one-way relationship that TV has with its audience, in that a team of entertainment professionals labor to create the illusion of watching other people in their natural habitat, deliberate voyeurism that is complicated by the fact that the people being watched are keenly aware of being watched, and the viewer knows this when he sits down in the first place. Thus the relationships that people feel they have with TV characters (and here we slowly veer away from DFW) are rather unusual in that there’s a Stockholm syndrome aspect to it, that these people are our so-called friends only because we become used to seeing them so frequently. Charitably, we could say that this is the same sort of relationship that one creates with characters in fine fiction; uncharitably, that we are letting ourselves be deluded if we actually think these paid actors are our friends. But what of non-characters, like good old Jon Stewart at the Daily Show? Could he properly be considered our friend, in that he is a familiar personage that is speaking to us, in a non-double-illusion direct way? To pursue a strange rhetorical tactic, I’m going to say no, and then jump to an example of something in radio that, while similar, ultimately proves the opposite point. Because ultimately community in radio comes from that same Jon Stewart-esque place, where we the audience come to think of they the media personages as friends, it would seem that our radio communities fall into precisely the same trap, in that these people are not our friends. But there is something quite different at work in radio, and I think it has everything to do with the ways in which we consume these distinct mediums.

TV is, of course, mostly visual, and as such deeply enthralling. I know that when there’s a TV on at a restaurant or bar, I have to sit with my back to it, because otherwise I’ll keep getting distracted by the magic of moving images. As such, when we watch TV, we sort of commit to it in a way that the cultural theorists would latch onto as being worshipful or idolizing, that full-body sort of focus that comes from total attention. To head back to DFW territory, this suits TV perfectly well, as it draws the viewer into that weird one-sided relationship, almost making the viewer commune with his television. Naturally, it is possible to have a TV on and not be held in a trancelike state, but this jarring disruption of the illusion is odd—here are people, acting like they’re not being watched so people can watch them, actually not being watched. When it comes to Jon Stewart and other direct-address TV shows, a real wedge is driven into the friendship illusion, as we are reminded that no matter how earnestly anyone on TV addresses us, they’re still not talking to us, only the collective impersonal Us. Now, contrast this with purely auditory radio. When I’m listening to, say, NPR while I eat breakfast, I’m fully capable of continuing to live my life, devoting plenty of attention to eating and maybe reading the paper and chatting with whoever’s around. And yet, even though this wouldn’t be the most respectful behavior were Carl Castle (remember him? Did I spell his name correctly?) were sitting at the table with me, it still seems somehow more personal than if we were watching everyone say the same things on TV. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I can tune in and out of what they’re saying, as if we were part of some larger conversation. Conversation is actually precisely the right word to work with here—listening to other people speak, the sound of human voices, is somehow more effective at creating this illusion of friendship. This sort of gets us back into the “why is music important” line of discussion, but I’m thinking that there’s something about listening to the sound of the human voice without the distraction of watching someone that we clearly know isn’t there (or, as DFW puts it, watching our furniture) that transcends the fact that we know the person we’re talking to isn’t talking to us. Distance, thanks to the telephone, almost doesn’t matter either—it’s entirely possible that if one of the Morning Edition folks wanted to say hi to me in particular, they could. So, just to clarify, we’ve hit the major distinction: the illusion of friendship (or, more accurately, camaraderie, as we’re not really interested in going out for a beer with these people, only developing an amiable relationship and forming a sort of community) is much more palatable in radio form, because we are simultaneously freed from the reminder (visually presented in TV) that we are not being directly addressed and comforted by whatever it is in our brains that makes the sound of a human voice so comforting/appealing.

There is, of course, more to the notion of community than these differing sorts of camaraderie that we build with media personages. Ignoring podcasts, many/most people still listen to the radio in real time, whereas more and more people are watching TV shows out of sequence thanks to DVRs, or even thanks to whatever spite it is that makes people like me postpone enjoyment in order to watch a show when it’s out on DVD, just so I don’t have to deal with any commercials or fast-forwarding. And then there’s the question of audience-ship, which brings us to that third, partial postulate in our Grand Theorem of Radio Worth, the sense of exploration. Even though the number of TV programs available is astounding, one still gets the sense that the number of one’s fellow viewers is huge, impossibly so. This is because most TV programming is nationalized—we have to share our “Parks and Rec” with everyone else who gets NBC. Radio, contrasting again, is still largely a local phenomenon, albeit slightly mitigated by the power of internet streaming. So even though I listen to KCRW, my local NPR affiliate, with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of other people in our rather large city, there is still an element of secrecy, of exclusivity, of community. Again, I could probably fill another post with thoughts about why it is that I have a hard time when other people enjoy the same cultural things as I do, but in the case of radio the message is clear: if our community got any larger, it would grow impersonal, and then it wouldn’t make me feel as special as a listener. KCRW has cannily tapped into whatever they think of as my feeling of community by actually creating a sense of community in LA, getting local merchants to offer small discounts for KCRW supporters (presumably they get a tax kickback) and sponsoring concerts and events. I know that it’s kind of silly, but when I see people at one of these events, or using their member benefits card at a restaurant, I feel some level of kinship towards them. These are our people. This is radio community exemplified.

Of course, most of this community exists as we’re listening to the radio and imagining (in a subconscious way) ourselves as a part of this smaller-than-excessively-huge web of listeners. The combination of real-time, human voice and localization all contribute to this feeling. But, oddly enough, this is exemplified most in that humble conceit of time-killing, DJ banter, which brings us super-circuitously back to where we left our argument, with why it is that DJ’s will save radio from our own need for immediate gratification in this iTunes era. Another personal example: now that I’m an old man and no longer staying out until all hours on the weekend, one of my great pleasures is realizing around 10 pm on Saturdays that United Groove is on over at the jazz station (88.1—the trials of our little jazz station have sort of shaped my childhood, radio-wise at least, but I’m proud to say that Miles Perlich is one of the last great things that the station has going for it, and his two hours of funky oddities are well worth a listen). I usually end up falling asleep towards the end of the show, and as I do Miles’ banter becomes more personal/profound, but not in a weird way. The falling asleep meditation process sort of slows everything down, and as I’m listening to Miles wrap up another solid show I feel a deep bond of kinship with him, something that goes beyond the music. I think it has something to do with the knowledge that the tracks he’s spinning have some premeditated order, some purpose, and that they are, in some small part, sent out over the airwaves for this one specific listener. The banter drives that all home; there’s no banter when you’re your own DJ. Sure, it’s entirely possible to make an excellent playlist on your own, or to enjoy computerized randomization and live in anticipation of what you’re getting next (there’s even a station somewhere in the southwest that apparently is entirely randomized, just some rich dude’s music library on shuffle, with a computer automatically reading the call numbers at the required intervals). But this ignores the human, community element. I’ve had transcendent experiences listening to radio, like one time when Garth Trinidad at KCRW dropped this Caribbean steel drum cover of “I Want You Back” into a set—that kind of premeditated awesomeness is hard to totally approximate with random songs, and doesn’t have the follow-up joy of listening to a DJ who knows he’s done something wild explain what he just did. 

Listening to good radio is ultimately all about finding a program that you like and trusting in the DJ, as one would trust in a friend, to play good things for you over the course of his show. Good radio is also/can also be about developing that relationship, of hearing a familiar voice at a familiar time, engaging you in another installment of a very long conversation. Garrison Keilor’s venerable “A Prairie Home Companion” is a prime example of both of these qualities (and it would have been criminally negligent to not mention that program in this essay). This is sort of the platonic ideal of radio programming, a tribute to golden-era variety shows, an assortment of live music, comedy sketches that provide some satirical takes on the news of the day, and of course the monologue, complete with recurring characters and Keilor’s own musings on life these days. It’s been on for quite some time now— since the ‘70s, I believe—and despite being both a nationally broadcast show and strictly local to the St. Paul area, it has inspired a network of mini-communities all over via its live performances, where fans can get together and, in a true act of closing the tribal circle, become the laughing/cheering/applauding audience heard in the background, i.e. a part of the show. 

And that is sort of the apex of radio, at least as far as my humble Grand Theorem goes. We haven’t touched much upon commercial, top 40’s radio, nor have we really hit the AM band at all—that’s because I don’t really spend a whole lot of time there, and nor do I need to. Talk radio, from what I’ve heard, is a prime example of a community of listeners, one that’s perhaps even better than the rest because the callers can actually develop that relationship with the hosts. Sports broadcasts also carry a different sort of community with them, that of devoted fans. Some folks would be more interested to hearing about the great undiscovered top 40’s station that is all Adele, or would be interested to hear me justify how prime-time corporate DJs’ banter makes the listener feel warm and welcome. But I’m not even going to touch on those, because that’s not what I’m looking for in radio. As far as I see it, there’s something vaguely cretinous about a lot of talk radio, sports radio mystifies me as much as ESPN, and top 40’s stations are largely a function of playing whatever those top 40 songs are as much as possible to satisfy some strange entertainment conglomerate’s master plan. That’s not my jam. For everything else, though, I think our tenets provide sufficient explanation—radio that’s worth saving is the sort of radio that provides community while playing new and noteworthy music. In the same way that there’s a lot of bad to mediocre TV out there, there’s a lot of radio that’s not worth listening to, and as such we shouldn’t think about it in the first place. The only radio that’s going to get people listening and re-interested in the medium is going to be good radio.

Which is, of course, the bottom line. To take it back half a step, radio is still a fundamentally viable form even in these internet days. People still like listening to human voices, and people still like listening to music. And, beyond that, I think that it’s sort of an important piece of our popular culture, and one worth saving. We’ve sort of touched upon some of the things that good radio traditionally can/does do, but there is plenty of room for expansion within the form, and we can perhaps draw some inspiration from our cousins over in the UK, where the BBC is alive and well (another indication of radio’s fundamental viability as a technology). According to a pretty good article in the LA Times about a year ago, there is still a huge audience for radio in BBC-land, partly derived from a radio-listening culture (one interviewee had a radio for every room, I believe, and left them on in the way that Americans leave televisions on), but also from a great deal of excellent programming. Because radio is still respected, and because the BBC is state-run and therefore beholden to nobody, the money to produce quality programming can meet the quality talent required, creating a number of excellent shows. Plays are serialized, new works commissioned expressly for radio, esteemed commentators are heard nationally, and yes, they have a pretty thriving music show lineup too (Mark Lamar’s show God’s Jukebox is quite nice). The moral is many-fold: an expansion of public radio would greatly enhance our national culture, as we’d be able to support no-strings attached works of critical radio excellence; we should be so lucky as to have the same intellectual-respecting and cross-media popular culture as there is in the UK (where dudes like Stephen Fry can show up basically anywhere and say insightful things, and get listened to!); and the only limitation on radio is that it’s a purely auditory medium.

So, what’s stopping us over here? We can actually work with the current state of the radio and start producing podcasts (which are fine and all, a DVR version of radio, but sort of negate that community sense a bit because it’s not happening live, as the Miles Perlich example had it), develop a following, and then take it to the airwaves. Tragically, Garrison Keilor is planning on retiring pretty soon, although his show will go on. Why not ride the wave of Keilor-veneration that’s starting to build and market a show to your NPR affiliate? Local stations breed communities, but each individual show is ultimately the base unit of community, and your hypothetical show of whatever you can do with a microphone could develop a devoted following. Perhaps, not knowing anything of the mechanics involved in financing a commercial radio station, the shenanigans with the economy will result in a lot of the mediocre stations shutting down, freeing up the airwaves for enterprising young stations. If you’re living in a college town with a real radio station, head on down and get involved by putting on a regular old music show. Plug events in the community. If you’ve ever seen “Northern Exposure,” you know the sort of small-town feel that comes from quality local programming (and indeed, apparently some local stations in extremely rural areas serve as the only form of community, when your neighbors are a mile away down winding roads). The point here, the grand point behind all of this, is that we can easily lose sight of what makes a thing great in the face of a whole lot of mediocrity and sea change. Radio is, by and large, just a thing, with strange pockets of excellence, so it’s pretty easy to switch over to your private digital music library and turn your back on the airwaves. But in doing so, you really miss out on another part of your city/town/whatever’s capital-C Community and Culture. Radio’s a pretty good thing, and perhaps a bunch of us enterprising youngsters can come up with some crazy ideas to bring it all back to its rebellious, “Pirate Radio” roots. The wildest new music? Super-subjective cultural commentary? Innovative new interpretations of the performing arts? The world is ours. But let’s not forget the good stuff that’s out there now. Turn up your radio next time you drive somewhere, even if you brought your iPod. Spin the dial. Find out what’s good, and listen in again soon. 

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2. peppersjam reblogged this from jujedispatch and added:

   friend Juje (Julian, whatever),

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4. wslack reblogged this from jujedispatch and added:

   EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS, IT’S AWESOME. Also Juju, Professor Nolan might assign

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