March 3rd, 2005
Recently friend and Boisee.com reader John Hecht sent me this article(see below). It bemoans the end of radio. Basically I agree with the author, but mostly it makes me sad. Guess I am now one of the “everything was better when I was a kid” generation.
Corporate radio sucketh, whole and large and true.
We know this. Everyone knows this. There is not a single person out there right now who is listening to any of the one zillion lifeless Clear Channel or Infinity-owned rock stations anywhere in the nation who is saying to themselves, gosh this KLOG station is just exceptionally good and clever and smart and plays amazingly fresh music and makes me want to listen all the time and oh my God I am so going to pick up the phone right now and try to be the 157th caller so I can win tickets to go see Dave Matthews live in Portland! Woo!
OK, maybe there’s a few. But you probably don’t want to know them, because they’re the type who never slam ice-cold shots of vodka or have never heard of Rocco Siffredi and they wear pink capri pants or backward baseball hats and drive Ford Escorts with weird stuffed animals in the windows. Mostly.
This is the problem with rock radio. It has become the last option, the thing you listen to only when all other options fail, when you’re too tired to pop in a CD or too lazy to reach for the iPod or just a little too buzzed on premium tequila and postcoital nirvana to care about searching your glove box for that old AC/DC tape. In short, rock radio is for people who buy their Matchbox 20 CDs from Target.
It has become background noise, something you leave on just to keep you from falling asleep as you drive to Sacramento, more ads than music and more generic than electrifying, a nearly dead form that lost its spark about 15 years ago and that is quickly giving way to Sirius and XM and your ability to burn your own custom-mix CDs for pennies apiece and listen to them for three days and throw them away and burn a new one.
Then there is the wondrous joy that is the iPod and its new upstart spawn, podcasting, that cute grassroots do-it-yourself radio mini-phenomenon thing that is spreading like porn-flavored candy and has the potential to slap corporate radio upside the head, even more than it has been in the past decade, which is a lot.
The good news is, such innovation and progress and user-powered choice is always good and always forces staid and monolithic industries to rethink their crusty and prehistoric business models, much like the Net forced newspapers to rethink their existence and microbreweries forced Budweiser to rethink its pisswater beer and HDTV is now forcing celebs to rethink all that Botox.
But the sad news is, we are now way past radio’s Golden Age, that time way back when before the Internet and before iPods and before you could find out every godforsaken detail you ever wanted to know about any band on the planet with the click of a mouse, a time when DJs were the true music authorities and actually seemed to know fantastic and curious and insider details about the art of noise, and they were rapturous and sexy and interesting and didn’t have to be de facto obnoxious and didn’t insist on telling really awful jokes and you could actually discover incredible new music by listening to their various antiestablishment noncorporate shows and feel something akin to community and connection and a true sense of your own identity.
But of course, that was then.
And I was just recently switching cassette tapes (don’t ask) in my aging car and found myself unwittingly flipping through the local radio options on the off off off chance that something, anything might catch my ear long enough to get me home, when lo and behold the one remaining decent alt-rock station in the Bay Area, Live 105, was playing a new song by a red-hot band called Kasabian.
And I was all, whoa, this is good, followed by hey wait, this is on the radio, followed by wow, radio actually introduced me to an excellent piece of new music I’ve never heard, followed by the realization that this hasn’t happened since about, oh, 1996, followed by the sad recognition that only a handful of major-station radio gems remain on the dial anywhere in the country, stations that still fly their flags of ragged independence like beacons in a wasteland of sameness and blandness and endless replays of Beyonc� and Eric Clapton and Sting, while the FCC stands behind them all like a psychotic nun with a giant ruler and a deep scowl and callused nipples.
But these stations, they’re few and far between and they’re going down faster than shots of formaldehyde into Laura Bush, and while I’m always happy to hear that companies like Clear Channel, that nasty and adorably soulless megacorporate owner of roughly 1 billion preprogrammed radio Dumpsters across the nation, just posted a $4.7 billion loss, there is no new model coming up behind, no pending radio revolution on a large scale, no new way to introduce the world to butt-shaking new artists en masse.
And while there are plenty of outstanding extant indie stations (hi, KCRW), not to mention gobs of superlative alternative talk radio (hey, KPFA), not to mention countless fabulous FCC-free Net radio stations, and while I certainly love wasting endless hours browsing the iTunes Music Store and Amazon’s reader recommendations and watching lesser-known music vids via the video archives on Rollingstone.com and indulging in semi-illegal file sharing via Acquisition and ripping the wondrously good SomaFM Net-radio stream straight into RadioLover, these are not the way to inform huge numbers of people about the absolute greatness of, say, Nick Cave’s “Abbatoir Blues.” You feel me?
Simply put, it now feels nice, in a painfully nostalgic and rose-colored sort of way, to say that rock radio once had the power to unify, to create shared experience and healthy, rebellious attitudes on a relatively large and badass scale. Was it true? Probably. At least a little. Maybe.
It was, after all, immediate and live and intensely localized while simultaneously seeming to be global and eternal and cool. And in a world of fractured divisive bitter warmongering and the rise of the sneering religious Right and of the sputtering faux-cowboy priggishness of George W. Bush, few are the cultural forces left to foster such a sense of place and togetherness and raw musical heat. Woe and bitch and lament.
But you know, whatever. It all had to change and it all should change, and change in such stagnating industries is always largely healthy and good and necessary. Mostly. We are now ushering in, like it or not, the era of random choice, of TiVo and iPod and all-custom content all the time. Which is, of course, fabulous. But also, not.
The eternal argument still stands: We still need content filters. We still want cool all-knowing ever winking authorities, music-drunk or media-drenched experts who know a bit more than us and who have their cultural s– together and who are trained in such worldly debauched pursuits to aim our ever hungry taste buds toward the Next Big Thing. We still want cool voices to come on the air and tell us how we simply have to hear this new band because they will change the face of music forever or at least make you want to dance or dream or scream or have more sex like, right now.
Blogs won’t do it alone. Podcasts won’t do it alone. Burned CDs and iPod playlists and live Net streams can’t do it alone. But in radio’s sad wake, maybe, just maybe, all these upstart forms hold a seed, a hint, a glimmer of the next thing that will. Or, who knows, maybe they all might work to pry the corporate fingers from the throat of once-great rock radio, and usher in a true rebirth.
What, too utopian? Hey, that’s just rock ‘n’ roll.
