I listened to the radio yesterday!

Good thread.

Two points I'll try to make quickly.

As with Grant, I too listen to a lot of NPR--espec Fresh Air w/Terry Gross. She's good with almost anybody on almost any subject, but espec w/art and culture/music, and her interests know few bounds. She MAY BE the best interviewer working in media today.

(EXCELLENT 2-part feature on SAM COOKE can be found at the npr.com which aired yestereday and today in drive-time. Features Peter Grualnick. BTW, his Cooke bio has apparently been pushed from this year to next--he's in his 7th year of work on it!)

My local NPR affiliate (88.1 WUTC) is near perfect for me. They play a broad range of music all day, and get espec adventurous at night. (Bright Eyes, Calico, Radiohead, cat power, Fountains of Wayne, New Pornographers, etc., though they could do with more r&b hip-hop influence.)

AND ON THE FCC THING, these changes being made will alter the way stations are counted in a given market such that (espec in some small and med mkts) giants like Clear Channel will actually be able to BUY MORE STATIONS.

RADIO as an artistic and creative propostion is nearly dead.

doug

 

Here's more depressing stuff from that 1996 Telecommunications Act:

IIRC, to placate the opponents of this deregulation act, the FCC came up with a process that simplified getting a license for a low-power FM station (I think one with a @10 mile transmission radius), and lowered the fees for doing so. This way the immediate neighborhood around it could be served properly.

Nice idea right?

Well, it was until the bill made it to the very last stage of the approval process, when a small addition was discretely tacked onto the low-power portion: it said that one of these low-power stations could not be closer than XX mHz to another station. I can't remember the exact frequency spacing but in practical terms, in a typical city the spacing would have prevented just about any low-power station to exist. This effectively killed the lofty goal of that part of the Telecommunications Act.



[T]

 

The transistor radio at night sure picked up neat stuff - Super CFL and WLS battling it out - those kinda slugfests just don't exist anymore....

 

Around here turn on the oldies station and you get:

"Saturday in the park,
I think it was the Fourth of July..."

or

"My baby does the Hanky Panky,
My baby does the Hanky Panky, ... ad nauseum.

Ugh!! Let's listen to talk radio or something...

 

Duplicate deleted

 

Did you guys never read Radio Waves by Jim Ladd? That book, while nominally discussing a very specific period from 1967ish through the mid eighties, and in particular one particular DJ's experience, said everything there was to say about the transformation of radio from vital to McRadio. It's only gotten worse since then, thanks to the loosening of the FCC's rules. A lot worse. In the mid nineties you could still find interesting stuff to listen to on radio.

 

Without getting into politics as such, I don't think the record supports your last statement, at least not often enough to matter. But I think on this topic the thing is that the individuals in Congress don't like the idea of big conglomerates controlling access to the media that they need to use to get elected. I also suspect Bush & co. don't care much about this particular issue and are willing to let Congress have it's way. Probably this means Michael Powell, the FCC's chair, also Colin Powell's son, is going to be sacrificed.

 

Turn me into more of Steve Hoffman fanboy, why don't you? I would love to have even heard Jim Ladd in his prime, let alone be in the studio with him.

Yeah, nothing that I recall about female groupies in the booth at all, in fact.

But the book is a good read once you get over the clumsy thin vineer of fiction.

 

Steve meanwhile, as you tried not to watch What exactly were you trying "NOT" to watch.

 

Thank goodness in the San Francisco area we have a wonderful jazz station in KCSM (public radio of course). It has that perfect balance of personalities and great music that the great rock stations of yore used to have. But there are only a handful of jazz stations like that in the US now.

- Joe