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An 8 Hour Trip With Only FM For Company |
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I moved from Chicago, where I had lived for 5 years, to Washington D.C. last week. I’m not an extravagant person, yet I was obliged to rent a moving truck to haul my assorted belongings from the shores of Lake Michigan to the banks of the Potomac. I completed this half-cross-country trip in two stages, stopping in Cincinnati, Ohio for a couple days before continuing on with the main push to D.C.
Though moving can be a real pain, I was actually excited about the trip itself. My father told me stories as a child of a cross-country car trip he took when he was finished with college, and so I was looking forward to having something of a cross-country trip of my own. I was excited to see this great country and I wasn’t at all phased by the thought of spending 8+ hours alone, driving a truck, with all of my worldly possessions riding behind me.
Of course, this truck, while newish and reliable (I used Penske, I highly recommend!), had no CD player or even tape player of any kind. And so my entertainment for the trip came solely from commercial radio.
Have you turned on the radio recently? Me either. I just never listen to the thing. My mom is addicted to NPR, but I prefer to read my news. And of course, it goes without saying that there is no good music on the airwaves. I’m told that at one point in American history, FM radio was a source for cultural exploration. When FM was first invented, AM radio broadcasters simply duplicated their programming on FM, hoping to draw in more listeners. In 1965 however, the FCC did something brilliant. It mandated that at least 50% of material broadcast on FM stations had to be original. AM radio stations simulcasting in FM had to create original programming. Because of FM’s greater fidelity and stereo capabilities, the open programming space that the FCC mandated created the now common music radio format overnight.
This music radio was originally locally focused and DJ driven. Without the Internet or large music distribution systems, DJs often were the arbiters of taste in a city, going out to hear musical groups perform and playing deep or unknown cuts on the radio, creating and commenting on their local music scene. A good endorsement from the right DJ could make a band popular instantly. These radio formats (by all accounts, I can’t say I’ve really ever heard one) were not only popular but culturally engaging. This wasn’t top 40 radio, this was real people going out and playing real music.
As FM radio expanded and advertising dollars increased, DJs become more and more corrupt and radio stations become more and more conglomerated. With the elimination of ownership caps by the FCC and the increasing use of computerized voice tracking to run radio stations from afar, radio companies got so big that they only catered to the broadest of tastes. The days of DJs broadcasting their local music scenes were over.
Today, the music played on the radio is beyond bland. You hear the same songs in heavy rotation on every station across the dial. Every song sounds the same and you never hear something new or worth listening to. This is why I’ve never listened to radio. I grew up without it, and I find no interest in it. I’m sure you can understand.
So eight hours alone in a truck with nothing but FM for company was starting to sound like a mind-numbing proposition. I did survive my trip, but I made some observations:
There is a lot of country music on the radio. I suppose I was under the impression that country music was confined to deep southern states. However, while driving through rural Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland, sometimes four out of the five radio stations I could pull in were playing country hits. If there is anything worse than top 40 pop and rock, it’s top 40 country.
Top 40 country music sounds a lot like top 40 rock and pop music. Sure, you’ll have a singer with a southern accent and some violins in the mix, but the backing bands are typically made up of drums, overdriven guitars, and electric basses playing the same 4-on-the-floor beat, just like rock and roll. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
Commercial radio has a ton of commercials. Though radio stations will say that they play an hour of straight music, this will often be accompanied by a half hour of advertisements. I’m not sure anybody actually sticks around and listens to the ads. I just change the channel.
Partly because of the commercials and partly because there are very few heavy rotation songs that I can stand, I ended up switching stations often, usually after one or two songs. I found that I gravitated towards oldies stations more often than I thought I would, if only for the reason that music played on those stations has been around forever, and has therefore withstood the test of time. I even found that I could tolerate oldies country stations. Johnny Cash, among others, was certainly worth listening to.
NPR plays a lot of classical music during the day. I like classical music, but it’s not the best stuff to keep a driver awake and alert on a long haul.
I did run across one radio station that was different from the rest. WFWM is a public radio station operated by the University of Frostburg in Maryland. As I was driving through, I was treated to the Acoustic Blues show, two hours of acoustic music put together by a local DJ. I didn’t like everything that was played, but by and large the music offered was interesting and new, and from artists I’d never heard of. It was a welcome change from the played out tunes on the rest of the dial and I stuck with the show until the signal faded into static.
This eight hour trip was the first time I had listened to commercial radio for any length of time in years. After the experience, I understand completely why radio listenership is slipping and why radio seems to have no influence on culture or art anymore. I suppose it is unfortunate that the great entertainment medium of yesteryear is being left behind for better things. However, I’d be happy if I never listened to FM again.
When was the last time you listened to radio for any length of time? If you do listen, for heaven’s sake, why?
One of the perks of living in the Bay area is that we have KFOG which is not corporate owned. I hear a variety of music, with quite a bit of local talent. They release a CD every year featuring between 15 and 18 local artist.
The morning show is the best with political commentary, humor, live music and many thoughtful comments from the fans. Other than that, radio sucks and lately I tend to hook up my iPod in the car because the musical options are pretty limited. One time the same song was playing on three stations, and more frequently than not, any two stations are playing the same thing. And it’s usually not a good song.
I stopped listening to commercial radio about ten years ago and never looked back.
I’m at work and I am currently suffering the artless, musically devoid, posturing of a burnt CD that one of our ~13 year old customers brings in with him on every visit. A disc full of FM pop-rock “hits” that he’s heard 1800 times before and which I’ve become victim of, at least 100 times, since he’s been coming.
This is what I’m on about people! The unashamed capitalism and unchecked greed of this culture is doing more damage than the cost-of-living shows. Thanks to the preeminence of marketing (we used to call it propaganda) this generation will grow up exposed to little else but mass-produced, unchallenging schlock designed to sate the base urges of the lowest common denominator.
It may not completely pollute today’s thirteen year old beyond relevant societal function but his children’s children will be hard pressed to form a cogent sentence.
This is one of the reasons I cannot stand hearing the, typically conservative, calls for wholly unrestricted capitalism. There are men in this world who would skin their own mothers alive if they could make a couple bucks selling tickets to the event. These same men presently own and operate all but a rare few sources of the American mainstream media. And they conspire to lower the standards of anyone who will tune in to absorb their mediocrity.
The market, left to it’s own devices, would turn every human being who carries with them hope, ideas, individuality, potential for greatness, and a spark of the divine… into a cabbage; A mindless, buy-me-beautiful, “Everybody Loves Raymond” watching, consumer set to graze in the mall-like pastures of the once great, “America - brought to you by Nike: Just do it.”
It’s not that the children of tomorrow’s generation will never hear good music, read good literature, or see fine cinema. It’s that they will have no ability to appreciate it; no ability to discern it from the garbage. Their every perception and sense of the world around them will be as round and dull as their obese McBodies. And finally the marketers and politicians - the powers and principalities - of the world will rejoice, having created a populace of replicants willing to swallow anything dangled passed the edge of their lips and dropped into the unending depths of their bottomless, palletless, gullets.
I would say it’s hard to blame bad pop music solely on marketing. I mean, yes, this music is shoved down our throats. But, the consumer does still decide what taste is, though in a roundabout way. Basically, a) it is hard not to blame the consumer in some senses for bad pop. I mean, if everyone truly hated it, it wouldn’t be successful. People in America deep down (or maybe not so deep) must really like shitty pop music. And b) CD sales and music revenue in general has been declining for years, a sure sign that what the music industry is putting out just isn’t resonating.
Of course, that’s a pretty slow process, and it doesn’t save me from bad music NOW.
The point for me, then, isn’t to worry about getting rid of the marketing machine or bad pop music. That’s really never going to happen, as bad music been around for as long as their has been music (I’m sure). The point is to ensure diversity. If I turn on the radio, I should at least be able to find something worthwhile. Oftentimes I can’t, and that really is a problem of consolidation more than it is a problem of America’s shitty taste in music. I don’t want to force my views of good taste on the world. (Well, I do, but I know I shouldn’t.) If you want to listen to Britney or Christina or some other BS, then fine. But I want my station on the dial too.
There isn’t a person here who believes that the bands polluting the FM wavelength would’ve gotten where they are without intervention from a music marketing mogul. Neither the quality of their content, nor the appeal of their stage persona’s could have carried them any further than a local battle of the bands.
But here they are before us with nationwide exposure and millions of albums sold. How is that?
I don’t think Americans enjoy shitty pop music any more than a two year old enjoys bright colors and tones in the key of ‘C.’ To some biological extent, it’s irresistible. Every one of us has had the “hook” of a song we couldn’t stand stuck in our heads at some point.
What needs to be acknowledged is that we, the public, are living under an ongoing psychological warfare. The reason that we accept the state of our media (not to mention our government) is because we have been conditioned to by people who have made a career of uncovering human frailties and using them to create baseless desire and unfounded support.
What’s worse is that this career choice, marketing, is considered respectable by modern American standards. To my mind these people are little different than the travelling snake-oil salesmen of days gone by. The only difference is that today’s fast-talking miracle peddlers do their little dance of hypnotic suggestion on a world stage instead of a street corner.
They have undermined the most basic premise of capitalism by devising methods of creating false demand. No one wants a pot with a colander built into the lid! But the exuberant British guy comes on the screen and starts yelling at the top of his lungs about how great it is… and the camera pans to a crowd full of “average people” cheering like it’s the second coming of Christ. After an hour of this, well, maybe I do want a pot with a colander in the lid. (By the way, why did I just watch an hour of this?)
The false demand lasts just long enough for them to get your credit card numbers, the pot takes 8 to 12 weeks to arrive and by the time it does you’re ashamed for having wasted your hard earned dollar on it. Then you give it a try only to discover the pasta gets in the way and not all the fluid drains; and while you’re holding the thing over the sink the sides of your forearms are being burned to hell by the rising steam; and, what do you know - the laws of physics still apply - and the heat from the water expands the metal top while your draining it, making it impossible to unlock the colander portion from the pot until the food you just spent twenty minutes cooking is cold! [Deep breath.]
They sold tens of millions of that stupid thing, for God’s sake! They knew it didn’t work. They knew it was a bad idea. But they marketed and sold it anyway. And they made hundreds of millions doing so. Now either we all admit that by birthright Americans are the dumbest motherfuckers to ever grace the surface of the planet or we must acknowledge that every day, all of our sources of media are lowering our collective standards, brainwashing us to the point of idiocy, and manipulating us by suggesting that our most undesirable traits are actually our greatest assets.
Tell me that marketing is a respectable profession. Tell me that every person who bought the pot with a colander top wasn’t a victim of a psychological manipulation the equal of any -illegal- subliminal advertising campaign. We’re not just talking pop music here, we’re talking about the evidenced, natural progression of capitalism’s influence. We’re talking about the free-market stripping human beings of their individuality, their ability to think rationally, and their mortal souls.
My great fear is that the media I see before me now, as corrosively destructive as it already is, is but a trifle; a prelude to what we will know a decade from now. And truly a state of ivy-league bliss in comparison to the culture-less, work-to-buy lives our grandchildren will think normal. By tolerating it now we are dooming the men who will follow to a state of unrecognized ignorance.
What is this existence that we see fit to pass to our heirs?
Sorry, I can’t help but go off on lengthy rants when it comes to matters of art and what the modern American populace considers normal.
Watch the stuff against marketers…that’s what I do for a living. It is possible to do ethically, though of course it is rarely done. But that’s another discussion.
I don’t disagree that a large reason for the success of shitty pop music is marketing and advertising dollars. However, I think marketing simply amplifies the degree of the problem, not the overall issue itself. For example, if you removed all of the music industry’s marketing efforts from the natiion’s airwaves today, I feel you would still have bad popular music tomorrow. I mean, people simply like the stuff. However, along with that I think you’d have a much higher degree of diversity. Yes, the mass appeal crap would still be popular, but it would be a lot easier to find the niche stuff too, because it wouldn’t be drowned out by marketing.
I am with you there. I write about it every Tuesday it seems.
College radio - you might not like everything you hear but if you take the time to get to know the shows and various DJs, you’re likely to find a gem amongst the noise.
http://www.cmj.com
The problem is simply that there’s no longer a problem for which FM radio is the answer. Internet radio stations come in far more varieties and so when you find a good one it’ll actually play music you want to hear. In the car, everybody just plugs in an iPod. For long-haul trips like yours, you’re never in one station’s area long enough, and it’s probably not a big enough market, anyway. (Tip: Library. Books on tape.)
I do still listen to FM. I turn it on for a specific (industrial music) radio show, once a week. I used to listen to the weekly opera, but the classical station in my town stupidly fired their one good announcer.
There are public radio stations (i.e., no commercials) which aren’t NPR. There’s one here that plays electronic music. It’s run by high-school students, and it’s one of the best radio stations I get. (The other is Canadian. Go figure.)
This is very true for most of my life, which is why I’ve never really listened to the radio. Between Internet radio, online sources, iTunes, iPods, mp3 collections, CDs, etc… I just have no need for it.
But of course, when you find yourself in those situations where you have to listen to radio, all of a sudden it’s a real problem again.
I recently came to the realization that I hate FM radio. I used to listen occasionally to a local top 40 station, but hadn’t touched it for a good year since pop disgusts me. I tuned in once for some reason or another for maybe half an hour, and it was tolerable, but the next day I gave it another shot and was again disgusted. The same cookie-cutter songs. The same noisy “DJs”. The same noisy bumpers. Commercial breaks so long that I have time to get lost in thought before I realize I’ve been listening to ads for the past 20 minutes when I could have changed the channel. Even worse, I’m slowly finding out that I hate the rock station I usually listen to. It plays all kinds of different things, but it’s just a slightly larger blender than the top 40 station was. What I really crave is what you described here - a station that plays up and coming songs… something different and unique, something from bands that haven’t hit it “big” yet, that haven’t been royally screwed by the record companies yet.
You bet. And when it’s “Can you take me to…FUNKYTOWN???” you know the Apocalypse is ’round the corner. We’re all gonna die!
The reason radio sucks: Clear Channel
And where is the Iraq war protest music? I swear, if we didn’t have corporate ownership of media, we’d have the same protest movement we saw in the 60’s. Instead we have songs from rich teenagers who bought a guitar whining about their girlfriends.
this is a great article.
if you’d like a great documentary about the subject, you should watch “before the music dies”, http://www.beforethemusicdies.com
i think you would get alot out of it. the interviews with questlove, dave matthews, and erykah badu are particularly insightful. check it out.
AM is great if you like being lied to by Rush and Sean Hannity. They seem to be everywhere , at leat in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania which I drive through monthly. Oh, Texas too.
When I used to listen to the radio is was mostly either NPR news or WYEP [1] in Pittsburgh. WYEP was one of the few decent music stations I could ever find and it was, unsurprisingly, also public radio.
When I was traveling between Pittsburgh and Philly regularly, I usually just listened to audio books from Audible.com.
[1] http://www.wyep.org/
“NPR plays a lot of classical music during the day. I like classical music, but it’s not the best stuff to keep a driver awake and alert on a long haul.”
It’s worth mentioning that this isn’t actually true of NPR, just the local affiliate station. For example, it was true of KUT (in Austin) but not WUNC (in Chapel Hill), where I live now. Here they only play music on weekend evenings, but reserve daytime hours for the best talk-based programs in the country.
Yeah…this is true. I guess I never really liked protest music as a genre, so I’m not so sad to see it fail to appear this time around. I would love to see more political songs in general though, maybe not simply protest music. We need more rage against the machine type stuff on the radio.
I haven’t listened to any broadcast AM or FM radio in nearly 10 years. I was blessed to live through FM in the 1970s so I know what you are talking about. I discovered most of my favorite genres back then: Jazz, Latin Jazz, Jazz Fusion, Funk, Disco, New Wave, etc. The closest thing to what it was like is Internet Radio where I gravitate to Downtempo, Acid and New Jazz, World and International and House of all sorts. If broadcast radio are an indication of the state of art and creativity then the US has already died.
Quite honestly I’ve been long thinking of submitting a petition to the FCC to reallocate both the entire AM and FM bands (keep 10% of each for AM/FM broadcast as is, change the rest to low bandwidth digital data broadcast) to public service transmission such as weather, traffic, public access, etc. It’s a waste of public resource in its current form.
I’ve never cared for the radio and the last time I listened seriously is when I did something similar to what you did, only I was doing it going into FM radio for the first time ever (I’m only 20). Some of it was… eh… bland, I guess. Some was just plain awful. Some was good, but I woke up from that dream the following night pretty quickly.
Good article… I hate it when I’m stuck in a car with anyone who listens to the radio… they don’t even turn down the volume when the ad for the big-blowout car sale comes on. It just blares and you wonder if they even hear it anymore.
In the Tampa Bay area, thankfully, we have 88.5 WMNF.
They stream online at…
http://amber.streamguys.com:4610/listen.pls
Like a previous poster said, look at the program guide for you local college/community radio station and just tune in when it’s the kind of music you want to hear… but open your mind to new stuff too.
http://www.wmnf.org/
peace,
D
But if you don’t listen to the radio, you’ll miss all the delightful advertisements!
Stay below 92 on the FM dial - that’s where the non-commercial FM resides, usually college radio and more interesting programming
I completely agree with you. Today’s radio is useless.
That’s why we started Boulder Free Radio (KBFR) in Boulder, Coloado in 2000. It ran for 5 years and we played whatever the DJ wanted to play, from 3 hours of Widespread panic to dead guy hippie shit music to local politics. We also had over 200 local bands in the studio over that 5 years, giving them a way to read their listener base in the city.
The FCC, of course, eventually shut us down. Usually it was caused by a complaint from a clear channel station. The final shutdown happened because a Boulder County school board director heard us and didn’t like that, at times, a song was uncensored and you’d hear the word fuck (right on the air! OMG!).
It was a good run though and literally hundreds of people got to be a DJ on a real pirate radio station. I still miss it today.
I think every town should start up a pirate station. It costs about $5K and the only thing it requires are the balls to stand up to the FCC and corporate radio.
Monk, that’s awesome! Pirate radio (and low power FM in general, legally too) is really where it’s at. Check out Prometheus Radio (http://prometheusradio.org/) for some activism to get low power FM transmitters in the hands of the people.
American radio panders to the lowest common denoinator. And boy is it low.
What’s missing from U.S. Radio is the eclecticism of broadcasters in different parts of the world. Nationl Broadcast Regulators in those countries (despite intense lobbying from the big American media conglomerates), actually do their job to ensure that Radio stations don’t just play the same mindless music over and over, or let the hate speech of Rush pollute the airwaves.
Why do Americans not hold the FCC accountable for the sad state of the nation’s airwaves?
I think they like crap.
I listen to the Teaching Company CD’s.
They’re free from my local library. I can just log on to the regional website and when the ones I get an email to come pick them up. I’d much rather listen to something cultural/historical/englightening. e.g. Civil War, Biography of Abraham Lincoln, Etho-cultural studies, History of Religion in U.S., History of Supreme Court. The FM music shows are terrible and the depressing wussiness of NPR gets too me pretty quickly. I love the fact that I’m actually learning when I’m in the car to and from work.
One of our national stations (5fm in South Africa) used to be pretty good. They changed management and decided their new target market was “the youth” (which means lots of hip-hop, crappy pop and bad dance music, apparently) which necessitated a change in their DJs.
The last straw for me was when they moved the one guy who persisted in playing local and original music from his 10pm on weekdays slot to 5pm on a Sunday afternoon.
John Steinbeck in Travels With Charley wrote, “We’ve listened to local radio all across the country. And apart from a few reportings of football games, the mental fare has been as generalized, as packaged, and as undistinguished as the food. “
Although I have to disagree that it is all bad. I just did a three week trek across the US with a radio only car. I found several stations out there that actually were playing great stuff. I think you just have to keep your ears open and your finger on the scan button. Plus that is just one more thing to keep you awake on the long drive.
This is true mostly in the US as far as I know. In most other countries FM is not the advertising channel for large corporations. Maybe UK, France, Germany… Not sure, but that is only a small fraction of the world.
But in the US this is so true, that new musicians who want to be heard, independent artists who don’t want to be exploited by big labels, and even mainstream musicians, have been migrating to a new medium: the Podsafe Music Network (music.podshow.com)
This is a network of musicians that are putting their music online. You can listen to it online for free, or you can download it for a small fee, which goes almost in its entirety to the musician (>90%). No DRM, its a standard mp3 file, you own it. And no advertising.
I know about this through listening to the “Daily Source Code” (www.dailysourcecode.com) by former MTV VJ Adam Curry, who more or less started this revolution, being himself sick of comercial radio. Give it a try!
I listen to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) FM radio every day during the drive to work.
CBC1 for the news and documentaries, CBC2 for the great classical music.
got to agree with all that. If you’re listening on the internet you should check out the BBC. 6 Music is one of the best stations I’ve ever heard, plus - no commercials!
I’m with you all the way.
I spend two hours in the car every day (Chicago area), and I won’t turn on the radio at all — it’s books on tape.
I guess cross country drives in a rental vehicle is what iPods were invented for.
Thanks for the good read (found you via reddit.com.
–Mudge
http://blogsignatr.com/mudge@essoenn.com.gif
Nice article, good discussion (I also came from reddit). I stopped listening to commercial radio over 20 years ago when I was twelve and in need of more diversity. When I think about it now, I don’t understand why anybody older than 17 would listen to that crap. Or how about when you go into a store, and the employees have the sound system tuned to a station that’s 50% commercials, AND the reception is horrible. It is completely baffling to me that they could not be driven crazy by that.
Do we get to plug our favorite stations? We do? Great!
Freeform WFMU 91.1, out of Jersey City, New Jersey. 100% of their funding comes from listeners. They have great DJs that play whatever they want. The diversity is phenomenal. Their library is very deep. They stream live and almost everything from the past 6 years is archived on their website at wfmu.org. They post lots of MP3s of out-of-print music on their blog. They also have live, in-studio performances of local, national, and international bands (last week: Stereo Total from France, and Jennifer Gentle from Italy).
WZBC, Boston College’s freeform station, especially for their No Commercial Potential block every evening. This is my local over-the-air favorite. Boston has a few great non-commercial stations: MIT’s WMBR, Tufts’ WMFO. But ZBC’s commitment to experimental music sets it apart.
Interesting read, I’m curious what you think of the 2 million music artist on MySpace.
Most of it is crap. But you do find some gems. That’s more than you can say (usually) for FM radio. I think there’s much more crap on FM than there is on MySpace.
Welcome to Washington.
I’m a very satisfied customer of satellite radio, but it won’t work in my current office, so I listened to CDs for a few years. A few months ago, I decided to give the local stations a spin and mostly found pretty much the same crap I did the previous time.
One station, a classic rock outlet that had been steadily sinking in the ratings, had changed format, and I think they got it right. Their morning and afternoon guys have been around the DC radio market for many, many years, and they get to program their own shows. I gave them a listen over the next several days, and the minute they played The Cure’s cover of Purple Haze, they had a listener.
That station is 94.7, WTGB. This isn’t a plug for them, but I think that it’s a good sign when one station in one market “gets it.”