My Radio Days
I just read this great piece by Michael Byrne on Motherboard:
The DJ Is Dead; Long Live The DJ: How the Cloud Is Changing Music
I liked this graph:
The other thing I wonder about is community. I think there is a thing to radio that has nothing to do with listening to a song. It has to do with with doing something with other people at the same time. As very, very imperfect as it is, our 92Q here in Baltimore is a thing that brings a great many people together. It’s not exactly a peaceful or equal togetherness, but there is a shared identity there. It is a way that we can feel together with people that we may not know, but have Baltimore in common. The cloud is about individuation, on the other hand. Every listener their own station. Every listener their own city.
I’ve never been much of a radio listener. At least, not since 1994. That was the year that Z100 called to offer me $1000 if I said “Z100-means-today’s-best-music-now-give-me-my-money” when I answered the phone, but I was at volleyball practice, so they left me a message on my answering machine telling me I didn’t win. If only I’d had a cell! Of course, it would’ve had to have been one of those Zack Morris phones:
Funny to think of that kind of promo now. Ah, the world pre-Twitter. At one point I had actually said the phrase on my answering machine. Point is, it was a distressing moment in my life. I’d listened to Z100 year after year. The Z Morning Zoo boomed from my Dream Machine clock radio each dawn, and then I was lulled to sleep by the sex doctor’s words of wisdom each night (only thing I recall from that education had to do with blow jobs and Halls cough drops). And here they called in the middle of the day! Didn’t they know my schedule?
In today’s Wikipedia world, It’s amazing to me to think about what a connection I felt to the deejays, despite the fact that I knew nothing about them. I didn’t know what they looked like, but it was fun to speculate. I was also clueless as to their first names. Was there really a person named Shadoe Stevens? Aha! There was! I mean, is!
I didn’t know where they were either, although they said “broadcasting live from the top of the Empire State Building,” which I suspected meant the antenna signal was coming from there more than it meant that the radio station was located there, but I liked imagining them in a small room in the spire, above the observation deck, looking down over downtown NYC. Maybe they could even see me when I walked to school!
Despite the fact that I don’t remember their names right now (and my Googling isn’t yielding much that rings a bell), I’m pretty sure that I was more connected to the deejays than I was to the music. I had rather geeky music taste. My mixtapes were hodgepodges of the soundtracks to old movie musicals, Billy Holiday, The Mamas & The Papas, Free To Be You & Me and Serge Gainsbourg (music-wise, I honestly haven’t evolved much since then). Z100 was all the latest greatest big hits. But it was about the people, no matter how clown-like they were. It was about connecting with the humans at the station, and the other listeners.
When people called in from places that seemed distant from my tiny Manhattan bedroom (Yonkers! Flushing!), I felt like they were my brethren. I can’t say that I ever thought about it in these terms before, but looking back on my thirty years, I think it might be one of the strongest connections I’ve ever felt to any kind of institution or media outlet. Not that this is something one should brag about, but whatever. My mind might be glorifying the past, but I remember it being something like how I feel when I think of all the other pairs of eyes that are staring at the moon at the same time as me, or all the people born the same minute as I was. Joo know what I mean?
I think stopped listening to Z100 at some point in the mid or late nineties. I spent a year in France when I was 16 and when I returned, I felt like I’d missed too much. We’d grown apart.
What is the word for this kind of connection? The feeling existed long before radio and it will continue to exist in centuries to come, but we’re living in a narrow slice of time when it’s a feeling elicited by the technology of radio waves going through the air. But it’s not gone yet. I was on the Mancow Muller show the other day, and I definitely had the sense that I was walking in on a club—a community of ears located in thousands of cubicles and driver’s seats in Chicago (and far beyond, I’m sure). The interview, which was done over the phone, was embarrassingly awful. They wouldn’t let me complete a sentence—so much so that I guessed that I had been disconnected (I hadn’t). At one point Mancow said to me, “You know what is obsolete, Jane? Your virginity.” When you do a radio interview by phone, you feel like you’re just talking to one person. And I really was just talking to one person! But I doubt he would’ve said that to me if only our two sets of ears were involved; he only could because he had the ballast of the better part of a major city. Maybe I’m just being a snob, but the whole experience made me think that maybe people everywhere listen to some radio purely for that sense of connection, not for the witty content. Or maybe I just don’t have a good sense of humor. Not that cracks about a married 30-year-old’s virginity aren’t hilarious. I guess I’m just more into scatalogical humor.
Still, it was a reminder of the radio community that continues to exist, even if I —for better or worse— tuned out before I finished high school. Did I mention that I have a whole section on the death of AM radio in my book Obsolete? Sorry, but writing this many words unremunerated, I feel compelled to at least plug something. In any case, I bet most people no longer have the attention span to read this far into a post. Except my dad. Hi dad!
While I’m at it, I suppose I should mention that next week I’m going to be on the old—speak of the devil! Tuesday July 6 at 9AM ET, The Bob and Tom Show.
Okay, talk to you later, have a goodnight. Wishing you sweet dreams and lots of Halls. Or Altoids. Those work too.
