Guilty pleasures

Ok, I admit it. There are times when I love listening to country music.

Now, I don’t mean the classic stuff, bluegrass, the honky-tonkers, western swing, Cash, etc. (which I love, but good luck finding on the airwaves except weekends on WAMU).

I mean the new stuff…the kind of music that puts you the divide between cultured and “ig’nt”. You know, guys with cutoff shirts, wifebeater t-shirts, chaw, pick-up trucks, and wouldn’t miss NASCAR for anything. As opposed to who I’m “supposed” to be. You know, classical music loving, wine-swishing, haute cuisine, pansy-ass, egg head liberal. Well, aren’t I a paradox? Aren’t we all, or wouldn’t we like to admit that some of our likes don’t fit the little boxes we put ourselves in?

Every so often I turn on a DC country station, WMZQ (a Clear Channel station–I know, double evil). I just need a quick hit of Martina McBride, Trace Adkins, or Keith Urban. (With the repetitive programming, I usually tune out after a few hours).

Country music gets my blood pumping, reminds me of the simpler pleasures in life, and could even inspire me change my oil in my car someday (HAH!). I’m not saying a lot of these songs are profound, innovative, or even musically interesting. But they serve another function to me than other types of music do. For example, folk music often makes me contemplative, Celtic music makes me feel like dancing, and music theatre…well, again the stereotypes. I guess it reminds me of where I’m from, my grandparents, and about the folks from high school that stayed on in my hometown.

That’s my honky-tonk ba-donk-a-donk.

So, what’s your guilty pleasure?

Catching up on reading

I’ve been perusing some books on radio broadcasting which I picked up at a used book store outside of West Chester, PA last month. One of which is a 1980 book called Radio in the Television Age by Peter Fornatale and Joshua E. Mills (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1980; ISBN: 0-87951-106-0) which discusses what happened to radio [and not in the usual negative way that golden age radio broadcast historians like to proclaim] after the dissolution of networks, and the fall of network programming.

From the book jacket:

“The authors…discuss: the impact of commercial television on radio programming, listenership, and advertising revenues in the 50s, 60s, and 70s; the great technological inventions–the transistor, FM, car, and clock radios…the creation of formats–including Top 40, All-News, country-and-Western, Disco, and classical music…and the pervasive influence of rock-and-rol ont he industry.”

Being that this book was written in 1980, they can’t get that deep into the great FCC deregulation of the 1980s, but it had started by that time. There is a good chapter on the history of non-commercial radio, including public access, community radio, college low-wattage stations, the Pacifica stations, and National Public Radio.

They start out with some interesting statistics (bearing in mind, again, this is 1980):

* There are nearly twice as many radios in the U.S. as there are people.
* More than 95 percent of America’s cars have radios, and the average household has 5.7 sets.
* About 71 percent of American bedrooms are equipped with radios, and 60 percent of all homes have clock radios.

There are lots of amusing anecdotes about the power of listening and how radio has saved lives by playing the right song at the right time to depressed listeners.

I’ll leave you with a story about a local station and the “service” it provided to its listeners:

Religious broadcasts on WOOK, Washington, D.C., that proved to be tips on numbers to bet in lottery rackets. A typical sermon: “The first three figures is 547…My God, my God. And take the mysterious two that was blessed through last week, if you place it on the five you’ll see it’s still working for you, and the 74th and the seventh verse was a blessing to Washington, D.C.” The station lost its license in 1975 (xx).

Search vs. browse, or downloading vs. broadcasting

HERE’S TO RADIO IN THE 21ST CENTURY: A Librarian’s Perspective

I listen to audio all day long. Whether it’s the digital files my library creates or its collection of over 1 million recordings in all sorts of formats; WAV and MP3 files, and my ever expanding collection of CDs and iTunes, both my apartment and my workstation (and computers) are filled with them. I could start with John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, and in a year, never make it all the way through my classical section to James Conlon’s recording of Alexander Zemlinsky’s two-act opera Der Traumgörge. The same is true of a number of other genres as well: folk, jazz, musical theatre, soundtracks…everything, well, except contemporary pop or hip-hop. As a music major, I started to collect classical recordings to build a basic music library, sort of an audio encyclopedia. Why would I do that now that I can subscribe for $20.00 a year to Naxos’s subscription service where I can stream every piece of classical music they own and license from their online? Sure there are pieces they don’t have, and hundreds of unique performances I crave. But as an encyclopedia Naxos does pretty well. (Alexander Street Press has a similar service through their Classical Music Library, Smithsonian Global Sound, and African American Song).

As a librarian and a music cataloger, searching is what I do best. I can write metadata with the best of them; I tag my Gmail with multiple subjects for efficient retrieval; and can devise complex search strings using keyword or Boolean (limiting my searches by date, language, format, etc.) operators. But what do I enjoy most about going into a library, bookstore, or record store? BROWSING. Whether it’s finding a book that I’ve heard of, but have never seen in person before, or impulsively buying the complete set of DVDs from a television series long since canceled, some joys can not be calculated or quantified so easily. Computer searching requires precise logic, but we can let our imaginations wander and take us to unknown lands when we browse. The audio equivalent of browsing is listening to radio.

I no longer think of the standard radio itself as the only (or even the predominant) means to receive programming. Through the web, via satellite radio, and yes, through their AM/FM band on your car’s stereo, one can receive opinions you’ve never thought of, discover music you’ve never heard before (even re-discover a piece you thought you knew), and hear other people’s stories through music and voice. (OK, internet radio is still sort of stuck in search mode, buried beneath the avalanche of Internet content which only a search engine can penetrate). Why do I forsake my own collection to listen to a medium that’s constantly changing? I don’t often know, but I keep doing it, just like my grandfather did. In a way to tune into radio is like throwing open a window, rather than rummaging through your attic. You may know what you have, but without radio (in all its modern forms), you’ll never know what you’re missing.