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Wisconsin State Journal (Madison)You have to hand it to radio; every time some new technology comes along to make the medium seem obsolete, it rises to new heights. Which is not to say those new heights are more spiritually lofty than the lower heights of yore might have been; but radio remains a profitable and omnipresent force in American culture. But that might not last, warns Marc Fisher, a Washington Post columnist, in “Something in the Air: Radio, Rock and the Revolution that Shaped a Generation” (Random House: $27.95). Despite the success of right-wing talk hosts like Rush Limbaugh and radical shock jocks like Howard Stern, radio is becoming homogenized and bland overall, he says. “Radio’s audience has been in decline for more than a decade, as the advertising load each hour soared toward the 30-minute mark,” Fisher laments. “Among Americans age 18 to 24, the folks advertisers most love to reach, radio listening has dropped by more than a quarter just since the turn of the century. “How did something that meant so much to so many become such a neglected corner of the popular culture? How could such an intimate medium come to be governed by impersonal and corporate forces? Why have we allowed radio, which brought together the most influential generation of the last century, to splinter into so many niches that it now divides us from each other more than it binds us in song or any sense of common cause?” Why, indeed? Fisher, as the above paragraph displays, blames the corporate takeover of what he says should be a local medium. The days when each station had its own disc jockeys and its own news reporters are pretty much gone, he says. Even public radio has sold its soul for bigger, blander audiences. He draws pictures of “focus” groups meeting in dark rooms listening to seven-second snippets of songs. Those that draw the most favorable response are played on the radio. Those that don’t get bumped. “Virtually everyone in radio believes the medium has become less fun, less creative and just plain less worth listening to than at any point since its birth,” Fisher says. Ironically, Fisher continues, there may be hope for radio in its newest manifestation, satellite XM and Sirius, which provides hundreds of channels for a monthly fee. The same satellite technology that allows Clear Channel to beam music formats from a central location to communities throughout the country, is used to create channels that appeal to small subgroups of Americans. “Programming,” Fisher writes, “is designed in response to what ails contemporary radio: nearly every form of music ignored by commercial and public radio has its own full-time channel on XM and Sirius – several styles of jazz, dozens of subgenera of rock, pop, and urban, bluegrass, folk, reggae, world music, techno, disco, novelty tunes, entire stations devoted to the pop songs of one decade, each broadcasting in the style of radio stations of that era – the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and so on. Plus talk, news, sports and, yes, drama.” —-William R. Wineke |