Radio, Radio

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I've found myself temporarily living back in my native North Carolina for a month. It's an exciting yet strange feeling; I haven't lived in the south for five years and it takes some getting used to all over again. Hearing "Sir" without it coming from the mouth of a police officer or judge is a bit startling, and the overall pace of life in the Old North State can be a bit too relaxed for my tastes at times.

One thing I've certainly had to get used to is the sheer amount of driving required. In this little part of the world you have to drive to get any little thing done. The nearest convenience store is only a quarter mile away, but it's a quarter mile of sidewalk-free, steep shouldered, two-lane blacktop. That pack of smokes or carton of milk just doesn't seem worth it with traffic whizzing inches away from you at 40 miles per hour.

So I've been spending hours a day it seems behind the wheel. And what is driving without the radio? They go together like airplanes and peanuts. Since I can't seem to stand silence, the radio is on for even the most brief of trips. It should be noted that in New York I rarely listen to local radio. The only broadcasting I really ever pay attention to are web streams of the Washington, D.C. NPR station, WAMU. This is usually when I'm falling asleep or bored at work. So this whole aspect of relying on the dial while sitting in traffic or at stoplights is a relatively new thing to me. Here are a few things I've noticed about the state of commercial radio in 2008:

First, I got a taste of this new-fangled satellite radio while renting a car for my first week here. A few years ago, I was convinced that it would be genius to invest in either XM or Sirius, whichever looked stronger, because it was my firm belief that satellite would become insanely popular and the two companies would eventually merge. Now I'm not so sure. Satellite certainly had neat features (I could listen to Seattle traffic reports and then with a turn of the knob know the freeway conditions in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex) and an abundance of variety. There was even a time-adjusted version of the BBC's Radio 1, which was an interesting look into what was popular across the pond. But inherently it was just too clunky... I'm not sure if I need multiple channels of rap and spoken word and comedy; I kept feeling that perhaps while I was pausing on one channel I'd be missing something amazing on another. All in all the whole setup reminded me of digital cable and my disdain for having 190 channels, nearly all of them uninteresting.

When the rental car was gone and I was back in my old sedan, it took a few days for me to realize just how blessed the Raleigh/Durham area is in terms of public radio. Not only do we have three excellent college radio formats (WXDU, WXYC and WKNC, from Duke, U.N.C. and N.C. State, respectively) playing all sorts of crazy stuff 24 hours a day, but we also have probably one of the best NPR stations I've heard, in WUNC. In addition to their syndicated pickups of Morning Edition and All Things Considered, the station produces its own hugely entertaining original programming with some of public radio's best interviewers. And when things got boring on that end and the college stations were playing something alienating -- I can only take about two minutes of Mongolian throat singing -- it was a toss between WCPE, the wonderful and soothing classical music station, or WNCU, which provides jazz, gospel, reggae and more around the clock. With all of this available, the tedium of driving disappeared completely, and I looked forward to each trip to the grocery store or dry cleaners.

Of course I had to check out the commercial dial as well. It's not even a question of regional differences these days, though. Clear Channel and other media groups seem to have swooped in and bought up every rock or pop station in the area, and I couldn't really discern the classic rock station here from the ones I've heard anywhere else in the U.S. It's also telling when the traffic reporters and DJs have strange accents and mispronounce the local roads and towns. It just felt like a waste of time, and I'm not really too fond of Foghat to begin with.

I am fond of hip-hop and R&B however, so I spent a lot of time listening to those stations. It's interesting, the urban station for Raleigh/Durham (which has a large population of relocated northerners) played a mix of all sorts of songs, from New York artists and chart-toppers. The urban station for Greensboro, an hour west, seemed to be totally devoted to southern rap, so-called "snap music." Since this form of music doesn't usually make waves up north, I spent a large amount of time with my ears perked to see what exactly it was that made up the genre. I can now reliably tell you this about southern urban music:

-It must contain a reference to a woman getting "low" at least a dozen times
-It must contain a man in the background saying "yeah" or "okay" in a lackadaisical manner
-It must contain a reference to a buying a woman a drink
-Any sung parts must be delivered via vocoder

I was fascinated.

With my time in North Carolina ending soon, I'm not sure if I'll miss driving and the radio or not. It will be nice to get back to the old iPod and my MetroCard. So tell me, Huffington Post readers, what is radio like where you live? What peeves and/or delights you?

Comments

[tompoe]

Welcome to north-central Iowa, and the non-market of the nation. Sure, there's some high school and college wrestling on the tv all weekend, but radio is all but nonexistent. Choice? Same as with broadband, . . . NADA! But, their day of control is almost finished. February, 2009, arrives in a few months. All transmissions go digital. That means a lot, actually. Are you seeing all those public service announcements about how the president wants to make sure every American can continue to watch tv? You can buy a device you plug into a wall socket that lets you do that. He's even allocated $450 million of taxpayer dollars to get the job done. Not one of those devices will let users enjoy broadband speed Internet service, phone, tv, radio and the web. But, hey, that's OK. Look at San Francisco. They're rolling out their own digital campaign. Instead of the stupid tv box, they're placing a Meraki unit in every house. When they get done, they'll have a citywide decentralized broadband infrastructure that lets every resident enjoy broadband speeds for phone, tv, radio and web.

Guess what they do next? The residents start their own digital live, interactive tv talk shows, where everyone participates. They'll start their own local telethons, their own local virtual town hall meetings, their own local digital, live interactive radio shows, and the list goes on, infinitum. The city will then put out a RFP and those incumbent thugs can bid to pay the city to gain access to that broadband infrastructure. Yep. Reasonable wholesale pricing for Internet access. Ypsilanti, Michigan, is doing the same thing. And, of course, Charles City, Iowa, is finally catching a glimmer of what can happen when those Meraki units are put to work.

We have one advantage. Stanford University provides freely available bundled audio and video software from the university's center for computer research in music and acoustics. That means, Charles City will have a lot of digital recording studios to create tv and radio shows, broadcast across their future community broadband infrastructure, and if folks like myself want to listen to jazz or classical music, it's just a matter of plugging in a computer, setting up a stream (video or audio) and broadcasting out across the community, computer to computer. Our local hosptial will be contracting with our local officials to be able to gain access to offer their telemedicine programs, the fire, police and rescue will be able to offer enhanced services, and city departments that operate on work-order basis, will be able to streamline and save significant monies for our rural community. Yep, the corporate thugs are real upset. They have already told the city they won't permit it. Our governor sent me a letter stating he didn't want to see me do anything illegal. You can bet the whole lot of them are about to see what it feels like to be on the whipping end of the buggy whip.

[blueraven]

I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for a region that is allegedly so cosmopolitan, far too many stations here are hopelessly restrictive. We have our own form of rap music in the Bay Area called hyphy, but the one major station that ever played it (KMEL) stopped out of a refusal to admit people wanted to hear that at least as much as they wanted to hear the nationally signed acts churning out the same-old same-old. The other station that played it no longer exists. The lone classical station here is operated with a mentality that belongs on Top 40 radio (now there's a dead format). The most unique stations have the weakest transmitters, ranging from the high school-run jazz station in Atherton (KCEA) to the politically uber-progressive Berkeley station, KPFA (oh, wait, I was just redundant there ;>). The biggest players are Clear Channel clones and their nearest competitors. There are two bright spots on the dial from my perspective, though. Both locally owned, and it shows. KFOG and KNGY are musically very different. KFOG plays "world-class rock", which translates to "Beatles and everything after that won't offend a Baby Boomer for either being too crunchy, too country, or too easy listening". KNGY is a dance/club music station. But they're aware of their peculiar status in the SFBA radio landscape and do what they can to both hold on to it and honor it. Morning shows that don't insult your intelligence, disc jockeys who know the music, and community outreach are large elements of both stations' approaches. Both are gay-supportive, with KNGY being more blatant about it as befits a station with a younger and gayer demographic target than KFOG. If one of them died tomorrow, I'd miss it terribly while listening exclusively to the other. If both died, I'd buy a satellite radio receiver and not look back.


It strikes me I should be fair and note the existence of KFRC, though. It's what used to be called oldies but now goes by "classic hits" because the Boomers and GenX are its target market and when we hear oldies, we think Elvis Presley, not Styx or Hendrix. It existed here for decades, died, then came back when an experiment at aiming talk radio at the twentysomething male demographic failed. It's a welcome return and a local institution.

[chinohillster]

I am blessed to live in the Lost Angeles Metropolitan Area, which is fortunate enough to have both NPR (KPCC 89.3 FM) AND Pacifica (KPFK 90.7 FM) - much-needed and appreciated counterweights to the increasingly strident, xenophobic and stentorian ClearChannel station KFI 640 AM.

Unfortunately, KFI is very, very popular, and naturally, broadcasts Limbaugh, Dr. Laura and other darlings of the Right. The afternoon drive-time is particularly afflicted with 'The John and Ken Show', hosted by two acolytes of Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs - a steady drumbeat of anti-immigrant (they are always careful to state that they are anti-ILLEGAL immigration), anti-ethnic minority, pro-prison­-industria­l-complex programming.

I used to try and listen to KFI, to get the opposite viewpoint, but lately, I just can't take it anymore. Five minutes of Rush or John and Ken, and I can't press the buttons on the Bose WaveRadio control fast enough to get back to the NPR or Pacifica stations!