The spirit of public radio
Demanding more from the peoples’ programmers
BY Dave Bidini
One of the reasons I started playing rock and roll was because I was born into a world without it. My parents listened to easy-listening and pop music—if they listened at all—and visits to the mall meant being boiled in the Laurie Bower Singers, Lawrence Welk, James Last and other area-rug soundists. Next to them, playing records by Harry Chapin or Jim Croce felt punk before I moved on to Brownsville Station and Sweet, who gave way to Slade and Thin Lizzy, then Kiss, and then the Ramones, who made everything else sound stupid and pointless and weak. Every reaction over the course of my musical life has been in response to what’s come before. Right now, I’m listening to whatever I can find on cassette—Los Lobos’ “Kiko,” “Definitely Maybe” by Oasis, Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light”—partly as a gesture to an iPod world trapped inside its own earphones looping a playlist that is privy only to the playlister. Me, I roll down the windows and blast the fucker. Here’s my music: just try to escape its sound.
But it’s getting harder these days to find those small shadowy corners where rock and roll festers waiting to be discovered, particularily in light of Indie Rock and its Gap-ad Microsoft yen, which exposes it to millions of aproned and besuited enemies who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Rotting Skulls show but find themselves snapping their fingers to Wilco or Vampire Weekend. Pity those ’90s kids who threw everything they had at their young, chin-in-chest, scrabble-bearded, small “h” heroes, only to find their music fed all too easily into the mainstream, denying them a chance to know what being reviled by the greater part of the neighbourhood feels like, the way teddy boys, greasers, mods, hippies and punks had before them. Then again, maybe the idea of rebellion or revolution in Indie Rock isn’t part of its creed at all. Maybe its adhesion to society’s greater soundscape is part of the irony that drives many of its performers. Maybe Indie Rock kids don’t want their bands to bust conventions or set their elders’ hair on fire. Maybe they only want them to be good.
The latest conventional pop body willing to romance Indie Rock and Alterna-Culture has been the CBC, which recently announced sweeping changes to its classical-only programming in an effort to youngify its listening audience. These efforts have hastened journalists such as Russell Smith to argue that, in choosing to become “alternative” by ditching classical shows, the CBC has achieved the opposite effect: no one listens to classical music much anymore, which makes it the real “alternative.” But because CBC’s proposed programming (a typical afternoon set might feature The New Pornographers, Feist, the Fembots and Final Fantasy) desires to be “alternative” but really isn’t—not with Indie Rock’s mainstream appeal—the point is moot. Only the sounds of grinding machines or spoken-word cabaret or sports programming could result in what the CBC hopes would be “alternative” programming. These days, being alternative isn’t what it used to be.
Smith argues that it takes guts and moxie to program classical music in a dying classical age, and he’s partly right. But that doesn’t justify rigid programming of any kind. This is where, I think, the CBC’s Revolution Radio has missed the point. All great internet radio—and, effectively, all great CBC radio in the past: “Nightlines” and “Brave New Waves,” “90 minutes with a Bullet” and “The Radio Show”; even parts of “Morningside”—works because it stews great sounds no matter the genre, acknowledging the fact that labels mean nothing and no good programmer should ever discriminate against one band because they come from a certain stylistic camp. The best recent bands—Nirvana, Radiohead, The Arctic Monkeys, Super Furry Animals, British Sea Power—have been campless. Even modern commercial rock radio has pushed the concept of organizing bands according to style. One night while driving around Newfoundland, we heard “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys mixed with “Dream On” by Aerosmith. It was an ugly mix, but it spanned myriad musical styles—classical, hard rock, pop, barbershop, musical theatre, metal—giving the listener a clear impression of the sea of cool sounds waving in the night air above and around us.
The way I see it, Russell Smith and the nerds at Radio Three could do an awesome show. So could Larry Lake coupled with Randy Bachman. Why programming has to be one thing and not the other, and why any public broadcaster should feel compelled to deliver a parcelized service, ignores where most people are in their tastes and how acutely even the most converative listener is attuned to the liveliness of the modern pop world. If television can give us Wilco following the “Theme to M*A*S*H” following Hank Williams’ Jr.’s intro to Monday Night Football, then the People’s Radio should consider throwing everything at the wall and giving us much, much more.
