What's With All The Noise?

Eh? What’s that?

Aaaaarrrrrrgh!!!

I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. It’s all noise to me.

It was pretty common knowledge at the commercial radio station that I once worked at: the only point of playing music was to keep the audience listening long enough to suffer through the advertisements. The music was just an excuse to print money. The costs of running the station were few, and little was required to keep the patter going.

Many were the listeners who played along. They dutifully paid attention to our various exhortations, to gleefully go and separate themselves from their hard earned cash. Yes, they waited long enough for us to stop shouting at them and get back to the music. Nothing much else required of them, and nothing much else delivered to them.

But what then of the oh-so-charming and deep timbres of public radio? Ack, I feel as though we’re still shouting, albeit with a lower volume. You still can’t hear me, can you? I gotta admit that there’s times when I feel the underwriting is just there to let the government off the hook for fully funding a public broadcaster. Trial lawyers, local doctors, investment companies, and the Childbloom Guitar Program. Yep, we hock them all.

So, what is the purpose of all those ever-so-important sounding NPR broadcasts? Can any listener ever say they enjoy hearing about the minutia of snail darters, about the water systems in Darfur, and the strenuous importance of damage to the ocean floor?

Sure, you feel better. You tell yourself you’re smarter. You tell other people you’re smarter. And, maybe you are, but is it only out of duty that you listen? To be fully civic and responsible?

No, you don’t feel entertained, relaxed or blissfully enraptured by the sheer audaciousness of anything that NPR broadcasts! The sameness of it all is deafening. *

Ah, so that leaves college and community radio. Amateur hour. The most uneven, unenduring, unpredictable, pointless spot on the dial. You may never know what gems you’ll discover in the rough, because no-one has that much staying power. Can you last through the endless stretches of abandon where you wonder if there ever was a fairway of harmony, melody, and rhythm?

What was that purpose, that flag, that coordinate? Remind me once again, if you please. Was it the alternative in the Fresh River Valley? The alternative to what? To the mainstream? To what real listeners choose to listen to? Maybe it was to be anti. Just for the sake of it. But, as soon as you knew what you were against, then there's a whole new striving to be different all over again. Nope, we were never with us, nor against us.

And, still the underwriting continues. Even on college radio they’re still trying to sell you stuff. By way of clever association, for sure. But, the store is still open and you're expected to pucker up and swallow all the same.

OK, there are the philanthropic sorts out there who sponsor it all because they think it is the right thing to do. Good for them, I hope they sleep better at night. But, I seriously doubt they know exactly what particular hour of sonic assault they bought. Not that it matters, because neither will most anybody else except the DJ.

The whole notion of building an audience, that I can understand. Requiring something of the listener, in ways of actively engaging them in a dialogue. I can’t help but feel that treating the audience with respect also means not treating them as a means to something else.

Sure, art must pays its own way. But, those ads, that talk, that philanthropic pandering, it all clouds the creativity. And the clarity of true broadcasting gets lost in the noise.

* And, don’t think it’s all that much better over the pond. I’ve spent the better part of the last two months listening to the BBC. Beyond the I’m smarter-than-you, plum-in-the-mouth, sanctimonious self-importance that you would expect from the British, its still the same pitiful blather. Now, it might be the mellifluous blather of the Asian Network, the rap-infused patter of 1Xtra, or the smug prat-boy blather of the ultra-hip 6Music, but it all seems an equally pointless exercise in filling newly created hours of dead air. I admit I do like Radio 1, particularly Gilles Peterson, Annie Nightingale, and Mary Anne Hobbs, if only I could work up the effort to listen in.