PATRICK HINELY knows only too well that radio is searching for answers in a landscape where the dinosaurs have never died and refuse to roll over and still know how to really roar
Perhaps I betray my age in opining as I will on this subject, having just turned 65, and thus having entered the final media demographic here in the USA, having aged out of the penultimate ‘55 to 64’ and entering ‘65 and over.’
My origins as a radio listener date to the early 1960s on the AM dial but really blossomed in the mid-1960s, when pop radio in my Floridian homeland was dominated by the 3 Bs: the Beatles, the Byrds and the Beach Boys, augmented by sweet soul from Memphis, Muscle Shoals and Motown.
It was AM radio such as this which made the success of integration inevitable, but that’s another story. At the time, it was possible to simply tune in to your favourite station – and there were multiple, real choices available – and listen for however long you liked, whether driving in the car, doing one’s homework, working one’s job, eating, socialising, whatever. It was a matter of choosing the station and/or DJ who played more of the music you liked, thus freeing you from the constant shuffling among stations, seeking something better, which seldom improved what you were hearing anyway. Now, with most everything ever recorded at one’s device-equipped fingertips, radio is hardly needed, thus adding another art form to all the other media already upended by the digital revolution.
‘The recurring image in my mind about so many media operations, from newspapers and magazines to record companies and now broadcast entities as well, trying to find a workable framework in the digital age, is that of a cockroach on its back, legs flailing in the air’
It must indeed be a great convenience for those who have the time to do so to plan a day’s listening in advance and load it all into/on to whatever the day’s chosen means of delivery might be. In the US it is only through primarily non-commercial stations such as WBGO, streaming on the web, that we have anything like the BBC, and I continue to enjoy being able to hand responsibility for what will be played next over to someone as knowledgeable as Dr Michael Bourne. Just tune in and let it run. What a luxury!
My own 90 minutes on air per week at WLUR (Mondays, 4.30 to 6pm, also streaming) are designed with that same goal in mind: to improve the listener’s quality of life while going about his or her life, as I take care of providing a suitably substantial soundtrack, with limited – and pertinent – commentary, striving to be creatively predictable in an unpredictable way, as it were – jazz, after all, has been defined as the sound of surprise, all of which may make me truly a dinosaur, but, with a finite potential for learning new tricks, I am content with my lot.
The recurring image in my mind about so many media operations, from newspapers and magazines to record companies and now broadcast entities as well, trying to find a workable framework in the digital age, is that of a cockroach on its back, legs flailing in the air. But we know it can be done, must be done, and, eventually, will be done. We just don’t know what the new forms will be, yet, and my hope is that the tub and/or baby don’t get thrown out with the bathwater.
Lee Morgan, above, still as relevant as ever. Just click