I’m sort of surprised by the amount of radioblogging I’ve done since I kicked ADDTF back into gear, as I don’t really ever listen to the radio. Well, not to music radio, anyway–Imus in the Morning on WFAN 660 AM on the drive to work, and a few minutes of WCBS News Radio 880 AM (just long enough to catch the traffic and maybe a few of the headline stories) on the ride home.
But what you may not know (ooh! Secret Origin time!) is that I used to be a radio DJ, way back in the day, at WYBC 94.3FM New Haven, Yale’s old frequency. I had a weekly show (mostly poppier industrial, the big English electronic-music acts of the mid-to-late ’90s, that sort of thing) that was cancelled, along with all of the station’s rock, alternative, blues, and folk programming, when a couple of nitwits with aspirations of becoming big radio suits upon graduation staged a coup d’etat, locked us all out of the station, and replaced us with a semi-pro “urban contemporary” format. So the Great Homogenization hits close to home, you know?
Anyway, the great Jim Henley points to this NYT article on the continuing death of alt-rock radio. It’s interesting for several reasons:
1) It informed me that Philly’s Y-100, my Delaware-native wife’s source for Weezer and Live and Garbage and such back when we were courting, is now all-talk. Another one bites the dust.
2) It centers on how alt-rock radio’s transition into the exclusive preserve of male-oriented mook-rock since the Limp Bizkit explosion has cost it listeners but bad. It certainly cost them me, but one thing I hadn’t thought of in these specific terms is how many women it must have cost them, too. As Jim reminds us, time was you could hear quite a few female artists on alt-rock stations–I think he’s being a little generous with his list, as I can’t ever remember hearing P.J. Harvey on the radio, but he’s not wrong generally. I’ll see him and raise by adding that most alt-rock (new rock, really) stations didn’t just not play female acts, but avoided as much as possible playing acts that were even remotely feminine. The Postal Service, for example, has apparently sold 500,000 records, but to the best of my knowledge K-ROCK never went near ’em; and I’m always stunned to hear the likes of Franz Ferdinand or Interpol on stations like that (the few that still exist). (Heck, my guess is that this is the reason Franz never relased the unbelievably awesome and very queer “Michael” as a single.) I can’t help but be reminded of another infuriating winnowing of acceptable songs during the death of free-form, as chronicled vividly in Richard Neer’s excellent book FM: In a similarly misguided effort to “give the listeners what they want,” the suits back then slowly stripped black musicians out of rock playlists, so on rock stations where you’d once hear everyone from Miles Davis to P-Funk to the Temptations, you now pretty much only hear Jimi Hendrix (and occasionally Phil Lynott, but no one I know seems to realize that he’s black). You’ve probably noticed that this radio segregation continued even during the heydey of mook-rock radio, wherein, despite the heavy influence of hip-hop on the music, the only hip-hop acts you’d hear were the Beastie Boys and Eminem, with the occasional rock-y Cypress Hill (1/3 black, 1/3 white, 1/3 Latino) track thrown in on a lark. (This despite the exhiliaratingly alternative music being made by everyone from A Tribe Called Quest to the Wu-Tang Clan.) When women, and indeed any men not content with music that presents women in much the same way as the Howard Stern Show that occupied the morning slot on a great many new-rock stations, were were written out of the equation as well, you have a recipe for demographic disaster, it would seem.
How can alternative rock radio recover? It probably can’t. As I’ve said before, even if stations were to start playing actual good music tomorrow, my guess is their listenership would probably continue to plummet. Meanwhile, the type of listener who wants to hear Death Cab for Cutie or the Faint is likely savvy enough to have explored the many new-media venues for this, from iTunes to Acquisition to music blogs to podcasts to Internet radio to satellite radio to TiVo’ing the three hours’ worth of good music-video shows left on the TV. In the world of the iPod, quirky radio is almost redundant.