RADIO RADIO: Radio, as I understand it, is that thing in my car through which I sometimes permit Jim Lehrer and the BBC World News to speak to me. I have no other use for it, except for occassional visits to the Church of St. John Coltrane courtesy of the fine folks at KPOO. (Tuesdays, noon to four, if memory serves.)
Actually I can listen to quite a lot of KPOO, just waiting for some cheeky DJ to get phonetic on the station ID instead of going alphabetical. I've only heard that once in five years.
Commercial radio however, makes my teeth ache. I've yet to succumb to satellite, and likely won't so long as interesting artists continue making their stuff available on-line. Commercial radio sucks so much that I'm tempted to believe it's some sort of malevolent corporate conspiracy or the product of some larger and more insidious socio-economic phenomenon. Whatever it is, I can't wait for it to become something else.
On reform-not-revolution front, I'm happy to note that some chickens Eliot Spitzer released last October appear to be coming home to roost, but I don't think that the courts or even the extraordinary Mr. Spitzer can give us our collective groove back (or the airwaves, for that matter, in the current climate of compulsive deregulation and remarkably accelerated consolidation). Money will continue to drive content (frequently right down to the lowest common denominator) whenever and wherever songs are made to be sold instead of growing out of the simple and compelling fact that something is worth singing about.
Long, long, long before file sharing was a problem for the music industry, music was a fundamental and foundational form of human sharing; sharing information, wisdom, culture, identity, understanding. It still is, and always will be, but the web is rapidly presenting us with the means to abandon corporate content filters in favor of spontaneous, viral dissemination of worthy works directly among the masses themselves. (Ourselves!)
I urge everyone who loves music to check out ccMixter.org, and generally to learn their way around the creative commons IP format. These are fertile fields with enormous potential to enrich both our personal music collections and our collective media environment, but they're only as rich as their inputs. These spaces are being created now on an "if you build it they will come" basis, and I can't wait to see what happens when a critical mass of participants gets out there.
The more we all have to say about what music the media mediate between us, the better. The more each of us has to say about what we're individually exposed to, the better. And for my teeth, the mental environment, muses and music everywhere, the sooner, the better.
No comments:
Post a Comment