Most of my hipster friends probably don’t listen to the radio.
The reason for this is as much due to a subconscious scoffing at of scheduled programming in the time of digital streaming, as it is to the fact that they simply don’t interact with the radio in their daily lives.
Good-hearted yuppies work white collar jobs where they don’t play the radio in the background all day. They drive cars with aux cables, radio channels that start with “x”, or even, working CD players.
None of them drive a car whose broken CD player has Brian Fallon’s 2016 solo effort Painkillers stuck in it and when you try to eject the CD some lever inside the CD player just makes a “tsk tsk tsk” sound as though, not only can the CD player not eject your CD, it is annoyed that you’d even think to ask. No one in the world has a car with a CD player like that.
Unpictured: my car’s CD player
My kind hearted, yuppy friends will listen to NPR of course, but I would bet on them streaming it before catching it live.
And while I can only speak clearly about my generation (my friends and myself) I can only imagine that the next generation of Young Urban Professionals are growing up right now without much radio in their lives.
By and large, that’s a good thing.
Radio is a gatekeeper’s medium in a time when we’re all supposed to think gatekeepers are going away (though they always seem to find a way to insert themselves into anything people find worth doing).
Besides holier-than-thou, more powerful than they should be gatekeepers, there’s not many things left in this world more irritating than a “shocking” radio DJ.
They’re offensive! They’re politically incorrect! They have a very contrived personality and they’re here to tell you about it!
Being in the World Without Being in the World
Radio, like TV, is the outside world reaching in.
It’s a one-way conversation where you don’t really get a choice on the topic.
Because radio and TV are broadcasting to the public, they become part of that public, they become society.
When you listen to the radio you are listening to it at the same time as thousands of people, hearing the exact same thing.
In that way, when you listen to the radio in your car you are effectively doubling down on societies intrusion into your life: you are driving through society while having another part of society telling you its ideas and opinions or even worse, singing you its ideas and opinions…on love.
Radio is The World and most interactions with The World are fraught with tension.
I Have a Tattoo of a Cassette Tape
The radio is why we have CD players, cassette players, 8-tracks, in our car in the first place.
They allow us to detach from the world when we need to travel through it.
In a small way, they bring our home outside and turn our car into a very expensive carbon fiber bubble. When we chose exactly what we hear, and we listen to it alone, we are insulating our self from the world.
Our home, and to an extent the interior of our car, is where society cannot go if we chose it not to.
If we try hard enough, if we don’t turn on a TV or read a newspaper, we can keep the grinding gears of society at our front gates, our apartment doors.
The Internet is Not The Radio
When we stream a video we are the only ones watching that exact video at that exact time.
Even if 2 or 3 other people pressed play the millisecond we did, they’re not going to pause that video to pee at the same time you are. And even if they did, there’s no way to know you are sharing that experience with some random stranger.
Doing anything on the internet is not a public act of cultural sharing the way watching TV or listening to the radio are.
Watching a streaming episode of Chef’s Table is a solitary act. It’s a safe bubble. It’s a home within our home. We choose to let the opinions of a chef into our lives at exactly the moment we want. And if that episode of Chef’s Table has subtitles and we feel like playing games on our phones while we watch, we chose a different show.
The amount of tension in our relationship with society is largely marked by how much or how little we are able to avoid society.
The Bubble
A young professional with a new-enough car will leave their apartment or home in the morning and walk to their car which is quite possibly in a parking spot legally designated to them.
They will play whatever music or podcast they want while they drive that car to work.
They will walk to their desk and maybe nod good morning to a couple co-workers on the way.
Besides traffic, whose effect can be dulled by the aux-connected podcast, opening their email may be the first time society – The World – starts infringing upon their bubble.
The rest of their day may be equally enwombed, (polite co-workers, understanding bosses, emails that don’t demand instant responses) cocooned from the noisy and uneven forces the world pushes on us every time we step out into it.
Compare that with someone who takes the bus to the construction site. That person is on the front lines of The World from the moment they leave their house in the morning. Those with kids? From the moment they wake up. Every moment of their life is infringed with the wants and needs and shouts and screams of others.
I’ve only lived 35 years, and all of those years were free of dependents, but from what I’ve gathered, The World is easier to deal with the less you have to deal with it.
The more you can choose when and where or even if to visit friends, the more you can choose to hear the types of voices you want to hear after a long day, and the more you can shut those voices out when you want, the less stressed out you will be.
The more you are able to manage how the world gets a hold of you, the more you’re able to manage the times when it gets a hold of you, the less you are in The World, the less public freak-outs on the subway you are likely to have.
That’s why, by and large, having less radio in your life, is better.
But then.
But then there’s that one remarkable moment when having radio in your life becomes a transcendent moment of indisputable good.
When the song you didn’t know you needed to hear right now comes on and everything shifts. The lights sync, the breeze suddenly demands the windows rolled down.
Putting a playlist on shuffle won’t do that the way a radio song will.
Why not?
Hearing a song on a large enough playlist that’s set to shuffle is arguably as unexpected and random as hearing it on the radio, possibly more so if you have a large enough playlist.
But a playlist can’t match the magic of radio because you are not sharing it. It is not happening to you, it is happening because of you.
A good song on the radio is a small experience unfolding in front of you as you and your neighbors all stop to watch; it’s an event, there’s an electricity, however slight, that is communal.
A good song, played on the radio, is one of the few times society imposing its will on you is pleasurable.
It’s one of the few times where outside forces converge to make something good happen.
TV can’t really reach this level of spontaneity because we know what’s coming on next. Even a good joke on TV is still on a show we knew was coming on and planned on watching.
If a trailer does its job and doesn’t give away too much plot, going to the movies can get close to the shared, spontaneous excitement of a song on the radio, but even in a movie theater we know exactly how large the group we are with is and we know we all chose to be there at an exact time and date.
No one knows what the radio is going to do next (well, hopefully it’s owner operators do) and there are millions of us sharing in the experience simultaneously.
Lastly, while a 5,000 song playlist that lasts 450 days on Spotify can be more randomized and diverse than a radio station, you still know you chose that song, at some point. It can still surprise you, but as soon as you hear it you remember adding it to the playlist last November when you had a slow day at work and everyone was annoying you.
Radio Ga-Ga
None of this to even mention the times radio introduces you to your new favorite song. Something about hearing a song on the radio feels like you found it.
I get a lot of good songs added to my playlists from movies and those songs always feel a bit cheaper to me (the pretentious music enthusiast side of me), as though I can’t really claim to be as cool as the director or music supervisor.
Hearing a good, new song on the radio is like finding it on the open fields, out in the wild, in The World, and trapping it to show your friends before they can tell you about it.
So my only suggestion after all of this, is on the days you have the emotional availability to be bombarded by potentially annoying DJs and radio ads with sirens in them that should be burned at the lowest (or highest?) levels of hell, turn on the radio, the real AM/FM radio, and take a chance on hearing the best song you’ve ever heard, again for the first time.
As Lou Reed said,
Despite all the amputations
You know you could just go out
And dance to a rock ‘n’ roll station It was alright (it was alright)