Sirius: The End of Radio?

Over the course of the past Friday (the 30th) to Sunday (the 2nd), Forrest and I drove from Bloomington, Indiana to Phoenix, Arizona to meet the movers that had all of her important things (they would be a day late, not arriving until the morning of the 4th). The drive itself went well and seemed to go quickly and smoothly, due in no small part to the fact that we had satellite radio in the car the entire drive. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s essentially like cable TV, but for radio. There are hundreds of channels (not stations, mind you), niched into disparate groupings like obscure classic rock, Fox News, redneck comedy, the CBC, the Sixties, etc. We didn’t lose reception once, which was pretty cool, and it was nice not to have to continually swap out CDs. We hopped around a lot, but kept coming back to the Left of Center station (we had the Sirius one), because we’re young and we enjoy the indie rock. And after a while, I wanted to keep listening because, well, at least I wanted to see if the theories I was developing would hold up. Sirius is pretty cool; don’t get me wrong, but only in a technological sense, not in terms of content. The former lets you see the artist and song of everything you hear, and you can jump around the dial and it instantly loads the titles on every channel, so browsing is really easy. But the latter, the actual content, essentially recreates what radio has turned into.

First, the Left of Center playlist is so tight it’s got a camel toe. Through high school and college, I worked at a relatively hip radio station, and remember coming in on Sunday mornings and printing out the CMJ list of what we were supposed to play because it was hip that week (lots of Pavement and Throwing Muses and stuff like that), and then deciding what other old “classic” stuff from the 80s we’d play (Black Flag and Human League and Pixies and Fugazi). And we didn’t play ads, only PSAs, and we didn’t have any formal on-air training or whatever. And that’s basically what Left of Center is. Even though I remember doing the same thing in college, I admit I was surprised at the narrowness of their rotation. While the stuff they play to death does include that one song by Lily Allen (twice in an hour at one point), the Walkmen’s “Louisiana” (which I’m now sick to death of), Sonic Youth’s “Incinerate” and that super-awesome Muse song “Knights of Cydonia,” the rest is just strange and mostly bad. They just play the shit out of like 20 songs at any given time that don’t seem to adhere to any notion of popularity I’m aware of. The main ones are Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch,” Pretty Girls Make Graves’ “The Number”, some song by Hard-Fi that I might actually be beginning to like, two songs from Radio 4, one song by Deadboy and the Elephantmen, two new songs from the just awful new New York Dolls record, and “Oh No Hello” by Elefant, which is just foul. Seriously, it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you turn on that channel right now, within two songs you’ll hear one of these.

And, yeah, I know that’s how it works. Not all stations can be WFMU, and they have to play by the rules, or risk alienating listeners and losing them, or something like that. But satellite radio just throws everything into such sharp relief. One of the biggest selling points of the thing is the fact that you can drive for hours and not lose reception. But if you drive for hours and listen to the same channel, you’re going to get annoyed at hearing Islands’ “Rough Gem,” which, no matter how much you like it the first few times, starts to sound like They Might Be Giants singing over a broken jack-in-the-box after the 20th.

And I know that one of the biggest selling points of satellite radio is that you don’t have to sit through hours of commercials for car dealers and nightclubs and whatever. But, especially on Left of Center, you do have to sit through some of the lamest on-air personalities I’ve ever heard anywhere. This past weekend, they were kind of going nuts about indie labels and how great they are (even while they play the life out of Built to Spill’s “Conventional Wisdom”), which is all well and good if they weren’t so didactic about “indie” meaning “something with guitars not released on a major label.” This one guy (who will remain nameless because I forget his handle) kept saying stuff like “you’ll never hear this on your local station, because they’ve probably never even heard of it,” and then playing Mission of Burma’s “2wice” for the 9th time that day. And while he’s probably right, a sentiment like that just rings pretty false when he’s essentially playing by the same rules as the Clear Channel stations, with the only difference being what he’s playing, which is completely subjective, right?

And the fact that all of these DJs are playing the same one or two songs from the same records means that they probably have little to no say about what they’re actually playing. Which, considering the fact that their personalities and knowledge of music leave a lot to be desired, left me wondering what would be lost and/or gained if the channel went in one of two rather extreme directions. One would be to completely lose the DJs altogether, bulk up the music rotation by like 50% (which would be possible if they’d dig into artists’ back catalogs a bit more), and just hit shuffle. Even though it's pretty radical and probably not recommended, I would love it. It’s not like the personalities add any knowledge to the proceedings—one guy, and I’m telling the truth here, informed us after playing Joy Division’s “Transmission” that it was from the album Substance. Oh, yeah, I forgot. And “Venus in Furs” is from the Velvet Underground’s Greatest Hits, too. The other, much much better direction they could take would be to send out a casting call for John Peel-type DJs—engaging music obsessives with an amazing body of knowledge and easy, exciting demeanor. They could even do a reality game show about it! What they’ve got now is a group of marginally informed yet somehow still snobby and disaffected time fillers that blend into one another.

I don’t mean to completely hate on Left of Center here, I just think that the technology shouldn’t be the main attraction, but should only drive the content, and thus I think it could be a lot better. I mean, while the satellite thing is neat, it kind of takes radio more toward the Clear Channel multi-ownership radio conglomerate model than anything, where one station decides what everyone in the country should hear at the same time, and listeners have to pay for it and buy a specific receiver. It offers more choice, sure, but who’s doing the choosing? Not to get all pedantic here or anything, but for me, the greatest thing about the idea of the public airwaves is the fact that they’re public—that, in theory, anyone with an idea and some free time should be able to broadcast whatever to other interested people. But we all know that that ideal was pretty much eradicated once companies started buying up bandwidth, the primary real estate item on radio next to advertising time. Although satellite radio seems like a revolution of freedom where there aren’t any commercials and Howard Stern can do the porno thing unfettered, it’s actually taking radio in the opposite direction that it should be going, by really limiting access and ivory-towering the whole medium. Great college/freeform/indie/alternative radio stations, those that had the power to break artists with the force of a jock’s personality and fervor, are endangered species on the verge of extinction. Left of Center doesn’t really have anything to do with that, but it’s an example of a technological alternative to the current way of doing things that actually reinforces a lot of what’s gone wrong with radio.