Half-Hatched Thoughts and Radio, Radio

I’m writing this first in a notepad on the way to the beach (who even hand writes anything, let alone an effing blog post?) and I am thinking about the mix tape my friend Ezra made me. Contrary to the nature of a blog, though in the spirit of an actual mixtape, I’m not going to share it here. Forgetting the fact that getting something from cassette to mp3 zip or (gasp) podcast isn’t something I know how to do, the underlying fact of the matter is this mix was crafted for me, curated, pulled from years of music obsession and assembled with careful planning and at least mental, if not physical drafts. It’s got classic songs and personal favorites and songs I don’t know and songs that are old, upstate NY buried treasure (Beef, The Punishment Frock, I could go on) sitting like dusty, fragile relics, whispering secrets to me and (I swear it’s true) making me a better driver. It’s a mixtape, but it has the weight of a 100,000 watt radio show. It’s artful.

Music has to have a sense of occasion dammit. I don’t care how cool or how casual you are or think you are; Lou Reed had a sense of occasion same as (though entirely different from) Ian Curtis same as all of the Talking Heads same as Chuck D same as Justin Timberlake, Madonna, Jeff Mangum, Brian Wilson, Nas, and on and on. Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run is crystallized, concentrated, crack-like sense of occasion (mp3). This has everything to do with why i love early Bruce, but that’s for another time. This is also why I hate commercial radio, and why I ultimately don’t like Sirius (yet) either. When I read Eric’s Sirius Post I never responded because I had too much to say. (Totally assbackards, I know, but there you have it.) He’s mostly right, but he misses one important mark: very few people care about radio anymore, relatively speaking, and if anything’s going to “save” it, it’s going to be that audiophiles will always seek out other audiophiles. Always. So cramming a bunch of deeper album cuts or b-sides into a Left of Center and hitting shuffle misses the point, because it falls back into the commercial model. It’s indie rock Charlie fm (or Jack fm, or whatever “we play everything” automated shit station you have.) Unless the focus is curating playlists, remembering that programming can be a craft, radio is done for. Stations have to be on the hunt for their own John Peels (though there will never be another) for their own benefit and to do right by the music. Even the littlest band can do right by the mighty sense of occasion (mp3), and if they can so should everyone else.