Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Radio Programs, Satellite Radios and such�

I tell myself, no, I will not buy a handheld satellite radio. Way too many electronic contraptions in the house already. Dealing with so many electronic things, we are forgetting we are human and turning into robots. But a radio...A radio is different; it is special. I can do stuff around the house and listed to the radio. It need not tie me down with visuals.

Radios used to be--and still are--my first love.

It used to be, each town we went to had its own flair, its own personality, and its own radio program. Since we traveled a lot, I always carried a small radio with me with a headphone to listen in on the people of those towns. Up to until fifteen years ago, local programs provided a grand delight for me, more so than those snowy-screened TV sets in the hotel rooms. Now that the program syndication and satellite radios have taken over during the recent years, the radio stations for the general public have lost their appeal and personality.

The syndicated talk show programs turn me off completely since most have foul-mouthed hosts and flimsy content. Worse yet, they think they are free to do and say anything no matter how unimportant, banal, or gross, just because they have achieved syndication and satellite broadcasting and they are above everybody and above any rules of conduct.

Those who are not as gross, still, do not reflect the local color and they end up imitating one another, therefore making their shows uninteresting and mind-numbing.

I remember in a small town in Tennessee, ten to twenty years ago, most of the music used to be in the lines of “monkey on the rope” or “your sweet boy stole my woman,” but I was truly entertained listening to the host with the local accent and that music the locals liked.

In even earlier days, in larger towns, radio stations played all kinds of music. They went from rock to Latin, from classical to pop, from international to spiritual, from local talk shows to radio plays. They opened people’s eyes, ears, minds, and hearts to many possibilities.

Once in New Orleans, I found a station where local volunteers read for the blind. I think they still do that in NPR all over the country, but only the blind are given a special contraption to hear it from.

I wish I could still hear their voices. It was a delight for me to listen to regular folks read. Not all of them were as well-trained as the actors who read the well-known works of literary writers on the tapes for sale. Some people stumbled on their words, skipped something and then came back. Others had accents or read too fast or too slowly, but it was a wonderful, wonderful community thing, which made me wonder why other places didn’t emulate that.

Our radio stations are not only syndicated these days, but also –since they are owned by bigger companies- they are politically biased. Where I live now, some stations are repulsively republican while others are nauseatingly liberal. To add to this, local stations are musically biased as well. While one station only plays rap, the other plays soul music, another plays heavy metal, another hip hop, another elevator music, and a rare one has classical on its agenda.

If one is lucky, where he lives there’s a more multicultural, a little on the high-brow side, state-sponsored station. In most places, however, I find that to be non-existent, or if it exists, its signal is so weak that it is impossible to hear.

On its own, the midnight programming, too, has gone totally to the dogs. So much so that a syndicated, far-out program that sometimes deals with the supernatural seems to be the most attention-worthy program. I can tell from the multitude of listener participation.

True, better choices are on the web, but I can’t take a computer to bed when I lose sleep at night. I need to use a tiny radio with an earphone, but with the way radios are nowadays, I usually lose out.

Maybe, I'll still get a satellite radio. Just maybe there's an obscure station in there somewhere that still carries on the true radio tradition.