Music, Radio and the Public Sphere
The Aesthetics of Democracy
C. Fairchild
ISBN: 9780230390515
DOI: 10.1057/9780230390515
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Music, Radio and the Public Sphere
10.1057/9780230390515 - Music, Radio and the Public Sphere, Charles Fairchild
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Also by Charles Fairchild
COMMUNITY RADIO AND PUBLIC CULTURE
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POP IDOLS AND PIRATES
10.1057/9780230390515 - Music, Radio and the Public Sphere, Charles Fairchild
Music, Radio and the
Public Sphere
Charles Fairchild
University of Sydney, Australia
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The Aesthetics of Democracy
© Charles Fairchild 2012
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Acknowledgements
ix
Introduction: The Unknown and the Unheard
A road map to what follows
A few notes on how this book was made
1
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10
Part I Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
1 Social Solidarity in the Luminiferous Ether
Speaking through music: The aesthetic practices of radio
The public lives of music
The public sphere and cultural democracy
2 Corporate Rationality, Communicative Reason
and Aesthetic Experience
The problem of the public and the ambiguity
of the aesthetic
Payola: The anti-aesthetic
Subjects of perception opening to communicative potential
A civil and potentially democratic aesthetics
Conclusion
3 Of Communities and Constituencies: Radio,
the Market and the State
Social networks defined by constituency relationships
The struggle to exist and survive
Deregulation and privatization: Cordoning off the ether
Conclusion
17
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41
46
54
61
69
74
77
78
81
84
100
Part II Making Radio, Making Meaning
4 What Does a Civil Society Sound Like?
Social aesthetics and the visceral ontology of radio
Presumptions of listening, practices of presenting
2SER and FBi: Emerging from the shadow of JJJ
2XX and ArtSound FM: Music or politics?
How do these sounds convey meaning?
vii
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108
112
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Contents
viii Contents
128
131
134
137
140
5 Local Music for Local People
The convivial presentation of music experienced locally
ArtSound’s ‘Concert Hall’
2XX’s ‘Sunset’
FBi’s ‘The Bridge: Unsigned’
DIY A&R: Inculcating musicians and presenters
into their own music scene
FBi’s ‘Amplified’
2XX’s ‘Micfest’
FBi’s ‘Music Lessons’
I’m not really a musician, but . . .
FBi’s ‘Out of the Box’
2SER’s ‘Jailbreak’
Conclusion
142
144
144
146
147
6 Mixing: The Rational, the Reasoned, the Resourceful
Can’t I just play what I want? Decision-making,
ordering and playlists
FBi’s ‘Weekend Lunch’
ArtSound’s ‘Sounds Early’ and ‘Disc Drive’
Challenging and changing each other
2XX’s ‘Innerspace’ and ‘Classic Matters’
ArtSound’s ‘Dress Circle’ and ‘Classical Moods’
A certain logic, trust and faith
ArtSound’s ‘World Vibe’ and FBi’s ‘Fat Planet’
2SER’s ‘Methodology’ and FBi’s ‘Utility Fog’
Conclusion
165
Conclusion: The Unheard and the Unknown
200
Notes
205
Bibliography
208
Index
223
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183
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2SER’s ‘The Attic’: Making the case for real music
FBi’s promos: Seeking the demographic
2XX’s ‘Lunch Box’: Imagining the unbroken past
ArtSound’s ‘The Soundspace’: Community-based
robot muzak
Conclusion
The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission
to reproduce copyright material:
Semiotext(e) for p. 210 and p. 32 from Neil Strauss, N. (ed.).
Radiotext(e).
The Permissions Company for Mark Slouka. ‘Dehumanized: When
Math and Science Rule the School.’ Harper’s Magazine, September
2009.
International Publishers for p. 238 from Antonio Gramsci Prison
Notebooks.
Fugazi for the lyric from ‘Cashout’ from the album The Argument
(2001).
The School of Media and Communication at RMIT University for use
of sections of my article ‘The Grinding Gears of a Neo-liberal State:
Community Radio and Cultural Production.’ Southern Review, 39(2).
I would like to thank the staff and volunteers of 2XX FM in Canberra,
ACT, ArtSound FM, Canberra, ACT, 2SER FM, Sydney NSW and FBi
Radio, Sydney, NSW. I have received an immense amount of good will,
honesty and care from a great many people who worked at these radio
stations. I am profoundly grateful for the help I have received, without
which this book would not exist. They have strongly influenced how
I think about music and what might be done with it.
I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists at the ACT
Heritage Library in Phillip, ACT, for their help in finding a significant
cache of documents regarding the history and development of community radio in the ACT, especially the histories of 2XX and ArtSound.
I also received much helpful advice and direction from the staff at the
National Film and Sound Archive and the National Library of Australia.
I would also like to thank Professor George McKay whose comments and suggestions on the earliest drafts of this work have proved
invaluable.
I would like to thank the Conservatorium of Music and the
Research Office of the University of Sydney. Both provided the research
ix
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Acknowledgements
x Acknowledgements
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grants and facilities without which I could not conduct this kind of
research.
Finally, and most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the
profound debt of gratitude I owe to Rachel, relentless editor, persuasive motivator and compassionate partner. I could not ask for
anything more.
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Radio is an alteration of space and a structuring of time. It extends
space if you’re making music, shrinks it if you’re listening.
Jody Berland, quoted in Strauss (1993: 210)
Most objects of pleasure in popular culture are produced by large
corporations. These corporations also happen to be the main advocates,
sponsors and beneficiaries of a thuggish, anti-democratic economic ideology responsible for shaping much of our social and cultural lives. The
ideology, neo-liberalism, and its methods, corporate rationality, have
produced spectacular privilege and appalling disadvantage the world
over. Their acolytes and representatives nest comfortably in every significant institution in Western society. These corporations are central
actors in a system in which due process, the rule of law, freedom of
expression and freedom of association are not proving capable of combating the economic, cultural and political onslaughts being levied
against them.1 Given this, it seems scarcely credible to claim a broadly
conceived ‘popular culture’ as the natural servant of democratic politics.
Yet there is little doubt that popular culture has what we should call a
‘politics’, if only because it is a source of tremendous power, influence
and learning.
In this book, I will look at how one expressive realm of popular
culture, music, is used by people within organizations under popular
control, community radio stations, to create civil and potentially democratic social relationships with each other. I will look at how a popularly
constituted organization can be used to construct a context for different
ways of making meaning from the mass of expressive aural materials
that circulate in increasing volume and speed all around us. The common claim is that the market already does this and that, even when it
1
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Introduction: The Unknown
and the Unheard
Music, Radio and the Public Sphere
doesn’t, we are all clever and creative enough that we make it so simply by staying awake and paying some measure of attention. However,
there are several incongruities, contradictions and apparent paradoxes
that suggest the tautological justifications of the culture industries and
their apologists are wrong, at least when it comes to the subjects of this
book: the music industry and radio broadcasting.
First, over the last ten years or so, a well-scrutinized paradox has been
stalking the music industry. The range and flexibility of options for consuming music have increased dramatically, but few of these options are
ones over which the music industry could exert much direct control or
influence for about ten years or so. This fact has occasioned a great deal
of social conflict and garnered a lot of attention. It demonstrated that
those who told us they were the indispensable interlocutors of popular
music were no such thing, and, as many have shown, they haven’t taken
the news very well (see Mann, 2000; Fairchild, 2008). Second, despite the
years of histrionics surrounding piracy, file sharing and ‘out of control’
consumption, there has been a far more striking paradox that has gone
largely unexplored by those interested in the evolution of the ways in
which we find, embrace and love music. At some imperceptible point in
the recent past, the one medium over which the music industry has had
tremendous influence, those wide, accommodating aural avenues they
have used to great effect for decades, commercial radio, simply stopped
being the effective publicity machine it once was (Paoletta, 2006; Taylor,
2007; Klein, 2008).
There is no immediate answer as to why this might be the case. The
music and broadcasting industries can’t blame interventionist governments for over-regulating the medium. The swaggering extortionists of
the broadcasters’ lobbies have managed to get their industry almost
completely deregulated, or ‘self-regulated’, or ‘voluntarily managed’, in
country after country through a series of staggeringly successful political campaigns spanning nearly two decades (McChesney and Schiller,
2003). They can’t blame their audiences. Despite the rhetoric of disintegration, radio is still one of the most popular forms of media there
is, despite many premature claims of obsolescence (Kipnis, 2005; Dick,
2010; The Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010; Dick and Corderoy,
2011). These industries can’t blame the vagaries of the law. It is tough
to find one area of law that has gone against them since the rush to
deregulate began in the late 1970s. Despite the constant clamor for
fewer and less burdensome forms of law and regulation for industry and
ever more robust forms of law and regulation for consumers, the entertainment industry still acts like it can’t quite find the perfect formula
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through which it might offer its products and services to an apparently
ungrateful public (Garofalo, 1999; Drahos, 2002; Bishop, 2004; Lessig,
2004).
Third, in most places in the world, radio, one of our most widely
available channels of communication, is dominated by those who most
effectively exclude the public from it, other than in the subordinate role
of consumer. However, the fact that one of the most used media of communication in the world is also one of the most tightly controlled is
not actually a contradiction; it is precisely the point. The dominant economic and political ideologies which have governed the evolution of
radio broadcasting around the world in recent decades were designed
for exactly this purpose. The pursuit of deregulation, economies of scale
and integrated practical monopolies run by corporate entities able to
dominate entire markets single-handed was intended to make entertainment and advertising markets more stable and predictable. This
phenomenon has hardly been confined to the entertainment industry (Kaufman, 2010; Robinson, 2010). The fear of the unheard and the
unknown has resulted in a commercial radio market that is supposed by
many to be a model of cost-effective efficiency.
As I show in the first half of this book, corporate rationalization has
its price. Hulking radio conglomerates rely heavily on remotely provided ‘voice-tracked’ programming sent to ‘robot’ stations presented
to the public as ‘virtual live’ radio. They use what are alleged to be
sophisticated statistical models to whittle down mass audiences into
manageable demographic niches. They only acknowledge the human
subjectivity of their audiences after reducing it to some common enumerative denominator. They rely on centrally planned playlists whose
composition and character are designed to solidify and economically
exploit those niches populated by numerically defined non-persons. Little of what we hear is constructed through carefully managed, intimate,
nuanced relationships with communities of listeners. Most of what we
hear is built through the administered relationships of consumerism:
focus groups, demographic and geo-demographic research, economically exclusionary and anti-competitive relationships between suppliers
and distributors, and proliferating forms of payola. Success is determined through ever more complex measurements of consumption
across time and space; information is thought to flow one way, cash
the other.
There is little mystery to this. Commercial radio is not designed to do
much more than turn a reliable profit, and the music industry has never
been a democracy.2 Only a hardy few still claim it ever was. The fortunes
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Introduction
Music, Radio and the Public Sphere
of the radio conglomerates do not proceed in parallel with the value
people find in their programming. Despite the fact that radio broadcasts are free, portable and ubiquitous, the industry can still contract
even as audiences remain stable. In some cases it can actually grow even
as measurable forms of demand fall and listeners desert it in droves as
‘market leaders’ take the hard-won gift of regulatory ‘reform’ and transform it into a device to gut their own markets (Schiffman, 1998; Fisher,
2007; Foege, 2008; Burrell, 2009). If the experience of commercial radio
in recent decades can teach us anything, it is that the common, convenient conflation of the market and democracy contained in that pithy
phrase ‘giving the people what they want’ simply doesn’t hold. This
is at least one of the reasons commercial radio no longer works as the
music industry’s sales team. The alternative ways of consuming music
that many people have embraced in recent years constitute, in and of
themselves, a social relation that commercial music radio is not capable
of constructing with any kind of longevity.
This aural version of consumerism is just not good enough for some
people. This is certainly true of the people whose work I describe in this
book. Instead, they have gone out and created their own radio stations,
a fact which leads us to my fourth and final apparent paradox: community radio stations are marginal forms of cultural production specifically
because they are democratic. Broadly speaking, community radio stations are an enactment of those practical forms of equitable, transparent
and accountable social organization lauded by so many, rhetorically at
least, as democracy. Yet there are few, if any, places in the world where
these kinds of institutions are a dominant force in public culture. Since
my research into community radio began in 1990, I’ve studied the form
in Canada, the USA and Australia. I have found that, wherever I go,
those involved in making community radio work face battles few other
media producers face. As I try to make obvious throughout this book,
when a group of people take democracy seriously and try to create it
through practical action, they face challenges others do not. They find
the supposedly public airwaves closed to them. Bureaucrats and politicians ignore their efforts, belittle their values and collude with ‘market
leaders’ to continually try to run them out of existence.
This book is about people who have made what I regard as extraordinary efforts to create open, civil and potentially democratic social
relationships through the act of presenting music in those formally
constituted, public, discursive arenas called community radio stations.
No other form of radio faces the same kinds of struggles as community radio. This is because democracy is messy, unpredictable, frustrating
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and inefficient, and if there is one thing the dominant ideology of neoliberalism can’t abide, it is the risks of democracy (Carey, 1995). Instead
of pursuing potentially democratic relations with their publics, the state
has colluded with state and commercial broadcasters as well as the entertainment industry to constrain for others the rights they seek to enjoy
for themselves (Ledbetter, 1997; Leys, 2001; Barsamian, 2002). The gradual but inexorable imposition of ideologically specific, anti-democratic
broadcast regulatory regimes, draconian entertainment and copyright
laws, and the inelastic rule of privatization, deregulation and corporatization have made it increasingly difficult to create and maintain open,
non-profit public spaces to which ordinary people have an implicit, inviolate guarantee of expressive access.3 Yet, as I’ve also discovered over and
over again, this doesn’t stop people from trying to create them.
One of the more difficult aspects of writing this book was the fact
that the study of music on radio takes up a surprisingly small corner of
academic writing. Even within the study of music there is only a small
number of sources on the aesthetic, social and political relationships
people construct for themselves using recorded music and radio broadcasting. Few works address the inherently public and potentially civil
or possibly even democratic character of the social relationships facilitated by these two ubiquitous forms of organized sound. There is, of
course, a breathtakingly large literature on music as a social and political
resource, focusing, not unreasonably, on musicians or explicitly musical institutions as well as the public contestation of musical meaning.
Yet the centrality of radio to the public experience of music has not
inspired the reams of specifically musical analysis and argument one
might expect. There are a lot of books on how people make meaning
with each other through music in public, but hardly any that examine
this way of doing it. Therefore, I am not talking about the kinds of things
musicians do, such as songwriting, composing, performing and the like.
Instead, I am asking how music is used to make public culture more public, more open, more democratic and more common, not to see how
people erase or ignore difference but to see how people acknowledge
and experience it and, when necessary, overcome it.
To write this book, I have been compelled to draw on the substantial tradition of public sphere studies. However, even the extremely rich
veins of public sphere, media and radio research available in other disciplines have been only uncomfortably adapted for use here. This is in part
because the dominant forms of discourse scholars of the public sphere
tend to examine are decidedly rational forms of talk whose primary task
is the mulling over of weighty issues. While there is a range of scholars
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Introduction
Music, Radio and the Public Sphere
who examine arenas of aesthetic practice as a contribution to any theory of civil society and the work of some imagined democratic polity
(see Hinderliter et al., 2009), few have applied their work to the worlds
of music or radio.
Initially, I imagined that the bulk of this book would consist of shredding the radio industry’s bland and self-serving justifications for its
patent dominance of what are supposed to be public airwaves. Similarly,
I could have taken the music industry to task for their use of rapidly
multiplying forms of legal and illegal payola to bribe their way into
tightly controlled playlists on the barricaded airwaves. However, I realized I could scathe and scythe the big radio conglomerates all I wanted,
but that wouldn’t tell us much about the kinds of communicative relationships a democratic society most needs to construct. I might have
spent my time quite happily excoriating the governments which have
kept radio broadcasting an exclusive and lucrative protected habitat,
punishing its many transgressions with an almost comical largess and
prosecutorial lassitude. However, these critiques would end up being little more than very satisfying brush-clearing exercises. They need to serve
a larger purpose.
My larger purpose in this book is to construct an understanding of
how people use music to create and participate in what I will call a civil
and potentially democratic aesthetics. As I will show throughout this
book, a civil and potentially democratic aesthetics means that the conditions for the encounter between a community radio station and its
publics must be as egalitarian as possible. These radio stations must provide the potential for the consequential participation by any member
of the general public. These organizations must be popularly constituted instead of becoming the exclusive preserve of professionals or
specialists, and these organizations must be easily mastered tools that
cannot be made subject to the arbitrary authority of the state or the
market. This sort of activity happens in many places and takes diverse
forms. Community radio is only one compelling example. I want to
chronicle the efforts of those people whose primary motivation is that
crucial element of living, breathing democracy: encountering the unfamiliar and allowing yourself to be changed by the encounter. I will show
how the capacity to be changed, discursively not coercively, is embodied in the kinds of aesthetic and rhetorical gestures the people I have
studied make through their radio stations. I will show how the character of their aesthetic practices defines what their radio stations are
and through this, ensures that the flexible, discursively open character of these practices makes these organizations responsive to change in
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communicatively reflexive ways. I will also show how a commitment
to cultural democracy makes these organizations vulnerable and fragile. This book is about how democracy gets made, not what outcomes
it produces. It is about the inherently unpredictable consequences of
genuinely open arenas of public expression. I want to show how the
seemingly simple act of playing music for other people in public is often
a leap into the unknown.
To pursue this larger purpose, I present a somewhat idiosyncratic
study of the inherent connections between music, radio and the public
sphere. I argue that the act of playing music on the radio always organizes people socially, aesthetically, politically and economically all at
the same time. Playing music on the radio creates publics that are organized and maintained through social relationships defined by the shared
construction of musical meaning. The questions are how is this accomplished and for what purposes. Music presenters working at community
radio stations constantly express the potential of their institutions to
create a civil or democratic social aesthetics because these radio stations are constituted by the very communities that produce them. Few
other forms of media ever realize this sort of potential. The ideas I am
pushing here need consideration because radio is at a strange impasse,
broadly speaking. Opportunities for near constant music consumption
have multiplied so exponentially in the last decade that traditional
radio broadcasting, one of the most effective media for the mass distribution of sound ever created, appears to many to be approaching
extinction. While its relevance and use do not seem to be declining
presently, the forms it will take in the future are very blurry. Yet there are
still those moments of serendipitous enchantment that this seemingly
ancient medium can still produce that link people in intimate, public
and necessary ways.
A road map to what follows
This book is divided into two parts. The first is primarily about the
intransigent rationalization of the context in which radio gets made.
The second is primarily about the ways in which people make meaning and construct publics by playing music on the radio. I will use a
series of specific cases of varying scale and scope to make my arguments,
presented in parallel with ideas and evidence drawn from a range of
sources, especially materials gathered through fieldwork at four community radio stations in Australia. In Chapter 1, I provide a broad overview
of the key terms and ideas I will use to explain the importance and value
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Introduction
Music, Radio and the Public Sphere
of people playing music for each other in public on community radio.
First, I argue that the ways in which music moves through the world
are indissolubly linked to the ways in which it becomes meaningful.
Second, I argue that the work of music presenters at community radio
stations constitutes a type of civil discourse that is underpinned by a
broadly civil and potentially democratic social aesthetics. The goal of the
aesthetic practices that constitute community radio is to create ongoing social relationships that are discursively open, equitable and allow
for distinct forms of subjective autonomy that those engaged in them
rarely experience elsewhere. That is to say, this form of public expression produces an experience of public life that does not exist anywhere
else. Therefore, I use this chapter to establish the criteria for the creation
of an open and democratic public sphere. The literature on the public
sphere I use here champions the value of procedure and the power of
discourse to produce the kinds of mutual understanding necessary to a
democratic society. Throughout this book I show how people might use
music to do this.
In Chapter 2 I set out the terms through which I demonstrate how
the civil and potentially democratic aesthetics I imagine work in practice. We need some accounting of the practices of such an aesthetics for
two reasons. First, aesthetic practices based on some significant measure
of civil cooperation are almost ubiquitous. People share music with each
other, legally and illegally, in a vast range of forums; this is nothing new.
The analysis of one such forum, a publicly accessible, equitable, open
and accountable organization such as a community radio station, is
long overdue. Second, aesthetic communication is not like other forms
of communication. It is a discursive and procedural model of communication and to a significant extent sits comfortably within a broader
range of civil social practices. It is not like the ideological, structurally
determined, strategic kinds of communication of the type which constantly lubricates the gears of consumerism. I argue in this chapter that
the value of the kinds of communication found in this book is found in
the way in which aesthetic expression generally creates tensions within
a larger public culture dominated by other, more rationalized forms of
communication. These tensions create the conditions for the existence
of the specific kinds of civil and potentially democratic aesthetics I am
talking about here.
As I show throughout chapters 2 and 3, the logic and pervasive presence of corporate rationality create a context of laws, regulations, ideologies, attitudes, assumptions, practices and experiences. These all bear
the marks of a largely tacit but familiar undertaking: the production of
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communicative gestures that are commercially and strategically planned
and managed to exploit the social relationships that result for the
accumulation of financial, cultural and political power. These forms of
knowledge and expression define the context in which all expressive
forms exist and strongly shape the communicative practices even of
those who might contest or reject them. The consumerist conditions
which mark contemporary public culture are the product of the strong
shaping presence of specific kinds of corporatist instrumental rationality. This ideology heavily influences the terms of access to public culture.
It defines the criterion by which speakers are deemed to be credible
interlocutors and by which institutions are established as viable and
enduring mediators of meaning.
As I show in Chapter 3, corporate rationality helps shape and define
how corporations and the state work in tandem to govern and influence the kinds of mediated communicative relationships we have with
one another. In this chapter, I will broadly characterize the kinds of
relationships that exist between radio, the state and the market. These
characterizations will clarify and specify the analytical terms presented
in the previous two chapters. I will use a wide range of materials focusing
on a series of regulatory and marketplace struggles on the part of three
of the community radio stations I have studied. These struggles show
how, despite their constitution as civil organizations, community radio
stations are often still beholden to the very regimes of power they are
trying to contest. Therefore, community media can only remain viable
in fostering open, civil or democratic cultural production within hostile
economic, political and cultural contexts by taking into account both
the formal and informal relations between these organizations and the
range of institutions of governance. They can only survive if they create social networks through what I call ‘constituency relationships’ that
they can rely on when things get tough. I use three case studies from
my research to show how three community radio stations staved off
dissolution in exactly this way.
The three chapters that constitute the second half of this book will
focus on the kinds of sonic and musical content produced by four community radio stations in Australia. I begin the second half of this book
by outlining the methodological problem of studying the act of playing
music on the radio. This act presented me with a kind of ethnographic
problem in that I often found it difficult to locate the forms of agency
that produced this act. In analyzing the ‘act’ of mediating music, I found
that I needed to examine a whole range of things in order to understand
it, including the intentions, practices and assumptions of presenters,
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Introduction
Music, Radio and the Public Sphere
the expectations and assumptions about the listener, the context within
which the relationship between presenter and listener is made material
and the structure and intent of the institution or organization, as well
as myriad contextual factors which govern the character and longevity
of the institution or organization.
Throughout the second half of this book I will move between qualitative material gathered through fieldwork, descriptive analytical material
drawn from archival research into the substantial documentary records
of each radio station and extensive analysis of actual music programming from each station. I include characterizations of the actual sounds
of the radio stations I have studied as well as the range of productive intentions of those making programs. This includes descriptions
of the sounds of people’s voices, the music they present and the distinct meanings they carry, as well as the ways in which the range of
sounds allowed on the air is constructed, negotiated and administered.
It will also include an explanation of the ideals inculcated through continued participation in these communities by those involved in them.
This implies, as I note in Chapter 4, a range of mostly implicit presumptions about how and why people listen, many of which are rarely tested
or even publicly articulated.
As might be expected, the nature and influence of these forms of
participation vary significantly from station to station. In Chapter 5,
I examine the practices that mark the relationships between community
radio stations and local musicians. Again, in each case, these practices
vary in instructive ways. Finally, in Chapter 6 I will explore the musical practices of mixing at each of these radio stations. The goal here
will be to present a clear understanding of the kinds of musical values
that are expressed both implicitly and explicitly through these practices.
I will show how mixing practices are emblematic of the broader ideals to which community radio presenters aspire when they construct
their publics. They are among the more reliable indicators as to the
nature and quality of any potential civil or democratic publics these
practitioners might be engaged in constructing.
A few notes on how this book was made
It is important to clarify how I have gone about assembling the sources
for this book.4 My analysis of community radio rests on mixed genre
research which I use to triangulate between information drawn from
ethnographic observation and extensive personal interviews, analysis of
as complete a record as possible of publicly available documents such as
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newspapers, magazines and policy documents, as well as the use of academic literature on the subject (see Nightingale, 1993). My sources and
methods are intimately tied together because they developed in tandem.
I began work on this book by using a few small research grants from the
University of Sydney to look at a broad range of community radio stations in Australia. In short order, I discovered a stunning range of station
types, programming philosophies and expressive practices. Given that
there are several hundred community radio stations in Australia, most of
which produce around 6000–8000 hours of programming annually, the
idea of drawing a detailed, fixed and empirically comprehensive analytical picture of what they all produced seemed fanciful. The simple fact
of this complexity and diversity helped me to focus on the four radio
stations whose programming and presenters are analyzed in this book.
Instead of drawing on an impossibly large range of stations, I carefully
chose four whose practices, histories and programming seemed to me
to provide an interesting complex of styles, attitudes and programming
philosophies. I also chose four stations located in the region where I live.
This was a conscious decision and has provided me with the opportunity to explore implicit as well as explicit understandings of how people
construct their varying senses of place through these institutions.
The four stations analyzed here are 2SER (Sydney Educational Radio)
and FBi (Free Broadcasting Incorporated) in Sydney and 2XX and
ArtSound FM in the national capital, Canberra. The two Sydney stations
are compelling studies in contrast and commonality. 2SER is one of the
oldest community radio stations in Australia. During its long history, it
has earned a reputation for a commitment to a broad range of critical
public affairs programming and innovative music presentation. FBi is
one of the newest community radio stations in Sydney. Its focus on new
music, particularly new Australian music and music from Sydney, as well
as what is loosely referred to as ‘youth culture’, usurped a fair chunk of
2SER’s former territory, which the older broadcaster ceded. 2SER altered
its programming philosophy in response, especially in its music offerings, to appeal to a slightly older group of listeners rather than engage
in a war of attrition with FBi. Their respective lineages have provided
me with ample sources of contrast and numerous points of comparison.
The two Canberra stations present an even more absorbing
dichotomy. 2XX, also one of the oldest community radio stations in
Australia, experienced long periods of fractious internecine conflict. The
fights were so intense and interminable, that one of their many consequences was the creation of ArtSound by a core group of 2XX’s founding
generation of volunteers and staff. The two stations continue to exist in
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Introduction
Music, Radio and the Public Sphere
an uneasy relationship as 2XX has struggled through several crises while
ArtSound has gradually built an enviable broadcast infrastructure, grantwriting capability, programming profile and audience loyalty. Yet 2XX
often produces programming that is far more idiosyncratic and inventive than ArtSound. The programming at ArtSound tends decidedly
toward the professional, sedate and smooth, while 2XX often produces
the kind of vibrant, anarchic sound that seems a relic of community
radio’s past. The intertwined histories of these two stations can help us
understand both the broader evolution of community radio in Australia
and the specificity of the social ideals which underpin that evolution.
I’ve made strong efforts to rely on several distinct types of sources
throughout this book. First, I spent a fair amount of time interviewing staff and volunteers at all four stations. Where possible, I recorded
the programs of people I interviewed and watched them produce their
shows. Second, I managed to unearth a substantial documentary record
for each station. I tried to contextualize the records each station produced within their specific histories and contexts and set them against
the fieldwork materials I gathered as a measure of historical continuity
and change. In conversation after conversation, people would suggest,
imply or state the kind of commitments they had made to their work.
They would express ideals and values that occasionally aligned so tightly
with what their peers at other radio stations said that a picture began to
emerge of an expressive style and intent that seemed distinct to at least
some iterations of this particular form of media. Yet, their actual programs were often so idiosyncratic that they defied many of the rhetorical
commonalities I found in my interviews. While many of these ideals
and values were confirmed in the documentary records I’ve examined,
they also reveal multiple distinct histories of social struggle too vivid to
ignore. Third, I worked very hard to use these materials as a guide to
the broader academic literature without shoehorning them into a systematic theoretical relationship with one another. I have tried not to
give pride of place to one or another method of knowledge production.
The qualitative fieldwork was only as useful as my trawls through various libraries and archives. These trawls in turn informed how I handled
interviews and observations. My various return trips to the documentary record and encounters with the academic literature were inevitably
changed by what people had told me. None of these procedures is worth
much without the analytical and theoretical frameworks which in some
cases preceded this book. While these are drawn from a line of inquiry
that began in 1990, the ideas and argument in this book were strongly
shaped by the experience of doing research for it.
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Finally, it is important to note one specific aspect of the character
of these institutions. The radio stations profiled in this book are complex, multifarious organizations. Each has large numbers of volunteers
and staff. In most cases, the people I talked to and observed did not
know many of their peers and colleagues. Most knew five or six other
volunteers closely and had regular, direct contact with perhaps a dozen
people. I found this to be the most unexpected facet of how these stations worked. It has important consequences. The more I learned how
to ask volunteers and staff about the less obvious details of their experiences, the more I was able to see how their expressive practices exerted a
range of shaping influences over the institutions in which they worked.
These stations are places that are constituted by the multiple pathways
people take through them. The diversity of their practices and experiences made it difficult for me to see these institutions as singular
expressive forums. I found that there is no one way to experience them
and no right way to study them.
This is one of the main reasons why this is not an ethnography of
listening to community radio. Radio is a distracted medium to which
we often respond in an idiosyncratic and inchoate manner. Listening
to the radio is a cumulative, longitudinal experience. It is an expression of a habitual social relationship. I set my sights on understanding
how these social relationships are produced in large part because the
sites in which these social relationships are realized, that is, where people listen to radio, are multiple and experienced simultaneously by an
unknown number of people. As I argue in Chapter 4, there is much
that is unknowable there. The experience of radio remains a familiar
enigma. Instead, I am examining these publics primarily through the
initiating communicative gestures upon which their existence depends
and simultaneously through the means of mediation that shapes the
character of the social relationships through which radio is made real.
As Hennion and Meadel have asked, ‘[w]here better to seize this world
in movement if not where it is constructed?’ (1986:285). The production and intent of the musical gestures I am analyzing throughout this
book are mysterious and complicated enough. To combine the undertaking of understanding the productive and communicative intent of
those I interviewed and observed with the potentially shallow populism
of a fragmentary audience ethnography would obscure what I see as
important about what I have found through my research: how the
potential for democracy gets made. Tracking the relationships listeners have with community radio stations in Australia has been done
repeatedly, if not annually, in great volume elsewhere (McNair Ingenuity
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Introduction
Music, Radio and the Public Sphere
Research, 2004, 2006; Meadows et al., 2007). I wish to move in another
direction.
I have chosen to focus on a very specific task in this book. I am hoping to present a counterexample to the many confining contexts within
which music is so often placed. Through this, I want to point to the
potential for other ways of creating self-organized, public spaces through
which the meanings of music can be constructed. Further, I want to
show how people do this in ways consonant with the broader social
experiences they have through music. Throughout my research, I was
able to see how the people I talked to learned to create public discourses
using a range of sounds, speaking through other people’s music. I was
able to watch them form new meanings for the music they presented
and discover how they held these meanings in common with a public
that remained largely imagined. I saw how they constructed and maintained a context for the production of musical meaning through the
organizations in which they worked. They used music that was both
known and unknown to them. They shaped it into aural constellations
using both familiar patterns and deliberately unfamiliar juxtapositions.
Many improvised live on air with music they had heard hundreds of
times and with music they had just grabbed from the music library on
the way into the studio. I saw people expanding their own aesthetic
worlds by seeking out music they had never heard before to place in
close relation to that which they knew by heart, enjoying both with
equal enthusiasm. It is the unceasing, subtle inventiveness and deliberative rummaging around in the constantly expanding worlds of music
they inhabit that can tell us why such a seemingly simple act, playing
music for other people in public, can be so important.
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Part I
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Enforcing and Evading
Rationalization
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Musical sound . . . is a self-referential, aural abstraction.
Georgina Born (1991:166)
The iron mouth of the autovoice has transformed a surge of lightning,
picked up and relayed it, into loud colloquial speech, into song and
the human word.
Velimir Khlebnikov, quoted in Strauss (1993:32)
The advent of radio broadcasting remains indelibly marked by what
we now recognize as wild speculation about its magical properties and
social potential. Radio waves were once said to reach us by exciting the
luminiferous ether, an invisible all-encompassing medium imagined to
carry sound and light across vast distances to bring the music of the
spheres down to earth. The theory of the ether proposed a whole new
imaginary vista accessible to anyone at the turn of a dial. In radio’s early
decades, commentators across a wide range of social, political and professional spectra offered all manner of strategy and suggestion, from the
practical to the fantastical, on the proper use and development of the
technology. Artists and scientists, poets and engineers, spun remarkable
visions of what might be wrung from this novel medium.
A.M. Low, an honorary professor of physics at the Royal Artillery College, noted in 1928 that ‘[i]n a few years time we shall be able to chat to
our friends in an aeroplane and in the street with the help of a pocket
wireless set’ (Low, 1928:35).1 His chipper little tome Wireless Possibilities ‘predicted a change in the whole trajectory of human life’ (Squier,
2003:276). Low boldly foresaw a world in which storms were tamed
and both wheat and babies grown more effectively by what he called
‘oscillatory means’ (Low, 1928:42). His most telling hopes were his most
humble. ‘All this is so easy’, he opined, ‘that no one can doubt that
17
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Social Solidarity in the
Luminiferous Ether
Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
we shall soon listen in to native jamborees’ or ‘hear the strange cries of
partisans at a baseball match’. He continued by suggesting that ‘when
reproduction becomes so accurate that the very nature of the people is
revealed to us through their speech, surely we might be a little more
neighbourly even with those whom we now pretend to love?’ (Low,
1928:31–2).
Like Low, Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov also saw what he wanted
in radio: the decay of capitalism and an opportunity for workers to
communicate in an organized way to counter the capitalist world’s ‘documents of oppression and exploitation’. His contemporary, the poet
Velimir Khlebnikov, imagined that the ‘metallic apparatus of Radio’
would let noise blare from walls of speakers and kiosks across the Soviet
Union producing sounds that would increase the ‘muscular capacity’
and ‘collective strength’ of the country (Khlebnikov, 1993:35; Kahn,
1994:100–2). Also in 1928, Edgard Varèse imagined a somewhat more
ecumenical use for radio broadcasting. He planned a series of symphonies in which various auditory sources spat out ‘slogans, utterances,
chants, proclamations’. The composer imagined his sounds ‘penetrating each other, splitting up, superimposing and repulsing each other’ as
they clanged simultaneously throughout every capital city in the world.
He imagined ‘the Fascist states and the opposing Democracies all breaking their paralysing crusts’ (Kahn, 1994:109). Yet such fantasies were not
confined to artists or marginal visionaries but infected even sober corporate bureaucrats. In 1923, Edward B. Craft, chief engineer of Western
Electric, suggested that the ‘loud speaking telephone system will tend
to re-establish oratory by making it worth while for the nation’s
leaders to sway the emotions of tremendous audiences’ (Wurtzler,
2007:32).
The early years of this still somewhat inscrutable medium were indeed
a time of wonder. Radio broadcasting arrived in North America and
Europe in the early 1920s, positioned at the tail end of a long string
of new communications technologies. It rested on the technical foundations of wireless telephony and telegraphy, which had only recently
made possible the rapid transportation of information across vast distances. Sound recording, the coding of sound in an aurally material
form, and sound reproduction, the mass production of sound recordings, had only come into widespread popularity a few years after the
turn of the century, after several decades of awkward gestation. This was
a period of intense social change and it inspired an epidemic of diseases attributable to what was called ‘over-civilization’. Various kinds of
malaise, ennui, melancholy, nervous prostration or ‘neurasthenia’ – a
kind of paralysis of the will – apparently ran riot; and beneath all, we
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are told, lay a frothing sense of unreality (Lears, 1983). Given the scale
and pace of change faced by our consuming forebears, it is not hard to
understand how such anxieties proliferated, even if we might find them
quaint and remote today.
Of course, radio ushered in neither a glittering aural utopia nor an
anxiety-laden perdition. It did something far more substantial. When
radio’s audible excitations and tremors wafted through the ether, they
began to breach the boundaries of the most intimate spheres of everyday
life. Invisible forces seemed to enter the home and the body of their own
accord, appearing out of what was regarded, then at least, as very thick
air indeed. When these intimate spheres became merely another point
in a boundless and seamless landscape of sound and imagery, a foundational shift in the way many were able to imagine their place in the
world began to take place. We were transformed ‘from sovereign possessor of . . . discrete and malleable technology to an enmeshed participant
in an amorphous and unstable informational circuit’ (Squier, 2003:276).
Laying down that evanescent matrix of visceral experience and induced
emotion we call music on top of an expanding, pulsating grid of electromagnetic excitation did not merely result in the increasingly efficient
transportation of information across vast spaces. In concert with larger
trajectories of change, it resulted in a fundamental reassessment of what
a rationally constituted social space actually was and what its potential
uses and effects might be.
The magic has inevitably been leached from these devices over the
years, but there remains some shadow of the supernatural in them;
it is just harder to see now, and therefore much easier to take for
granted. As Eric Davis evocatively noted, since ‘the self is partly a product of communications, new media technologies remold the boundaries
of being. As they do so, the shadows, doppelgangers and dark intuitions that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self’ (Davis,
2002:17–18). It is in these shifting boundaries where that skerrick of
radio’s magical origins still resides. It is not located in any material or
technical form. It lives in the social relationships that the medium facilitates, not in the sounds it produces. It can only exist if the people who
produce and experience those sounds actually want it there. The social
connections people create through sounds and the ways in which some
people invest their social beings in a seemingly simple act – playing
music for other people in public – can occasionally take on a shade of
the profound.
The people whose musical practices are presented in this book do not
make radio because it is their job; they don’t get paid for it; they are
not celebrities; their work gains them very little social (or actual) capital
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Social Solidarity in the Luminiferous Ether
Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
of the type that can be spent in other arenas. But the payoff for them
seems more than sufficient. Their efforts are repaid in those numerous
forms of social solidarity that the act of playing music in public makes
possible. Guided by a distinctly humble kind of idealism, it is a payoff
that is no less conjectural than those visionary reveries noted above; but
that doesn’t make it any less real.
Whether or not mere sound is capable of conveying all of this is not
the issue. To paraphrase Douglas Kahn, sound has no autonomy, no
being of its own that we need worry about; sound is relational, a carrier
(Kahn, 1992:15). CDs are little more than barely useful coasters until
someone chooses to play one of them. Radio studios are merely wellinsulated rooms, soundproofed and silent, until someone comes in and
decides what sounds to make. If you look closely at the spinning visions
of radio’s potential that I strategically presented above, you can see how
each speaker – whether scientist, artist, engineer or composer – did not
seek some technical or aesthetic innovation for its own sake. All sought
some new form of human relation. In each case they described what
they imagined to be distinctly civil relationships with those regarded
as peers. This should not be surprising because, as Kahn notes, radio’s
‘newfound and newly populated space was not acoustic’. That is, the
space radio created was not experienced as literal. Instead ‘the distance
between replicated objects’, the sounds that go in one end and come out
the other, ‘collapsed space to an ideal of instantaneous transmission and
reception’. Radio produced a new type of aural intimacy and closeness
across indeterminate and suddenly bridged distances (Kahn, 1992:21).
It is the social character and material qualities of those bridges that are
of most interest here.
There is little doubt that when the material form of music changes,
so do its abilities to connect us. Many bridled as these changes swept
through their early 20th-century societies and homes. When music
became unmoored from previously existing spheres of social convention, experience and control, first through sound recording and then
through radio broadcasting, all hell was thought to break loose. It was
bad enough that sounds could be sliced off, ring by ring, and taken
off into the privacy of the home. With radio, sounds were brought
home on the lode-bearing ether without compunction or even any necessary discrimination. The vibrations of music, now flying around often
without any necessary regard for prevailing etiquette or the sanctity of
social ritual, were once thought to contain the seeds of both spiritual
enlightenment and neurological destruction (Stearns, 1956; Leonard,
1962:30–8; Douglas, 2004:81–99). The promiscuous broadcast of music
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has inspired regimes of surveillance and control that persist to this day,
under various legal fictions, regulatory guises and economic excuses. If it
can’t be exorcized, the magic must be controlled.
While there has always been an obvious social and technological affinity between sound recording and radio broadcasting, it is too much to
say that they were made for each other. It was only with the advent of
the mediating influences of the purpose-built broadcast studio, electric
microphones and loudspeakers that radio became a distinctly musical
medium. Each of the two acts as both mold and figure, foreground and
background, to the other. When music passes through the liminal space
of the studio, borne by loyal devices charged with reproducing its perceived splendor with some measure of fidelity, something happens to
it. It is not simply reproduced, it is reconfigured; it becomes richer and
denser. The corpses of sound in the form of discs or audio files that enter
the studio by the door or the data cable are recontextualized, reproduced
and reanimated. New layers of circumstantially specific meaning are
built through social relationships that produce some significant measure
of ruminative overlap between otherwise distant parties. There is something undeniably alchemic about listening to music on the radio. In the
right context, even the most tarnished and common composite might
be transformed into a more noble metal. In the wrong context, even
the most magnificent creations can become background noise. Musical meaning and affect, the preoccupation of so many philosophers,
artists and social reformers for centuries, was long ago subsumed into
the seemingly untamable world of living, moving sound.
Speaking through music: The aesthetic practices of radio
I am setting out here a way of understanding the mediation of music by
arguing for what Georgina Born has called ‘an exploded and constellatory definition of artistic meaning’ (Born, 1991:158). This model of the
value we draw from aesthetic expression tells us that the meaning of a
work of art is not only inhered inherent in its materials or animating
intent but is also formed by the multiple mediations to which a work of
art is made subject. Aesthetic meaning evolves socially along the many
trajectories we carve for a work of art as it is drawn through scores of
materially distinct and identifiable channels and spaces of mediation.
Clearly, radio broadcasting is one such channel. Radio broadcasting is
an inherently public practice, and very often a musical one. Its centrality to the public lives of music is undeniable. The musical meanings
that radio facilitates are by definition collaborative, open, circumstantial
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Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
and unfinished. The meanings made from music as it circulates in the
world always defy the pretences of those who would pin a song under
glass for all time. This book is heavily populated by people who seem to
know this.
There are two key arguments that shape all that follows. First, I will
argue that the people whose musical practices I examine in this book
aspire to what I call civil and potentially democratic aesthetics. This
means that they want the conditions in which they encounter their
publics through music to be open and egalitarian. This implies several things. In order to maintain this kind of openness, these radio
stations must always provide at least the potential for anyone to participate. These stations must be popularly constituted. They cannot
remain open and egalitarian if they become the preserve of professionals or specialists. They must allow those people who do choose to
participate to easily master and control the expressive tools that the
stations provide. This makes their participation productive and meaningful, and it implies that the outcomes of the musical practices that
constitute civil and potentially democratic aesthetics cannot be set out
in advance.
Such aesthetics can only be made real in musical practices whose users
implicitly acknowledge that the meaning of music is not necessarily
something they can fix, own or enforce. Civil and potentially democratic aesthetics cannot bear much pretence toward rationalization and
control. There is no guarantee that these conditions will spontaneously
produce ‘democracy’, so I am using the word ‘potentially’ to note that
the circumstances friendly to democracy are more rare, ambiguous and
fragile than we might think.
The second central argument of this book is that it is precisely this
lack of rationalized control that allows for the very possibility of the
civil and potentially democratic aesthetics I see in these radio stations. This is because these organizations are not merely shaped by the
expressive practices they facilitate; they are constituted by them. Such
aesthetics cannot be the product of a strategy or an ideology; it simply cannot be planned and implemented. It has to be worked out in
practice in situ. It can only be the product of a multitude of social relationships and forms of interaction. It is the product of a social space
that doesn’t merely allow or encourage such aesthetics but cannot exist
without them.
Before we can get an idea of the kinds of social spaces that might sustain civil or potentially democratic aesthetics, we need to understand
the character of the aesthetic practices I am imagining. When I say
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that the musical practices I analyze in this book are familiar, I mean
that they are, in some respects, pretty straightforward. I am really only
talking about people playing music on the radio. But if we alter our
perspective and think about them in a kind of manically practical way,
we can ask questions that are far more intriguing. What is it exactly,
materially, literally, ontologically, that we are talking about here? What
do these people actually produce? It has a material form, but it isn’t
an object. It has meaning but that meaning is not stable, nor does it
result from the explicitly expressed intent of a distinct creator. It is an
aesthetic practice with an identifiable criterion for success, but it is not
really recognized by anybody as an ‘artistic’ practice as such. It is constructed from commodities but is not necessarily a commodity. It is
the practice of creative agents, but its aesthetic status is parasitic and
systemic, as opposed to individualist and authentic.2 The use value it
produces is an ongoing consequence of the collaborative social relationships that create and carry its meaning, but its meaning is evanescent,
almost entirely circumstantial, and seems to disappear almost as soon as
its aural presence passes. Add to all of this the overarching procedural
and facilitating context of a popularly constituted institution such as a
community radio station, and really it isn’t all that clear what we are
talking about any more.
What ‘it’ is, is a fleeting event, a momentary point of social connection produced by a radio station and experienced by an unknowable
number of listeners in multiple, disparate places simultaneously. That
point is the connection between the music, the presenter and their
public, with the radio station acting as the fulcrum upon which the
social relations between them tilt.3 The meanings produced through
these innumerable points of contact are elusive because they are experienced so multifariously. They appear entirely mutable, inconstant and
frustratingly fickle. Further, the credibility and value of these meanings
is dependent upon the lived experiences of those participating in their
production and consumption. That is, the actions of the presenter and
the character of the institution bear some significant trace of implicit
and inherent meaning for the listener, but only in specific relation to the
listener’s existing knowledge and experience of them. The institution is
the mold through which these social connections are articulated and
specified, mediating between the experience and materiality of music
on the one hand and the networks or media through which that music
inevitably travels on the other. A radio station is a mold in the same
way a piece of software is a mold. It is a context defined by procedural
demands, formal instructions and informal protocols (Attali, 1985:128).
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These simply produce radio programming consisting mostly of music.
Their specificities cannot be precisely predicted; their shape and contour
can only be generally expected.
What links those who might be a part of these webs of social connections is what we might call a discursively open musical practice. This
consists of situational arrangements, juxtapositions and presentations
designed to create contextual associations between multiple experiences
of existing sounds. It is not an act of musical production proceeding
through the intent of a creator or author to construct a preferred or singular meaning recognized as such by those who receive it. Such musical
practice doesn’t construct, define and enforce musical meaning so much
as it creates a context for the production of an indeterminate range of
potential meanings by relocating and redirecting sound through the
channels and pathways created by the very acts of presentation and
social expression themselves. These acts recur constantly, by definition,
continuously crafting and recrafting the channels through which music
moves, continuously altered by those who use these channels to make
and remake musical meaning.
This much is true of all radio stations. The rub comes when one
wants to form these acts into something larger – a market or a public,
for example – by filtering them through some enabling form of social
organization intended to exploit their potential, whether that potential
is civil or economic. The economic case is familiar. Producers must fix
some ideal image or notion before us that is long enough to allow sufficient people to consume it to make it a worthwhile economic endeavor.
An enormous amount of effort must be made to achieve this illusory,
paradoxical brand of stability of expression and meaning that defines
contemporary consumerist public culture (see Fairchild, 2008:157–8).
The civil case is different. Producers must create relationships that are
both more durable and more flexible, and therefore more fragile. They
are both more durable and flexible in that community radio presenters
must cede some significant measure of power over the meaning they
make through music to their publics and the radio station itself; this
is also what makes them fragile. Community radio stations must cede
power and allow any potential for the survival of the organization itself
to rest with their publics. It is this negotiated kind of power in which
the very possibility of a civil or democratic aesthetics exists.
The power to make music move in a certain direction or along a particular pathway is central to its meaning. As Joselit has noted, we live
‘in a consumer world where things habitually stand for ideals’. In such a
world, he suggests, the consequences of relocating or redirecting a text
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are not as self-evident as they may seem. ‘If a commodity’s meaning
results from its circulation,’ he argues, ‘it is possible to develop a politics
whose goal is not to abolish or “critique” commodification . . . but rather
to reroute the trajectories of things’ (Joselit, 2007:5). The meaning and
value of the material experience of music are always moving along many
tracks at the same time within complicated networks of movement. The
meaning of music is continually being socially constructed, resting on a
shifting foundation of the kinds of constant motion to which it is subject. It is this motion that is the confounding factor in any stasis and stability we might ascribe to the meaning and value of music. It is through
the extant and enduring ruptures between the stability of our perception
of the visceral qualities of music and its constant mobility through the
networks in which it travels to become meaningful that any potential
for a civil or democratic aesthetics exists. Those moments in which this
latent potential is either stilled or realized are the subject of this book.
As noted above, community radio is by no means the only medium
thought to have the potential to nourish open and democratic aesthetic
expression. We do not exactly lack for breathless description and analysis of numerous forms of what we might call the discursively open
musical practices proliferating on the magical, mystical internet. There
does not seem to be any immediate end to the tireless fantasies spun
around the apparently limitless power of music blogs, playlist swaps,
mixtape sharing, sound clouds or musically recombinant organizational
aesthetic schema like mashups, bastard pop or the conjunction of online
‘radio’ with social media. Surely the inexhaustible aesthetic possibilities of social networking sites, peer-to-peer connectivity and mobile
music consumption are so immediately relevant that they almost speak
for themselves (Ayers, 2006; O’Hara and Brown, 2006; Miller, 2008;
Sinnreich, 2010). What does music presenting on community radio tell
us that other forms of aesthetic agency do not?
There are several reasons why I am studying music presenters on community radio stations. First, I am doing so because of my frustration
with the distinct strain of socio-technological inevitability and digital
exceptionalism that seeps from many neologistic effusions about digital culture, marked by the insistent invention of new terms such as
produser, infotainment, edutainment and democratainment, if only to
try to capture the wonder of it all. As noted at the beginning of this
chapter, we have heard similar gush before. In radio, I am studying a
medium that was defined by decades of fairly serious hype – hype that
misrecognized many of the medium’s most important characteristics.
Recognition of this fact might help us avoid the familiar fantasies of
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inherently emancipating communication technologies. Unfortunately,
much scholarship on digital culture is marred by an abundance of speculative rhetoric about the varied glories of ‘user-generated content’.4
Cyberspace has allowed a dramatic increase in the volume of public
expression, to be sure, but there is no necessary or concomitant ‘democratic’ flowering built into its forms. It should be obvious by now that
the efforts to enclose anything even resembling a digital commons are
proceeding with as much haste and urgency as previous efforts to rationalize that other form of ideal electromagnetic space, the luminiferous
ether (Lovink, 2002:330–68; Elmer, 2004; Dahlberg, 2005; Turow, 2006;
Gillespie, 2007). This is a familiar story that radio and television have
already told us (McChesney, 1993; Spinelli, 2002; Boddy, 2004). Many
forms of reflexive, transparent, accountable digital communication are
often strangled in their infancy by the punitive expansion of copyright
law, instinctive and reactionary accusations of theft and an increasingly coordinated effort to render digital culture supine and mercantile
(Mann, 2000; Drahos, 2002; Diebert, 2003).5 Those sponsoring such
efforts have successfully established digitally distinct forms of social and
economic power which bear a remarkable resemblance to those forms
of such power that exist out here in the boring old real world (Arnold,
2010; Lee, 2010; Munro, 2010).6
Second, we sit at a historical juncture in which the insistent institutional and political pressure placed on media regulators has meant that
the most used online expressive avenues can at best perpetuate the tensions between the ideals to which they allude and the realities in which
they are enmeshed. Most remain conflicted attempts to commercially
constrain the movement of music between the poles of safe, familiar
trajectories of movement and meaning, and more provocative and challenging ones. As such, it is crucial that we understand the residue that
old media leave behind if we are to understand how much sticks to
new media. The forms of social connection that the internet fosters can
be more fully understood if we view them in specific relation to those
with a longer ancestry and more substantial pedigree, given that they
remain the unacknowledged foundations upon which these new digital forms of socio-musical interrelation uncomfortably rest. This is not
because community radio is somehow uniquely resistant to the depredations of forms of power hostile to its existence. Instead, as I show
through numerous examples in this book, community radio has dealt
with hostile power intent on preventing its existence. It has dealt with
hostile markets determined to neuter its expression, and it has dealt
with a forcibly enclosed commons only to rend them open repeatedly
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in place after place, time after time (Girard, 1992, 2003; Howley, 2005,
2010; Fuller, 2007).
Third, I am studying music presenting on community radio because it
is one of the many forms of aesthetic agency upon which a potentially
more civil and democratic public culture has already been founded. The
people whose work I describe in this book are part of long-established
‘social networks’ that have long been nestled within ‘participatory cultures’, producing great volumes of ‘user-generated content’ of the type
so recently discovered and acclaimed by the burgeoning tomes of digital scholarship. The excitable Henry Jenkins, for example, a principal
exponent of ‘participatory’ media, can posit in the first of his ‘Nine
Propositions toward a Cultural Theory of YouTube’ that while ‘in the
past powerful interests would have been content to exert their control
over broadcasting and mass-market media’ explicitly and publicly, now
they ‘often have to mask their power in order to operate within network
culture’ (Jenkins, 2007:94). He argues that this demonstrates that network culture is a uniquely resistant, contestatory space in which power
is actively and constantly renegotiated between a variety of interests.
Jenkins’ simplistic theorem manages to deftly elide the fact that such
masks have been the necessary foundation that has made corporate
propaganda or, more gently, ‘public diplomacy’ increasingly invisible
and therefore effective for a very long time. The earliest efforts of corporate PR specifically masked the source of their power as the central
fact of their work. Its progenitors knew that this is what distinguished
their communications from mere advertising and this is what proved its
unique value. These pioneers knew very well that without the masks,
their enterprises would fail (Stauber and Rampton, 1995; Ewen, 1996;
Rushkoff, 2001). Their masks have proved to be more necessary and,
in many cases, even more effective in digital culture (Kingsley, 2011;
Moses, 2011). That so basic a distinction should escape so prominent a
figure is remarkable enough, but Jenkins is hardly alone in his claims.7
Efforts toward a more democratic and open public culture undertaken
by countless media activists for decades have been ignored to such an
extent in so many volumes of work on new media that they pass almost
completely without acknowledgement. As a result, some serious triage
is in order.
The reasons for this gaping blind spot are elusive. The people whose
work I have been studying have long practiced familiar forms of musical creativity based on mutuality of authorship, shared construction of
meaning and acknowledgement of the inherently collective and collaborative character of public expression. The authors of the aesthetic
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practices I describe throughout this book have long been more instigators than singular savants, less technically gifted sophisticates and more
popular spurs. They exist within institutions whose ‘terms of use’ and
regulation of ‘user-generated content’ are nowhere near as onerous and
objectionable as those drawn up by the nimble legal minds of News
Corp./MySpace, Google/YouTube or Facebook, Inc.8 The terms of use of
the organizations I study are mutually agreed upon and are routinely
re-evaluated and cooperatively validated. These organizations are not
beholden to investors. The way these organizations change over time is
not determined by a power-wielding managerial class. Their expressive
practices exist in many varied, complicated and contradictory forms.
Their work points to a range of possibilities for equitable social connection that the broader culture seems dead keen to negate or neuter.
However, given that the practices I am studying have been around for
long, and even though these kinds of practices have rarely been in short
supply, they have no necessary consequence implied in their shape
or structure; to put it bluntly, we already know they are not innately
liberating. This fact alone often renders their efforts marginal, if not
invisible.
Finally, I am studying music presenting on community radio because
the phantoms that stalk the evolution of our public culture remain
potent. The overwhelming pervasion of consumerism and ubiquitous
presence of corporate rationalization lodge themselves in nearly every
musically expressive sphere, message and moment we might find (Van
Buskirk, 2008; Mahdawi, 2011). These grind against any potential
civil or democratic relations we might draw out of public culture.
Consumerism necessarily transforms their civil or democratic potential into a subordinate condition of their economic success or failure.
It remains flatly unavoidable that the very fact of any commodity’s existence turns on whatever prior surmise of its imagined exchange and
use value might be made by those trying to control its circulation and
exploit its potential. In short, the economic value of a commodity is
largely determined in advance; its existence depends on it. This is what
led Jacques Attali to argue that ‘what is called music today is all too
often only a disguise for the monologue of power’. Yet as the economist
also noted, despite the fact that music often ‘seems hardly more than
an excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new
industrial sector’, it remains ‘an activity that is essential for knowledge
and social relations’ (Attali, 1985:9).
Attali’s searing optimism, so fundamental to his argument, can help
us understand what is at stake here. He audaciously foresaw within
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consumer culture what he called a herald and wrote of as prophecy.
While I prefer to see his analysis simply as aggressive idealism, not
predestination, it still feels remarkably prescient. Attali argues that consumer culture was working itself into a ‘crisis of proliferation’ in which
the extraordinary number of objects in circulation meant that the use
and exchange value of a commodity had little if anything to do with
any intrinsic value it might have when measured in terms of the labor
or materials required to create it. Instead, the value of a commodity
created through market competition comes not from the production of
objects but from the production of perceived value through the excitation of demand for those objects, ‘the usage of which is very difficult to
differentiate, except by rankings determined by mysterious processes in
which the consumer is led to believe he participates through the simulacra of voting’ (Attali, 1985:128–9). The degree of repetitive productive
excess makes the production of demand and the assignation of value
increasingly labored.9 The sheer number of pathways and trajectories
through which commodities and ideas travel ‘herald the invention of
a radical subversion’. The proliferation of massive supply – what Attali
calls repetition – so outpaces the ability to entice demand for that supply that the latent meaning and power of those circulating objects begin
not so much to dissolve as to disperse or float. As he evocatively notes,
‘the carefully preserved theater of politics is only sustained to mask the
dissolution of institutional places of power’ (Attali, 1985:132). It is hard
to look at the contemporary music industry, with its constant evocation
of destruction provoked not least by its own hand, its notable lack of
relevance to so many consumers who embrace so many other, apparently preferable options, and not hear a few echoes of Attali’s claims to
dissolution and subversion.
The ‘new noise’ Attali saw emerging, ‘piecemeal and with the greatest
ambiguity’, was inspired by a radical ‘shift in the locus of the perception
of things’ (p. 133). He imagines people creating new communicative
relations with each other, built on the ruins and scattered remains of
‘the old codes’ – codes which were fractured as the field of the commodity itself was gradually dismembered. Instead of working to recreate
the broken forms of obsolete paradigms, Attali argues that ‘the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure in being instead of
having’ was creating aesthetic formations in which the ‘listener is the
operator’. In these formations, the act of creation ‘calls into question the
distinction between worker and consumer, between doing and destroying’, and encourages us ‘to take pleasure in the instruments, the tools
of communication’ (pp. 133–5). ‘Production melds with consumption,’
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he continued, and ‘is not foreseeable before its conclusion. It becomes
a starting point, rather than an end product.’ He argues that, as a
result, consumption time becomes ‘lived time’. It is not stored in the
commodities in which we stockpile meaning. Nor is time a tool for
instilling within our communicative relationships only our ability to
express power over each other. In his often inscrutable apparitions,
Attali foresaw a world in which music ‘is no longer a central network,
an unavoidable monologue, becoming instead a real potential for a relationship’. Within this ‘new practice of music among the people’, he
writes, music can become ‘the unfinished, the relational’ (pp. 140–3),
inexorably leading us into a world in which ‘rhythms, styles, and codes
diverge, interdependencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve’ (p. 147). It is not hard to find pieces of his imagined world in the
one that surrounds us. This book is in part about the kinds of musical
practices that I see nestled in Attali’s various fevered imaginings.
The public lives of music
I don’t share Attali’s providential confidence and I make no claims as to
my ability to fulfill any of his stirring, often hallucinatory, visions. However, I will build on his admirable speculations to put forward a practical,
critical study of the inherent connections between music, radio and
the public sphere. I argue that the act of presenting music in public
organizes people socially, aesthetically, politically and economically at
the same time in ways specific to the materials in question and the
medium in use. I define a medium as a network of social conventions
which delineate the realm over which aesthetic materials and the meanings ascribed to them are mediated and recognized (Gracyk, 1996:70–1).
Playing music on the radio creates particular kinds of social spaces which
are organized and maintained through relationships forged by the collective construction of musical meaning. Through such social spaces,
participants use various sonic materials to initiate gestures of connection or to consummate some form of social accord in relationship with
others. As Attali argues, ‘any organization of sounds is then a tool for the
creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality’ (Attali, 1985:6).
The crucial question is what form such a totality might take. Noise can
repressively ‘channel desire’ just as it can free the body; it can denude
and rationalize aesthetic practices while also remaining a ‘refuge for
residual irrationality’ in which music is a gleeful escape from the more
repressive forms of rationalism (Attali, 1985:6). Even the most subversive noises can offer no guarantees that the spaces in which they move
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will be rebellious or that members of such publics will have any reason
to be anything other than insular or self-absorbed. ‘Any noise,’ Attali
says, ‘when two people decide to invest their imaginary and their desire
in it, becomes a potential relationship, future order’ (Attali, 1985:143).
It is the character and shape of that potential that will concern me
most, specifically the civil and potentially democratic aesthetic that
forms through the ability of people to create social networks facilitated by the common experience of music. Community radio conjures
its audiences as ideal publics by presenting a series of broadly recognizable aural materials, the experience of which is shaped by the
practical exigencies of a radio station’s daily existence. I demonstrate
this throughout this book by presenting a series of integrated case studies examining the uses to which music is put at four community radio
stations. I do so in order to demonstrate how music presenters and
programmers working at community radio stations express the inherent potential – latent or realized – of their institutions to create a civil
or democratic aesthetics. Rather than exploiting the economic potential of musical experience by deliberately excluding any broadly civil or
democratic potential, the community radio presenters I study base their
musical practices on creating some measure of equity and mutuality
with those imagined to be part of their public. They do so by mediating
the visceral experience of music to produce some significant measure
of social solidarity and acknowledgement of the common expression of
aesthetic value that we so often use music to convey.
All media organizations exist through the construction and management of complex networks of ‘social solidarity’ (Calhoun, 2002). Social
solidarity is largely the consequence of a series of acts of mutual social
engagement that all forms of media must inevitably make with their
publics if they hope to have any measure of longevity. Media organizations can only find the edges of their particular forms of self-definition
through the creation and maintenance of a series of fluid social relationships with their publics. All such relationships are shaped by the power
of the state and the market as much as through the agency of people
acting in concert with one another. I will examine the musical practices
of community radio from within a critique of the dominant characteristics of the broader public culture, pervaded as it is by endlessly
mutating strains of consumerism which are themselves underwritten
by the regulatory and governance apparatuses of state power. It is the
forcibly intimate relationship between the marginal musical practices
of community radio and the musical practices that predominate in
the larger hegemonic consumerist sphere that makes forms such as
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community radio necessary to any understanding of the possibility of
a more democratic public culture.
The central problem that all media institutions confront is their ability to create and perpetuate their publics. These publics are the means
of their continued existence. This is what I call the ‘problem of the
public’. This problem is based on the fact that the public looks very different depending on what you might want to get out of them. Publics
are pockmarked with blind spots and shadows growing from the always
incomplete understandings of why people act the way they do. The ways
in which different media organizations solve this problem of the public
tell us a great deal about who it is they exist to serve and what is it they
most aspire to do. Some construct their social bonds by selling carefully
constructed statistical approximations of their audiences to advertisers,
others by presenting unique content, others by creating and maintaining the kinds of organic relationships we all have with our peers simply
as a consequence of daily living. The central arguments I make in this
book do not concern the mere possibility of creating a public through
civil or potentially democratic aesthetics. I do not argue that the virtues
of a democratic public sphere are possible in some types of organizations
but not others. They are possible pretty much anywhere those involved
can agree to have them. However, some organizations never appear even
to consider the possibility. The important questions about the character
of public culture regard the strength, consequences and longevity of the
social relationships that constitute the social spaces and aesthetic practices through which communicative connections are made. This is what
I mean by potential. In this respect at least, some media institutions
simply have a lot more potential than others.
Commercial radio stations, tied as they are to impatient investors and
corporate codes of practice, create social bonds through relationships
marked by enclosure, predictability and control. As I show in chapters
2 and 3, contemporary commercial radio conglomerates construct their
publics by participating in the enclosure of the arenas in which they
operate in order to control them and, notionally at least, reduce any
potential unpredictability in operations. Like any corporate entity, they
are legally bound to make as much money as they possibly can (Bakan,
2004). To put it more daintily, they must maximize shareholder value
to the greatest extent possible while minimizing any risk confronted in
the process. They must therefore manage risk and uncertainty as close to
extinction as they can. This quixotic quest has produced the unrelenting consistency in the music programming of contemporary commercial
radio that has come to dominate their medium. Yet this methodically
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administered consistency is hardly a foregone conclusion. Commercial radio has at times produced the odd compelling anomaly, such as
freeform commercial radio of the 1970s, the aural upheaval produced
by 1950s’ payola, the role played by commercial radio in the development of new forms of country and rock and roll, and the remarkable
reach and influence of African American commercial radio in the southeastern USA after World War II (Post, 1974; Kloosterman and Quispel,
1990; Dannen, 1991). The ways in which a media organization resolves
the tensions between risk and reward tell us a great deal about how that
organization works.
Community radio practitioners, on the other hand, react to the inherent instability created by their problem of the public by displaying or
embracing the founding imperatives of collusion, unpredictability and
marginality. The existing literature on community media more broadly
is replete with the recognition of the near impossibility of assuming
that permanent and solid relationships with their publics will always
exist. Further, there is widespread recognition that community media
are almost inherently marginal forms of media (see Fairchild, 2001;
Howley, 2010). In each case analyzed in this book, the problematic pursuit of a public creates different kinds of social tensions between these
organizations and those they claim to serve, between factions within
the institutions themselves and between groups within their variously
imagined publics.
The public sphere and cultural democracy
Inherent within the problematic tensions experienced by media organizations and institutions, the practical methods designed for their
resolution and the principles which shape both, is a model of an ideal
public sphere. This ideal is always present within the practices which
constitute it. It is this ideal that makes the continued existence of the
media organization possible. The ways in which different kinds of media
practitioners imagine their publics and pursue specific kinds of relationships with them reveal those principles that help explain why they exist
in the first place. This study is distinct only in my insistence on examining how music works to create such publics and how people use music
to create more civil and democratic ones.
The terms ‘public sphere’ and ‘cultural democracy’ are both highly
contested. They are most often used to delineate the social spaces in
which we are supposed to fuss and fret about our experience and understanding of the world, hopefully reaching some form of tolerance,
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agreement or even consensus. These two ideas have a substantial presence in this book. Rather than simply assume that everyone knows what
I mean by them, I want to establish my particular way of using them to
clarify my theoretical, methodological and analytical approach. These
terms have long lineages within academic debate which have produced
complexities and nuances far too numerous for summarization here.10
Instead, I wish to define these terms in relation to the sources from
which I have drawn them and note here that the rest of this book is
in large part devoted to a substantial and practical specification of the
terse concision offered here.
For this work, the public sphere consists of many social spaces – ideal,
imaginary, virtual and actual – in which people establish and maintain
social relationships with each other discursively, as free as possible from
the coercion of institutionalized state and corporate power. They do so
through a variety of discursive media, including what Habermas calls
‘rational critical debate’ and what others call storytelling or rhetorics
(Habermas, 1989:27, 35–7; Young, 2008). Through a variety of discursive
mediums, people engage in acts of mutual consent and ethical interaction. The central analytic category of the public sphere for my purposes
is the character of those communicative relationships and forms of
social collaboration in which people are obligated to recognize the need
to work with others to define those things that might matter to those
who voluntarily include themselves in those spaces. As McCarthy puts
it, since
Habermas cedes a certain privilege to subjects as regards the interpretation of their own needs, there can be no question of prescribing or
dictating their needs to them. We can at most try to convince others,
by using arguments that run the spectrum from aesthetic to therapeutic, that their understanding of their own needs is inadequate,
inauthentic, what have you.
(McCarthy, 1992:58)
At the heart of this discursive, deliberative model of the public sphere
is not the content of communications but the intersubjective conditions under which communicative relationships are formed and maintained. As Loehwing and Motter argue, this focus on the conditions
of communications has important implications. As they suggest, ‘the
remarkable capacity of rational-critical debate is not to objectively
weigh various alternatives that preexist their engagement in the public sphere.’ Instead, the goal of communicative action is ‘to generate
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the kind of public discursive engagement that enables citizens to
generate the rhetorical culture in which their communicative action
alters institutional judgment by challenging and reinventing the
nature of a political power that would lay claim to the final authority
on all matters.
(Loehwing and Motter, 2009:232)
The goal of communicative action in the public sphere is to change the
terms on which power itself is constructed. As Loehwing and Motter
conclude, ‘we are speaking of the difference between a problem-solving
model of democracy and a culture-generating paradigm’ (Loehwing and
Motter, 2009:232). So am I.
It follows from this that any social space defined as part of the public sphere in a society that calls itself ‘democratic’ must also be in
some basic form ‘democratic’. To put it sharply and simply, the public sphere in a democratic society should be made up of communicative
and expressive social relationships that are defined by the transparent and
accountable exercise of equitably distributed power. At first glance, this very
basic, idealist definition of communicative democracy may appear to
exclude a vast range of cultural practices from that apparently soughtafter form of public validation that being included in the public sphere
seems to bring; this is not the case. Communicative relationships that
don’t pass this fairly simple test are not necessarily diminished in the
value, pleasure or importance we might take from them; they are simply part of the broader consumerist public culture, not a public sphere.
For this work I am drawing a sharp distinction between consumer culture and the public sphere. I am not doing this on the basis of particular
types of content or questions about the relevance or irrelevance of that
content to formal or informal politics (see Lunt and Pantti, 2007:174).
I am doing so based on a defining difference between consumer culture
and the public sphere: the issue of public accountability. I am arguing
that the terms of our inclusion and participation in public culture are
frequently determined by others with more power than we have specifically because the broader public culture is dominated by consumerism.
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intersubjectivities and conditions for identification that rearticulate
issues of common concern so that they can be critically engaged and
judged by all participants’ (Loehwing and Motter, 2009:232). This places
an extraordinary power within the scope of freely organized people.
Instead of merely competing for representation and resources through
instrumental political action, a deliberative public sphere facilitates
Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
Most of the communicative relationships we enter into are commercial
relationships, a great many of which are conducted through objectives
pursued by stealth and dissembling. The communications in these relationships are not offered in a neutral or ‘disinterested’ way. They are
‘interested’, instrumental communications, the content of which is prescribed in advance and engineered to reach a predetermined end. Those
offering such communications are not bound by any obligation to be
publicly accountable to anyone else involved in these relationships.
We simply do not have much, if any, influence or control over the terms
of our inclusion and participation in consumerist public culture.
In fact, consumerist institutions are often legally prevented from
enacting most forms of ethical, transparent accountability in that they
are legally bound to be privately accountable only to those sponsoring
the communications, such as shareholders, owners and investors. They
are only commercially accountable to the rest of us. This is not a circle any consumer can square. These institutions might be considered
to be indirectly accountable through the ‘free market’, but this kind
of accountability offers power only to those who can pay for it or to
those who might be seen to be commercially valuable enough to producers. In turn, these values are only measured through the producers’
own accounting of their actions and their own assessment of the economic value of their communications. It is difficult to find a coherent
argument defending the communicative practices which predominate
in the consumerist sphere as ‘democratic’ in the fairly straightforward
manner defined above.
It should be clear that I am assuming that the public sphere isn’t
just anything or everything that happens in public involving communication between people who don’t necessarily know one another. The
public sphere has limits, and these limits are defined by two things. First,
the public sphere is limited by the kinds of social relationships people
have within spaces mutually acknowledged to be specifically useful for
discursive deliberation. Second, it is limited because participation in discursive deliberation requires an act of free consent by those who wish
to engage in those communicative relationships in those spaces. The
work of creating explicitly discursive and deliberative communicative
spaces means that such spaces use ‘human relations as the foundation
for democratic culture’, a culture ‘that influences institutional decision
making, instead of extending the logic of institutions into the arena of
citizen interaction’ (Loehwing and Motter, 2009:236).
For some, the very idea that the public sphere has limits is somehow
in and of itself bad politics and anti-democratic. This is not the case.
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I am simply trying to acknowledge that there are times when we are
constituted as citizens within a democratic polity and there are times
when we are not, and we don’t always have control over when, where
and how these designations are applied. This doesn’t mean that we have
abdicated any of our rights. Quite the contrary. The heart of the concept
of a deliberative public sphere is that we decide, in knowing cooperation with peers, compatriots or total strangers, how, where and when
we will exercise our rights and for what purpose. Public culture is replete
with social spaces in which we are specifically and deliberately prevented from making these kinds of free choices of mutual consent with
those we regard as peers. Just try holding a spontaneous information
session about sweatshops in a privately owned shopping mall or, better
yet, inside Niketown and see how long you are allowed to participate in
that particular ‘public’ sphere of the ‘free’ market (Klodawsky, 2008).
A good deal of recent work has pushed another model of the public
sphere, one founded on the idea that to be ‘excluded’ is to be excommunicated. In a kind of perverse neo-liberal hardening of the concept,
the idea of the public sphere has become synonymous with the simple
opportunity to say things in public, reducing the concept to that of a
default social space in which the exercise of expressive and consumer
choice is paramount (see Lunt and Pantti, 2007:163). In this model,
debate about the character and function of the social relationships
which constitute the public sphere revolves around providing the conditions for optimum expressive and consumer choice. For many, this freedom is explicitly synonymous with ‘participatory culture’ and political
democracy, and, in this respect at least, the media have become increasingly ‘democratized’ in recent years (Hartley, 1999:159–65; Lumby,
1999; McKee, 2005; Jenkins, 2006). This particularly flaccid imagining
of popular democracy is only nominally distinguishable from the conception put forward by free market fundamentalists who also valorize
individual choice and fetishize every such act as a paragon expression
of free will (Friedman, 1982; for inspired critique, see Wolin, 2008). Key
exponents of the two schools of thought agree on at least one thing:
that public culture in Western societies has become increasingly ‘free’
and ‘democratized’ over the past several decades. That is, public culture has become more and more dominated by the market, which has
done little more than provide ever-increasing opportunities to choose
between a wider and wider range of things to consume.
The main flaw with any model of the public sphere that equates
range of market choice with character of democracy is the conflation of two concepts that are far too often expressed as if they were
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Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
synonymous: democracy and freedom. Simply put, it is possible to
engage in democratic social relationships in which one is not ‘free’.
There are many social spaces in which we can engage in various forms
of social connection and expression and, at times, leave our citizenship
obligations and commitment to the greater good aside. To be blunt,
I might not necessarily want to be a good citizen when I am at the
movies, in a nightclub or at the football.
A second problem is the overwhelming attention paid to content and
consumption to the detriment of an understanding of the ways in which
that content moves through the world as it is made meaningful. Most
importantly, the systems of knowledge that govern the mediation and
configuration of media content before the act of consumption occurs
and after it has passed rarely get much attention. In the rush to exalt the
agency of the consuming individual, many of those studying consumption marginalize the agency of those who produce, move and shape
what we consume. They ignore a vast amount of the agency through
which consumerist public culture is produced. As Warner notes, what
is often called ‘ “vernacular” performance is . . . in reality structured by
a continually shifting field of artfulness in managing the reflexivity of
mass circulation’ (Warner, 2002:73). Consumerist public culture is a context in which varied, inequitable forms of agency are exercised through
a dramatic imbalance in the ability and power to produce, circulate and
shape the meaning and experience of that agency (Warner, 2002:73;
see also Fraser, 1992). Central to any understanding of consumerism
is an understanding of the character of the systems of knowledge
which underpin the kind of reflexive circularity that Warner describes.
As I argue in the next two chapters, these systems of knowledge have
made the constant expansion of the consumerist sphere possible and
help us account for its manifest inequities. They define which consumers matter, how they matter and why they matter. They target
people for inclusion or exclusion based on a series of evolving mechanisms of discrimination that complete the circuits of consumerism
linking every act of production to concomitant acts of consumption.
These systems of knowledge distinguish consumerist culture from the
public sphere and show us most clearly that markets are not the same as
publics.
The third issue, the increasing ‘democratization’ of the media, at least
in terms of some notional value inherently ascribed to consumer choice,
is a product of three important and exhaustively well-documented
changes in public culture. First is the abdication by the public sector
of its oversight and regulation of the broadcasting and entertainment
industries. As I show in the next two chapters, varied systems of
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‘self-regulation’ have replaced actual regulation. This produces systems
in which regulators are taken from the very industries they are meant to
regulate. This has led directly to unprecedented levels and forms of commercialization (McAllister, 1996; Barber, 2007). Second, we have seen an
unprecedented and continuing expansion of the advertising and public
relations industry for several decades (Ruskin et al., 1999; Anonymous,
2001; Ruskin and Schor, 2005). Third, through this we have experienced
the dramatic expansion of corporate power and influence into numerous social, political, economic and communicative spheres from which
it had previously been barred (Leys, 2001).
These changes have ensured that members of the broadly construed
public have fewer and fewer levers of power and influence over the dominant institutions of public culture. These are the vehicles in which the
presumed ‘democratization’ of the media has traveled. Many uncritically celebrate the dominance of strategic and instrumental forms of
communication used by the advertising and public relations industry
by patronizingly describing these distorting and deceptive communications as ‘democratic’ because they are more ‘accessible’ than the
apparently impenetrable knots of communication they have displaced
(McKee, 2005:67–71; see also Lumby, 1999; Hartley, 1999).
The consequences of these changes are pervasively present throughout public culture. They have mostly displaced what I am calling
democracy with mere participation, accessibility and choice. This has
the pernicious effect of channeling a potentially vast range of human
agency and creativity into communicative relationships designed to
reach predictable consequences sought through carefully controlled
channels, consummated in necessarily uniform modes of social connection that predominate across the length and breadth of public culture
(Elmer, 2004; Turow, 2006). Most of the social relationships we forge
throughout public culture are not equitable good faith connections
in which the parties involved are recognized as equals. Participation
simply presumes consent. As I argue in the next chapter, the act of
communicative connection is simply a transition point to the primary
purpose of the communication – selling things – without which the
communicative relationship would not exist at all. Moreover, a great
many of these connections are increasingly opaque, and the transparency required of any ethical communicative connection is simply
not present in them. Whether we are talking about stealth marketing,
product placement, infotainment or any of a large range of similarly
camouflaged forms of communicative intent and interest, the fact of
deregulation has led to an unprecedented, yet weirdly furtive, commercialization of public life (Goodman, 2006; Thussu, 2007). Public culture
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Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
is dominated by forms of expression whose purpose is hidden from view
and the content of which is deliberately distorted and manipulated to
achieve a predetermined outcome.
Obviously there are multiple public spaces through which we engage
with the world every single day, but are they all part of the ‘public
sphere’? Does all communicative activity have to be part of the public sphere to be of any value? Of course not. Clearly our public culture
is well populated by spaces and expressive relations in which we cannot
make a consensual choice to participate equitably because that very possibility of the public being constituted as equal is simply not available
(see Briggs, 2010). There are multiple communicative contexts in which
we are constituted only as the subjects of power, in which we are, can
be and, in some cases, have no choice but to be shorn, not only of the
rights and obligations of citizenship but also of a primary source of our
own power.
My goal here is to find a way of understanding what happens when
we choose to engage in equitable communicative spheres in which we
are constituted as something other than consumers, subjects or individuals. It is in this sense that I regard community radio as a civil and
potentially democratic form of social connection set within an increasingly anti-democratic public culture. As I argue in the next chapter, there
are two broad models of communication, interconnected and mutually
constitutive, that I will use to examine community radio throughout this book. One is the dominant model of a public culture that
describes the purpose of communication in strategic instrumental and
economic terms. This ideal demands a certain scarcity of resonance in
meaning and inflexibility in circulation. Its adherents tend to focus on
the predictability and control of outcomes and content. The other is
a contrasting model that describes communication in procedural and
discursive terms. Those devoted to this ideal recognize a defining openness and elasticity to communications. They know that meaning only
evolves through free circulation and only stops evolving when something stops circulating freely. As an increasingly urgent and voluminous
body of work has demonstrated, the dominant forms of power and
control over the ways in which our public culture is produced and is
experienced have taken a severe toll on those forms of communication
which seek that elusive something else. My main interest in the rest
of this book is to see how that something else gets made and what its
possible consequences might be.
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Corporate Rationality,
Communicative Reason
and Aesthetic Experience
Rain does not follow the plow. Political freedom, whatever the market
evangelists may tell us, is not an automatic by-product of a growing
economy; democratic institutions do not spring up, like flowers at the
feet of the magi, in the tire tracks of commerce. They just don’t.
Mark Slouka (2009:32)
Not long after the turn of the millennium, the BBC World Service introduced a multi-part series on the globalization of popular culture with
a telling, if familiar, rhetorical gesture. Before the presenter played five
clips from radio stations around the world, he asked, with some measure
of theatrical foreboding, ‘And if you don’t think the world has become
American, then which radio station do you think you’re listening to
now?’ (BBC, 2004).
The clips hailed from Kuala Lumpur, Colombo, Kampala, Lagos and
Mumbai. They held several obvious aural features in common. The
dominant characteristic they shared was the uniform presence of a
quick rhythmic flow to the overall sound. The listener’s attention was
quickly drawn from station identifications to pre-programmed jingles to
a recorded voice telling the audience what programming was on offer.
Then there was another contrasting voice informing listeners what was
superlative about their listening experience and then the live voices of
DJs enthusiastically naming the station again while trying to engage
listeners with more specific fare, such as a traffic report or a song by
Santana or Dido. In each case, the jingles were brightly textured, quick,
upbeat, major-key snippets of electronic drums and bass with multiple
voices, both male and female, singing the name of the station. The
voices were placed somewhere slightly lower than the middle of the
overall mix of sounds and did not take the center of the aural stage.
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Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
The clip from Colombo leapt from the tuneful, choral intonation ‘I love
wakin’ up’ to a crisp, dry, clear female voice placed at the very front of
the mix saying ‘Yes FM Morning Show’, followed by a slightly distorted,
compressed male voice completing this three-part sentence by saying
‘Only on your number one hit music station’; he was placed well back
in the mix. Then the live DJs entered with their tightly compressed,
contained, excitable live chatter.
The recorded voices offering stock phrases such as ‘Kampala’s better
music mix all day long’ had indistinct American or British accents, and
with the removal of one or two words (e.g., ‘Kampala’) they could have
been used almost anywhere one might expect most listeners to understand English. The live DJs spoke in a tone that was loud, upbeat and
enthusiastic, using diction that was clear and friendly without being
perfect. Their tenor was oddly distant, as if they were looking just past
your ear into the middle distance. The address to the individual listener
was both personable and coldly generic. It was an amorphous address,
directed not to anyone but at everyone. One DJ might tell his Lagosian
listeners they should get excited about ‘the big drive home’ as they were
‘gonna get home in style, believe me’, while another told her audience
in Mumbai that ‘the red eye in the sky does not have good news for us’
as Marine Drive had ground to a halt. Each sound was a familiar in form
and content, marking a place in time with a sound that was almost like
useful language, but not quite.
Clearly the producers of the BBC program meant to demonstrate
a certain type of ‘global’ uniformity, and they did so with impressive concision. But the clips were so particular in their consistencies,
so compelling in their monochrome aurality, that they raised more
questions than they answered. They implied not so much a global
homogeneity of thought as the broad conformity of the practices from
which each collection of sounds resulted. These sounds are not representative of some mythic reflection of what people in each of these
cities actively or consciously sought. Rather, each is an aural artifact
of series of institutional dynamics, goals and commercial relationships.
These relationships necessitate an experiential corollary. That experiential corollary takes the shape of the specific expressive forms that
will be recognized by the desired audience. They form the sound of a
global franchise, with all that such a term entails. As I suggest here, the
expressive forms that define commercial music radio cohere and take
on meaning through their underlying logic as a particular iteration of
corporate rationality.
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As Ritzer (2000) has noted, the version of corporate rationality that
has dominated the recent experience of globalization has four key
components: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. These
ingredients make for a far more comprehensive explanation of the uniformity these clips display than does some fanciful notion that listeners
all over the world have some inclination toward bland radio. The digital bits and pieces of these station identifications, and indeed any radio
program, can be organized easily and cost-effectively from a central location using standardized programming templates constructed through
the use of audio editing and music scheduling software such as Selector XV Music Scheduling. Created by RCS Sound Software, Selector XV
offers ‘consistency, variety, balance and control’, which in this case
means ‘consistency of mix; variety within a library; balance of genres;
control of each daypart’. Selector enables individual stations to construct programming measured down to the half-second in which every
moment is scheduled and scripted to conform to some overall plan. Programs can be placed on a central server accessible to all members of the
network. Stations can then swap programming databases over secure
networks, construct or download nearly complete programs that include
the songs, voiceovers, tags, station IDs and what they call ‘opens, closes
and hooks’ in the same version in which they will be broadcast. This
allows more effective real-time management of a more uniform programming product over substantial administrative distances. All sounds
can be fit within any imaginable time slot and arranged in the manner
required. The databases are organized to help create ‘customized’ lists
that allow users to drag and drop songs files anywhere they like. Users
can create charts based on relevant factors such a frequency, genre or
category, and ‘multiple users can work on promos, songs and music logs
at the same time.’ Selector even has ‘comprehensive reporting tools’ to
make reports to copyright and performance rights agencies quicker and
more efficient (RCS, 2006).
While such programs appear to provide some flexibility, any variability is offered only in a context defined by precise measures of control.
As Ritzer has noted, one of the most important aspects of franchising is
control through nonhuman technology. This form of control underpins
other features of franchising and makes them possible (Ritzer, 2000:14).
The management and control of the sounds that get broadcast on commercial radio can easily be administered in such as way as to exploit
the inherent economic advantages of the franchise system. For example, it is markedly more efficient to streamline the production process
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for recording promos and organizing music. There is no compelling reason to have all network members record their own promos and station
IDs, nor is it particularly efficient to allow decentralized construction
of playlists. Centralizing the production of common elements not only
requires less labor and less cost; it also gives more control over the final
product to a smaller number of producers and assures that the sound of
the programming will be consistent. Uniform and generic sounds have
the virtue of being less idiosyncratic and risky. The network can exert
greater control over programming by minimizing the ways in which
most employees can affect the sound of a broadcast. The ability to
shape programming into a common form for multiple radio stations
through one set of common tools also increases predictability, both of
the means of production and of the mode of experience. This makes the
programming more marketable and appealing to those investing in its
production in the hopes of seeing some return.
‘Voice tracking’ is an obvious experiential corollary to this ideal social
relationship. Voice tracking allows the sound of any broadcast to be
managed in microscopic aural detail specifically by removing the literal human content. In place of the human voice, with all of its
uncontrollable and natural inflections and rhythms, are sounds that are
compressed in frequency, timbre and duration. This form of content
management is necessarily controlled from a central location and distributed in an efficient manner to multiple stations. In the voice-tracked
clips described above, the actual amount of live speech was minimal
and neatly contained in very small chunks of time set within the stocks
of other prefabricated sounds. It is likely the live DJs relied on various
script and scheduling templates to make their patter sound effortless
and smooth. Australian radio networks have moved to creating what
they call ‘virtual live’ radio. From a central location, producers construct
standardized programs and ‘pre-record casual references to weather, the
local sports teams and upcoming community events’. These digital bits
are dropped into the standard network programs ‘to create a local homegrown feel’ (Javes, 2003b:3). Producers of this kind of radio can easily
create collections of sounds that are assumed to be likely to reach and
appeal to that part of the listening audience they want to sell to advertisers while also minimizing cost and risk and maximizing control and
profit through the means of cheap and widely available tools.
The strikingly similar sounds of commercial music radio in Kampala,
Mumbai or Sydney cannot be explained, however, simply as being the
result of specific production processes or institutional arrangements
held in common. The similarity of these sounds is the result of the
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pervasive influence of the much broader social and economic logic
called corporate rationality. Put simply, these clips all sound the same
because each radio station is trying to create the same kinds of social
relationships with their listeners. This common desire is expressed when
the audience is carved out of a mass of statistical abstractions known
as demographic research. These abstractions have a specific kind of
widely recognized, economically validated utility ascribed to them. It is
expressed when programming is constructed and experienced in such as
way as to deliberately mask the conditions and intent of its production
in order to naturalize its diligent fabrication. It is expressed not simply as sounds or words but in the social connections those sounds and
words are supposed to produce: a manageable relationship in which the
form and content of communication are tightly controlled, efficiently
administered and effectively delivered in order to produce a public that
acts only as a repository for content and a conduit for commerce.
This chapter will briefly specify the influence corporate rationality has
on the ways in which the expressive sonic forms we hear on commercial radio are produced. Then I will show how the aesthetic practices
of several community radio music presenters I have talked to point to
innate contradictions within this logic, contradictions that create the
social space necessary for the contestation of the terms of its dominance.
The logic of corporate rationality is both trans-institutional and transiterative. That is, it is larger than anyone who uses it and bigger than
any discrete form of expression that results from it. Some people contest
it, others do not, but it permeates and saturates the practices that constitute radio generally. It frames the expressive practices even of those who
actively contest the terms of its dominance. Instead of producing this
or that type of sound or program, it establishes the dominant contexts
through which the content produced by radio moves through the world
and acquires meaning.
Yet it is the very fact of corporate rationality’s omnipresence that
highlights its limits. The social context in which this logic works is constituted by a massive range of connections people that make with each
other through the media. The broadly considered media sphere is constituted by an extraordinary mass of sounds, images and relationships.
We implicitly recognize bit and pieces of the media sphere as notable
or meaningful simply by virtue of their widespread presence across so
many areas of social life. Given its scope and scale, the broadly considered media sphere is defined by an ungovernable process of change
and evolution, a process that is so broadly experienced that it is beyond
any specific mode of regulation or control. Thus, there is always some
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immanent, residual and enduring potential for some measure of subjective autonomy. It is the potential inherent in the aesthetic specifically
that is central to my explanation of how the meaning and use of music
within the public sphere can come to represent something far more
important and powerful than the conditions of its presentation and
public consumption might otherwise suggest. Within the conditions
that exert the power to channel, constrain or exploit the musical meaning we produce between us are also those that have the power to extend
musical meaning beyond the rationalizing influence of the context in
which those meanings circulate.
The problem of the public and the ambiguity
of the aesthetic
As I noted in the previous chapter, all media organizations must continually solve what I call their ‘problem of the public’. If they don’t
solve this problem, they won’t be around for very long. The problem
of the public makes different demands on different institutions depending on their underlying values, assumptions and goals about the kinds
of ideal social relationships they want to form with their publics. There
are two main models of communication used to do this. Each model
is less an actual set of practices than a kind of unreachable ideal set
at opposite ends of a broad spectrum of communication toward which
institutions might drift or tend or perhaps even run headlong. These
models define the ideal kinds of social relationships media organizations seek to produce with their publics in order to survive. At one
end we have a dominant model of public culture that tends toward a
strategic and economic understanding of communication, and at the
other a contrasting model that tends toward a procedural and discursive understanding of communication. In both cases, communication
is being used to solve a problem. In the former case, it is a problem of
profitability for its own sake; this problem must be solved instrumentally. In the latter, it is a problem of facilitating understanding for its
own sake; this problem must be solved discursively. Most media institutions use a range of communicative forms to connect with members
of their publics, and few can survive if they end up marooned at either
pole.1 The important issues in this chapter and the next are how often
different institutions use different kinds of communicative acts, for what
purposes and for how long.
My goal in the rest of this chapter is twofold. First, I want to stake out
the character of the kinds of publicly communicative gestures that are
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consonant with the dominant values of corporate rationality, and second, I want to show how the communicative gestures which constitute
aesthetic communication and expression can produce contradictions
and tensions within a consumerist public culture which has been continually moving toward increasing rationalization for several decades
(Bowlby, 2000). It is the inevitable and necessary circulation of discursively open forms of aesthetic expression that helps create a space for
marginal, non-rationalized forms to exist. After a brief foray through
some basic ideas on the role of corporate rationality in consumerist
public culture, I will argue that the contours of a civil and potentially
democratic aesthetics are implied through several examples of nonrationalized public communication I have drawn from my fieldwork at
community radio stations.
Most media institutions can exist only by implicitly taking into
account the inherent unruliness of actually existing worlds of communication and meaning. The specific character of the institution lies in how
those involved in them try to manage that unruliness. A consumerist
institution will need efficient, cost-effective tools to manage the inherent risk and unpredictability of consumer culture. Their dependence on
such tools to combat their problem of the public has inspired most market leaders in consumerist public culture increasingly to define their
practices through a constant increase in surveillance of consumers,
forms of marketing that proceed by stealth and infiltration into the
communicative practices and channels of everyday life, and global
informational systems that make it both practical and affordable to continually gather a massive range of data on patterns of consumer agency,
data that are consistently mined, plotted and recalibrated to keep up
with changing market conditions (Goss, 1995; Frank, 2000; Harvard
Project on the City, 2002; Goodman, 2006; Turow, 2006). The underlying logic of consumerist public culture is geared toward managing
uncertainty out of existence and toward erasing any potential for change
not inspired or controlled from within.
The goal of absolute certainty and predictability is an obvious
chimera, but the informing logic of corporate rationality through
which it is pursued has proved enduring and influential (Schiller,
1989; Allen, 2005; Barber, 2007). This underlying logic shapes and
contextualizes what gets produced, how it gets distributed and helps
form the contexts through which it moves to become meaningful.
It also shapes the purpose and form of the systems of knowledge
production that bind consumerist institutions to consumers. This in
turn produces assumptions about what is or is not a good, effective,
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rational way to communicate with other people. Just as importantly,
this dominant, expansive logic shapes our competencies and expectations as consumers, producers, practitioners and citizens (Fürsich and
Roushanzamir, 2001). To put it as simply and as bluntly as possible, our
importance to consumerism can only be measured through the extent
and quality of our participation in it.2 We are rendered irrelevant when
we can no longer make a meaningful or measurable economic contribution. This means that our agency, no matter what form it may take,
autonomous, resistant or even subversive, not only exists quite comfortably within consumerist public culture but is indispensable to its
effectiveness.
There are several aspects of corporate rationality that impinge on my
explanations of the presentation of music on radio. First, the dominant
ideological assumption underlying corporate rationality is that the market is the most free and most efficient mechanism for giving people what
they want and need. In this ideological universe, democracy and freedom and not mere adjuncts to the market, they are synonymous with it
(Friedman, 1982; Saul, 1997:88; Wolin, 2008). The formal and informal
rules which shape the expressive practices which constitute consumerist
public culture are definitively shaped by this primary presupposition.
As I show in this and the next chapter, corporate rationality ensures that
the dominant model of communication in consumerist public culture is
one that values the strategic use of communication for economic ends
above other forms of communication. To reach these ends, corporate
rationality demands communicative acts and expressive gestures that
are efficiently produced and the consequences of which are, notionally
at least, predictable. However, without a significant effort to enclose and
control the contexts in which these acts and gestures take place, even
the pretence of predictability is impossible to maintain. Thus, there are
always ongoing efforts to enclose the spaces and channels of communication and consumption from forces of influence or interference from
elsewhere (Schiller, 1989; Chomsky, 1991:73–7, 351–77; Saul, 1992:5–9,
1997:41–6; Allen, 2005:28–30). This one key task, insulating the ways in
which media texts are produced from outside forces in order to produce
publics efficiently and predictably, produces a series of communicative
tasks that are so common and widespread that they are largely taken for
granted.
In order to construct a market for music with some hope of stability, expansion and longevity, it is crucial to be able to have some way
of knowing, predicting or at least imagining the value of its constituent
parts in advance. It’s pretty tough to scare up investment capital without
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being able to explain what the return might be, and occasionally you
need to be right about it. The goal is always the same: to figure out how
to produce the desired responses, such as people buying music, as distinguished from undesirable ones, such as people not buying music. The
very notion of what counts as an important or valuable reaction on the
part of those targeted and encouraged to act as consumers is prescribed
ahead of time. The means for achieving that goal and for measuring
one’s performance are also set in advance too. Given this, to render
the market in music more predictable, those working in these markets
must produce a credible and reliable type of knowledge about the value
of the music on offer. This is called market research or trend forecasting. In the name of efficiency and predictability, the complexity, risk
and uncertainty that define consumer culture are countered with logics
and practices that are so ‘efficient’ that they are entirely self-contained,
self-justifying and self-perpetuating (see Saul, 1992:471–86; Hardt and
Negri, 2000:33–4). Suddenly that unruly world of communication and
meaning doesn’t look so unmanageable.
The value of music might be directly measured as a kind of toll charge
where you pay a fee for a service or a commodity; the iTunes store
springs to mind. Or its value might be extracted through some alchemic
calculation of market power through various ratings systems, as with
radio broadcasting, free-to-air commercial television or the many forms
of measuring internet traffic in which every single click is a contribution to endless fields of data. The vast majority of communicative
relationships most of us encounter through the media are part of this
encompassing sea of commercial transactions. They may not require
anything resembling an actual exchange of money, but they only exist
because they serve a commercial purpose. Any piece of music must prove
to be instrumentally useful and profitable enough as measured within
this context to sustain the social relationships it produces or those relationships simply won’t last very long. To sustain any kind of successful
existence, a communicative institution, such as a radio station, must
find the value of music by somehow measuring its ability to incite a
specific number and type of desired responses to it.
If the economic value of music hinges at least in part on its received
meaning, the range of possible meanings for acts which define the
communicative relationships that music creates within consumerist
public culture must also be framed and constrained in advance. The
social relationships that constitute consumerist public culture must be
instrumentally useful in this way or they probably won’t exist, much less
persist. Given the need for this kind of predictability, however illusory,
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the logics and practices of corporate rationality in consumerist public
culture must be necessarily invasive and expansive (Leys, 2001:4, 81–2;
Heath and Potter, 2005; Ruskin and Schor, 2005). The goal of any market is ceaseless expansion always approaching that elusive, asymptotic
point of total enclosure, predictability and control. However, since it is
impossible to imagine or determine the meaning of music in advance,
the only immediate, practical prior constraint one might exert on the
meaning of a communicative act is to control the context in which
that act takes place (see Atkins and Mintcheva, 2006; Gillespie, 2007;
Fairchild, 2008).
Therefore, if we can accept that the context of any piece of music
exerts some significant force on its meaning, then the meaning of music
is at least in part determined by the ways in which it moves through
the world. Given that the meaning of music plays a big part in determining its value, then the control over the channels through which
these acts move is crucial to their perceived value as potentially profitable acts. Music must be channeled through conduits whose shape and
character are both formally and informally enclosed and controlled by
their producers to the greatest practical extent. Evidence of this effort
is so widespread is requires little comment (Mann, 2000; Drahos, 2002;
Fairchild, 2008). It is simply more efficient, more predictable and less
risky to try to control the context of the experience of music to have
any hope of extracting measurable monetary value from the meaning of
it. In short, the logic of corporate rationality suggests that what can’t be
profitably said probably won’t be said too often (Atkins and Mintcheva,
2006:15–28, 67–79).
Corporate rationality increasingly dominates most areas of social life,
including workplaces, hospitals, universities, the public service, the tax
code and the media (Leys, 2001; Hertz, 2003). We are increasingly constituted as consumers with choices not citizens with rights, economic
units not political participants, living in a consumer society not a civil
one. The ways in which we talk to each other, educate and care for one
another are increasingly governed by the calculating rigidity of costbenefit analyses. Corporate rationality has expanded to such an extent
that the two major power centers of most societies, the state and the
corporation, have fused. The power relations between the two are such
that corporations are able to ‘directly articulate territories and populations’ and ‘make nation-states merely instruments to record the flows
of the commodities, monies, and populations that they set in motion’
(Hardt and Negri, 2000:31). The ‘corporate state’ is defined by strong,
stable chains of command within institutions that exert significant,
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recognizable and enforceable influence on those arenas of public life
that might impinge in some way on the certainty of the power these
institutions require (see Cox and O’Sullivan, 1988; Williamson, 1989).
Over the last several decades, corporate influence has been plainly evident in the relationships between global media conglomerates and the
state. There is little question that the corporation has subdued the state’s
power to legislate, regulate and enforce those ideals alleged to be the
collective expression of a society through those forms of power it seeks
to monopolize, absorbing all manner of legislative benefaction without
ever being sated (Saul, 1997:87–97; George, 2004:68–87; Broder, 2009;
Johnson, 2009:52; Newhouse, 2009).
Despite the centrality of corporate rationality in most areas of public life, there is a vast thicket of contradictions in the communicative
rationales of consumerist public culture. Given that even the most
sophisticated forms of market knowledge can never actually describe
what goes on in the world, much less predict it, no one can really know
in advance what might be said profitably. The flawless logic of corporate
rationality always runs headlong into restive worlds of expression and
meaning. Therefore, the main contradictions that are important here are
between the kinds of ideal publics that different kinds of media institutions invent, whether as ‘markets’ or ‘communities’, and the ways in
which these formations actually exist in the world.
The tensions produced by these contradictions spring from the fact
that within all but the most rationalized contexts for public communication there exist elements of a largely contrary model of public
communication, a discursive and procedural one. This model of communication and connection is founded on the search for the truth
value, social value and aesthetic value of the discourses and expressive
practices that constitute it. It is defined simultaneously by the ways in
which discourse is created, the value it has for those producing it and
the experience of solidarity and communality that the experience and
evaluation of its content produce. These forms of communication cannot be contained in any predetermined forms or massaged to fit some
pre-imagined conclusion. They do not exist in order to meet some arbitrarily set measure of profitability, nor can they be made to conform to
some manageable level of risk determined in advance. They are necessarily constituted by more equitable power relationships and, as such,
participants can express any values they might seek to inject into them.
As noted earlier, commercial and community radio stations are both
capable of producing such forms of communication. The important
questions are how often are they are allowed to do so and for how long.
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Consumerist public culture is riven with communicative contradictions because all media institutions are dependent on the continuous
excitation of expressions of agency by consumers, or what we might call
‘demand’. We are constantly enticed through a huge range of sounds
and images to experience the central forms of our common sensual
and aesthetic experience of the world. As such, consumerist public culture is defined by two divergent necessities. Its organizing forces and
practices are designed to direct and shape popular agency in ways that
are beneficial to its constituent institutions and to do so in acceptably predictable ways. However, these institutions have to incite that
same popular agency through whatever means are available or necessary. This means that the widespread excitation of a public and popular
agency will sometimes be heavily reliant on at least the appearance,
however short-lived, of discursive and procedural forms of communication. The consequences of this incitement to action are inherently
unpredictable. They depend on us deciding to act without really knowing what we are going to do. Therefore, aggressive management of the
inherent risk and uncertainty in consumerist public culture can only be
accomplished after all this agency has been stirred up in order to exploit
consumers’ engagement and attention. Consumerist institutions must
capitalize only on that very small range of reactions deemed economically relevant. Other common reactions are usually called things like
piracy, distraction or perhaps indolence.3
Rather than valorize the agency of consumers as the source of ‘resistance’ or ‘subversion’, we have to take into account the nature of the
experience of all of those sounds and images, a specifically aesthetic
experience. The status of aesthetic experience and expression is thoroughly ambiguous. Given that the experience of the aesthetic is set,
not only within our rational lives, but also within our sensate lives, it
has been rightly regarded by some as ‘an eminently contradictory phenomenon’ (Eagleton, 1990:3). As Eagleton argues, the aesthetic retains ‘a
charge of irreducible particularity, providing us with a kind of paradigm
of what a non-alienated mode of cognition might look like’ (1990:2).
These contradictions are numerous and foundational. The aesthetic is:
a vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is
the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thought.
It signifies a creative turn to the sensuous body, as well as an inscribing of that body with a subtly oppressive law; it represents on the
one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on
the other hand a specious form of universalism.
(1990:9)
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Aesthetic experience and the constant excitation of reactions to it create an inevitable tension between the character of that experience and
the forces aligned to corral and control it. This is what allows contrary and marginal forms of expression the space they need to exist.
The dominant consumerist sphere has so much uncertainty and risk
built into it that no one can know what will work and what won’t
ahead of time. Sometimes, someone somewhere will just invent a better
mousetrap.
However, in a context where consumerism is pervasive, marginal and
contrary forms of communication and meaning making can only exist
in relation to it. Any contestation of the terms of market dominance can
only take place on the terms the market sets, and therefore that contest
is strongly shaped and influenced by consumerism’s dominant forms of
expression. While marginal and dominant expressive forms exist in an
awkward interdependence, the market’s invasive character means that
the consumerist conditions of public culture are always marked by conditions hostile to and often destructive of marginal forms of expression.
Expressive forms marked by egalitarianism, mutuality and a civil and
potentially democratic aesthetics are particularly fragile because they are
not economically viable enough to ward off the endless expansion of
consumerism. I follow these claims up in the next chapter.
The marketplace of ideas, so called, is capable of incorporating a welter of diverse communicative forms, but the existence and longevity of
all of them are haunted by a crude, fickle kind of cultural monetarism.
That is, the culture industry writ large imagines it can manage demand
through its control of supply. But the supply of communicative acts is
simply not regulated by demand. The relationship between the demand
for things like music or literature is not regulated by the amount of
them that exists in the world. Songs or stories or pictures are not used
up the way shoes or pencils are. Demand for them is extremely elastic
and unpredictable. The character of demand, especially for music, is as
capricious as it is mysterious. Therefore, the incitement of demand and
the conditions through which that demand is met must be very carefully
managed. This means that the social relationships produced through the
communicative acts which constitute consumerist public culture are not
governed by the value of their content. The truth value, social value or
aesthetic value of the communicative acts that occur within this sphere
are simply not paramount concerns. This is not to say that these acts
of communication express no such values or that no such values can
be extracted from them. It is simply to say that any such values are
peripheral, if occasionally useful, and are always subordinated to their
economic import, by definition.
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The contradictions inherent within aesthetic experience form the
center of this book. In the balance of this chapter, I will explore a
few examples of the presentation of music in public in an effort to
give this contradiction a familiar shape. The first example, payola, seeks
to avoid entirely the risks inherent in the ‘vision of human energies’
that music represents by turning its public presentation into a complex system of barter and trade. As I will show, payola, a seemingly
unnecessary form of fraud, remains common because even the most
rationalized forms of commercial radio nevertheless retain procedures
and expressive forms that allow for acknowledgement and exploitation
of the contradictions of aesthetic experience. The second two cases show
how community radio stations not only provide the potential to create communicative relationships more laden with expressive equity and
forms of accountability than most other media institutions, but also provide access to the means to produce those expressive forms within social
circumstances that allow for acknowledgement and understanding of
the contradictions and possibilities of aesthetic experience.
Payola: The anti-aesthetic
The persistence of payola is due in large part to the inability of the music
industry in particular to comprehensively define the economic value
of music. Payola, defined here simply as the exchange of cash, considerations or items of value for radio airplay, has long been a common
practice in the music industry (Dannen, 1991; Segrave, 1994). While
payola mostly takes the form of a crime, it also has another life as a
solution to the exponentially increasing complexity of the market in
music. But there is an important fact about payola, the importance of
which is often overlooked. There are actually only few places in the
world where the act of exchanging cash for airplay is illegal. Most of us
are free to engage in such exchanges as long as we do so openly, providing some manner of clarity and public explanation of the character
of the relationship between the parties involved. In most places, it is
only illegal to engage in such exchanges if you don’t acknowledge them
publicly (Pride et al., 1998; ‘Announcement of Payment for Broadcast’).
While payola might seem pretty straightforward, it is actually a revealing form of social and economic organization that can tell us, by its very
tenacity, a good deal about the underlying values of the commercial
radio and music industries. Continual scandals and exposures give us
the opportunity to see how particular kinds of social relationships persist
within these industries despite the manifest upheaval going on around
them. The continued use of various forms of economic exchange, both
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publicly and surreptitiously, to gain airplay on commercial music radio
is part of a larger effort by commercial music radio and record labels to
resolve several sets of contradictory relationships that define the market
in music.
First, as widely acknowledged through numerous sources, the music
industry fails far more than it succeeds in selling music (Salganik et al.,
2006; see also Kirk, 2004; Amoaku, 2005). This is due to the defining
ambiguity surrounding both the economic value of the experience of
music and the confounding nature of that experience itself. As Seabrook
notes, ‘[h]it-making is an imprecise method of doing business’ as no one
seems to be able to predict what the big sellers will be (Seabrook, 2003).
Second, the sheer amount of promotional work that goes into making a hit is often extraordinarily expensive (Seabrook, 2003; Fairchild,
2008:107, 117–18; see also Garofalo, 1999:342–4). Third, the underlying
contradiction between the demonstrable need for market stability and
reliability in the absence of any proven economically predictive value
to music is compounded by the economic logic of corporate rationality
by which the music and entertainment industries have governed their
global expansion over the last two decades. This logic, with its concomitant levels of debt and pressure to maximize profits, has demanded a
kind of operational certainty that is very hard to sustain. Given that
predicting the value of music has proven such a fiendish equation, the
radio broadcasting and music industries have instead tried to constrain
the experience of music. They have tried to increase profits by decreasing
costs through economies of scale and intrafirm synergies made possible through vertical integration that define the strategic imperatives
of the music and entertainment industries (Herman and McChesney,
1997:52–61; Bishop, 2005; Fairchild, 2008:98). This economic context
has exacerbated the immediate effects of deregulation, leading to the
kinds of pressures that payola might seem suited to relieve. Payola is a
form of aesthetic ‘pre-selection’ preferable to the risky and taxing effort
of predicting which of the thousands of new songs released each year
might be a hit. The combined risks of high promotional costs, a probable lack of success and the complex risks of a globalized market demand
that the economic value of music must be demonstrable in advance
in order to construct a market with some hope of stability, expansion
and longevity. Payola is one way of making music more economically
predictable by offering guaranteed airplay.
Fourth, the primary social relationship for commercial radio is
between radio stations’ ownership conglomerates, investors and advertisers, and the secondary one is between individual stations and their
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listeners. Payola offers an easy route to the resolution of conflicts
between the two. The primary goal of those who run commercial music
radio stations is to sell the largest and most lucrative blocks of listeners to advertisers, thereby demonstrating their worth as investment
vehicles. Yet they must do so by managing the experience of music,
the bodily, sensuous, subjective and heavily contextual experience of
music, to those listeners. At the same time, commercial radio stations
must rely on the administered relationships of consumerism, such as
focus groups, demographic and geo-demographic research, to clarify
the value that their product, listeners’ time and attention, has for their
clients, advertisers. In short, the experience of commercial radio must be
both a carefully engineered form of economic experience and a pleasurable form of aesthetic and social experience to have any demonstrable
economic value.
While payola is an obvious way of taking at least some of the guesswork out of the process of making a hit, it is an odd phenomenon simply
because it seems so unnecessary. It is a form of ‘stealth marketing’ where
the very possibility of stealth seems at best unlikely (Goodman, 2006).
Given that everything one hears on a commercial radio station is in
some sense a commercial for something else, including and especially
the music, it seems that hiding the source of the programming staple
would be futile. Why court some notional penalty such as license revocation or criminal prosecution simply for that? The answer has to do
with the peculiarity of music as a form of commercial exchange. As Mol
and Wijnberg (2007) note, the more difficult it is to nail down the value
of a product, the greater the power that rests in the hands of those who
act as intermediaries for that product. In such a market, the knowledge
and expertise of intermediaries will occupy a central role in the chain
of relationships through which value is ascribed to the products they
help distribute. It is not surprising then, that using the broadcasting of
music as a currency for brokering influence over the value and meaning
of that music would attract exactly these kinds of competition as well as
attempts to gain competitive advantage (pp. 701–2). Despite the manifest commonality of interest in making songs into hits held by both
the commercial music radio industry and record labels, the real market
competition between them takes the form of the influence each is able
to wield through their respective practices of mediation. Payola is a way
of managing this competition toward mutual advantage by making the
market in music more stable and predictable. Payola is made effective
by excluding the public from decision-making power and allowing the
sponsors and beneficiaries of payola to accrue structural power over their
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markets. The actual character of payola is masked to maintain the pretence to public service while hiding the conditions and purpose of the
accumulation of power by stealth.
Recent examples of payola from the USA show how the exchange of
money, goods, influence or consideration, legally or otherwise, is used
to make the market in music more manageable. The recent high-profile
payola investigations that dissipated with the separate settlements
between Sony BMG, the Warner Music Group and the State of New York
in 2005 had all of the elements of a classic payola scandal. There were
aggrieved victims seeking redress, righteous politicians pursuing justice,
contrite executives professing reform and anonymous industry sources
cynically suggesting nothing would really change (Garrity, 2005a:5–6,
2005b:5–6; Mokhiber, 2005:70; Stark, 2005:18). The scandal played out
with a remarkable correspondence to earlier scandals, right down to the
tone and character of the claims made by politicians as to the evils
of corruption and immorality in the entertainment industry and those
by industry insiders that the prosecutions and investigations would do
more harm than good (see Coase, 1979:303–6; Heine, 2006). Commentators weighed in with the standard line that payola is nothing more
than a rational and efficient means of allocating the valued resource of
broadcast time. Sources within this rather limited spectrum of debate
argued that it is the public that is the ultimate arbiter of the success
or failure in the music industry, as ‘every radio comes equipped with
an on/off switch’, a rhetorical gem with a long, disingenuous history
(Gross, 2005; see Rennhoff, 2010; see also Coase, 1979:309–12). The
continuity between contemporary and past scandals included ambiguous outcomes to the tussle between various state and federal authorities
and the music and radio broadcasting industries. Unequivocal claims
of tightened playlists and little relief for those harmed by corrupt practices rang through the industry press after the settlements concluded
(Butler, 2005; Martens, 2005; Rose, 2006; Serpick, 2006; Heine and
Tucker, 2007). As with many such scandals from the past, these too concluded with a weary acknowledgement that little had changed (Martens,
2007a, 2007b; Harding, 2008; Jouvenal, 2008; Thomson, 2009).
The seeming lack of successful prosecutions for misconduct and anticompetitive behavior was due in some significant measure to the fact
that these contests had little to do with the actual constitution of
playlists or the goal of achieving some agreed upon measure of musical diversity on the airwaves that might be thought to serve the public
good. Throughout the entire affair, few if any concrete proposals were
put forward for the measurement of a specifically musical diversity.
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Debate centered on the source of the primary materials of commercial
music radio, recordings. Most writing about the potentially increasing
or decreasing diversity on commercial music radio was forced to abandon any discussion of the aural characteristics of music in its entirety.
Perhaps more importantly, few if any concrete measures regarding what
constituted serving the public’s demonstrated interests in the character
and equity of the larger market in music were offered. These contests
were not about music but about who would wield the mediating power
over the market in music, and there are many perfectly legal means
through which this power and influence can be and have been exercised
with as much ‘efficiency’ as illegal forms of payola.
Legal forms of payola have been commonly used in radio broadcasting for decades. Of particular relevance are forms variously referred to
as ‘Play-for pay’, ‘Spin Buys’, ‘Paid Airplay’ or simply ‘Legal Payola’
(Gloede, 1993; Boehlert, 1996; BPI Communications, 1997; Thigpen,
1998; Eliscu, 2003; Garrity, 2004). The ways in which this practice
evolved from the early 1990s to the early 2000s provides an illuminating look at the development of the full-blown payola scandal which
followed. In the early ’90s, paid airplay was presented by some as
having an undeniable logic. The radio industry was experiencing a significant downturn, and many were seeking new forms of revenue to
compensate. The first wave of industry consolidation had just begun,
and many stations had begun to accrue the kinds of debt that would
define the industry by the late ’90s (Gloede, 1993; Fairchild, 2001:71).
Some radio stations allowed record labels to buy programming time
with the stations making regular announcements about the sponsorship of specific chunks of airplay by record labels (Taylor, 1998:82).
Quite often, radio stations would buy advertising time during ‘fringe
listening times at small- to medium-sized radio chains and using the
time for repeated play of singles in their entirety—sometimes hundreds
of times in a given week’ (Garrity 2004:5, 92). As one industry journalist noted, these arrangements ‘raise concerns about manipulation of
the hitmaking process as measured by various singles charts’ (Garrity,
2004:5, 92).
Importantly, these practices were a direct result of the deregulation of
the American media, especially the removal of all limits on the amount
of advertising. They were made economically preferable by deregulation,
vertical integration and ownership consolidation. As I note in the
next chapter, media deregulation has had remarkably similar effects on
radio in countries such as the USA, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and
Australia. By the turn of the century, most radio stations in the USA were
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part of much larger music industry conglomerates which were laden
with enormous amounts of debt (Saxe, 2000; Kot, 2001). In response,
the largest companies in the radio broadcasting industry cut staff and
began to use ‘virtual live’ radio, ‘voice tracking’ or, more simply, program syndication, with a much greater intensity. As a result, most radio
stations often didn’t actually have much in the way of programming
staff to make decisions about what went on the air; these decisions were
taken elsewhere (Silberman, 1999, 2000; Farrish, 2002; Eliscu, 2003;
Bachman and Heine, 2005; Sterne and Yorke, 2009). As a result, one
of the more salient problems for the recording industry was that they
had decreasing influence over their ‘chain of value’ because the ‘control
of that vital link’, radio airplay, ‘has been ceded to a relative handful of
influential program directors’ (Phillips, 1996). As record companies were
to discover, radio stations were treating their beloved products merely
as ‘heavily researched programming tools to craft a winning format’
(Phillips, 1996). Record labels found themselves funneling an estimated
$100 million a year to radio stations for promotions without getting the
market control they thought they were buying (Kot, 2001). In 2002, the
record industry turned on the radio industry as a ‘coalition representing
artists’ unions, major labels, and indie labels’ asked the US government
‘to take a hard look at radio consolidation, hinting that some practices
by large group owners smack of payola’ (Albiniak, 2002; Holland, 2002).
This almost comically understated request was followed by one of the
most aggressive, far-reaching and lengthy investigations into the music
industry since the 1950s and ’60s.
The combined results of both forms of payola on the music market in
the USA, underwritten by deregulation, were marked by a form of ‘consolidated power over musicians’ access to the airwaves’ that ‘has not
existed since the earliest days of radio’ (DiCola and Thomson, 2002:62).
Moreover, as deregulation in the USA worked out in practice over the
decade following implementation, the trends apparent in the first few
years following the new laws greatly intensified. As a series of studies
from the Future of Music Coalition have consistently found, first in 2002
and then in 2006 and again in 2009, there were fewer, larger and richer
companies dominating the US market. These companies had gained an
increasing share of an audience that was getting slightly smaller overall,
and these same companies were playing a smaller number of songs that
overlapped more and more across increasingly constrained and indistinct formats (DiCola and Thomson, 2002; DiCola, 2006). The 2009
survey applied quantitative measures specifically to the concentration of
songs on US radio, tracking their sources and recording their prevalence.
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the picture that emerges from these data is one of status quo: radio
that is simultaneously risk-averse and controlling of its greatest asset–
access to the airwaves–a circumstance that is greatly compounded by
the consolidating effect of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The
major labels continue to have the most success in getting access, in
large part because of the cumulative effect of cozy relationships and
incentives paid over the years, as well as the ‘twin bottlenecks’ that
the oligopolistic radio and music industries represent.
(Thomson, 2009:42)
Despite the claims of some researchers, the ‘programming repertoires’
and ‘philosophies’ as well as the ‘true diversity of practices employed
by programmers’ have not provided any challenge to the effects of
corporate rationalization in commercial music radio (Ahlkvist, 2001;
Ahlkvist and Faulkner, 2002:211). The forlorn hope that such practices
might mean that ‘music programming standardization will likely be
confined to larger markets’ (Ahlkvist and Fisher, 2002:301) has been
flatly contradicted by the evidence. As DiCola and Thomson demonstrate, ‘[v]irtually every geographic market is dominated by four firms
controlling 70 percent market share or greater.’ Further, in ‘smaller markets, consolidation is more extensive’. The largest four firms in almost
all small markets control 90 per cent market share or more (DiCola
and Thomson, 2002:31–5; see also Thomson, 2009).4 The power of
the earnestly felt, fiercely honest tastes of the music programmer who
is driven by a passion for music, who ‘listens with their heart’ and
acts as a ‘populist’ by using ‘the listener’s ear’ (Ahlkvist and Faulkner,
2002:197, 202–3) has not been enough to challenge, much less subvert,
the systems in which they work.
The machinations of all forms of payola are designed not to tame
the experience of music but to tame the market in music specifically by
excluding most of the important characteristics of music from the equation. Payola is, in many respects, a characteristic expression of a market
that has experienced a great deal of change and instability. It tells us
that, for those who manage it, the economic value of music is unacceptably ambiguous. As Goodman succinctly notes, music competes on
quality, not on price (Goodman, 2006:101). Given the fact that there
are literally tens of thousands of new releases every year, and given
the seemingly unique promotional costs and risks the music industry
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It produced results consistent with the logic of deregulation. Between
2005 and 2008,
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faces, the competition to be heard is hardly one free of the distortions
of anti-competitive market power. It is precisely these risks that make the
market in music potentially unmanageable. Therefore, the dominant
institutions in the music and radio broadcasting industries have made
substantial efforts at making the market in music more predictable,
stable and manageable because of the decidedly ambiguous economic
value of music. These attempts to manage the ambiguity of the aesthetic
stand in sharp contrast to those examples of radio that wholly embrace,
if not celebrate, such ambiguity and all of the communicative potential
it holds.
Subjects of perception opening to communicative potential
In order to look at the communicative potential in the social relationships enacted through the aesthetic generally and the public presentation of music specifically, I’d like to present a few stories from which
I want to draw out some values that I will later claim are demonstrative of a civil, or potentially even a democratic, aesthetics. These values
were made manifest to me through the specificity of the relationships
the people I’ve interviewed and observed were trying to create by playing music on radio. These communicative relationships are central to
the experience these people have of their imaginatively constructed
communities, both materially and notionally. Just as importantly, the
specificity of their experiences grows directly from the civil and occasionally the democratic character of these aesthetic relationships. I’d
like to focus primarily on the character and quality of these relationships and their connection to broader ideas of the potential for creating
a form of communicative equity not available elsewhere.
Toward this end, there are two stories that follow here. The first
describes a long-term community radio presenter whose musical practices have gradually evolved into a form of public expression closely
approaching the ideals of a civil and potentially democratic aesthetics
I have already set out. The second describes a presenter who decided
to take on an expressive task one might think is largely obsolete: a
show devoted to the careful, considered presentation of one album in
its entirety. Both presenters have, in their own way, devoted themselves to something larger: an ideal way of experiencing music offered
to strangers on an ongoing basis.
In November 2007, I went to interview a music presenter at 2XX,
one of the community radio stations at which I have conducted
research. 2XX is one of the oldest community radio stations in Australia.
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The creation of 2XX, as well as several other community radio stations
in each Australian state’s capital city, was part of an explicit attempt
to open up the broadcast spectrum to a wider range of voices. While
I will explain this process in more detail in the next two chapters, it is
important to understand this key aspect of the original mission of 2XX
in order to understand the motivations of this presenter. He had been
presenting at 2XX almost from the organization’s creation. He had mentioned to me several times the significance of several radio programs that
inspired and influenced him from around that time. The first was ‘Room
to Move’, which was started in 1971 as part of the state-run broadcaster’s
efforts to expand their musical offerings to include the freer programming forms then found on other broadcasters in the USA and the UK.
The show focused on playing album tracks or entire album sides, making a strong attempt to play music that had little chance of being played
elsewhere. This particular 2XX presenter used to record each edition of
‘Room to Move’ on reel-to-reel tape and listen to each one repeatedly,
not only for the music but also to study the ways in which the music
was presented. Also, he noted that a Friday night music program on
radio station 2CA in Canberra had strongly influenced him as well. The
program often included a much broader range of music than most commercial radio stations of the time, notably including a good deal of jazz,
which remains important to this programmer’s shows.
The programs he was listening to in the early 1970s had a long-term
influence that he says stayed with him. Holding these shows up as a
kind of personal ideal continually compelled him to hone his skills at
music presenting in such a way as to maintain some sense of the original purpose of the radio station, while simultaneously trying to remain
relevant to the world around him. As a result, his more recent shows still
possessed the distinct resonance of freeform radio. When he started presenting music at 2XX, he says he felt that he had ‘stumbled into a form
of self-expression that was appropriate to me’. The opportunity to play
music on the radio came at the exact moment in his life when his interest in music was starting to flourish. Radio presenting became at first a
hobby, then an informal vocation that allowed him to take his extensive listening habits and fit them into a more formal context defined by
a kind of playing around within an existing structure, balancing careful
planning and open ended improvisation. His programming goal seemed
to be to place a broad range of music in close enough proximity yet
in a complicated enough mix to challenge his listeners’ preconceptions
of the interrelationships of that music without losing their attention.
Yet he also strove to outflank himself, so to speak, in that he tried not
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to have playlists or to plan his programs with anything more deliberate than a vague kind of precision. As I will suggest below, this is what
brings his programs closer to the civil and potentially democratic ideals
I am putting forward in this book.
On the day of the interview, I had arranged to arrive toward the end
of his two-hour show so I could record the first part of it and watch the
rest as he presented it. Listening to a show and watching it get done
are distinctly different experiences, a fact made abundantly clear in the
time it took me to make the short trip to the studio. When I left to meet
up with him, he had been playing a Fairport Convention tune. When
I arrived, he was playing Chaka Khan. I’m still not sure how he got from
the standard bearers for English folk rock to an R&B diva, nor how he
made it work, but I know that he did, at least on his own terms. However, I also know that, at least in his own estimation, it almost didn’t.
I could tell something was wrong when I arrived at the studio. While this
particular presenter had usually been taciturn to the point of seeming
disinterest, when I arrived there was a minor spout of chaos churning
away inside the booth, inaudible from behind the studio glass. After
some minutes standing outside looking into the studio, I was waved
inside. He didn’t even look up when I entered. He simply kept up his
semi-frantic movements while standing behind the mixing desk. He said
distractedly, ‘I think I’ve boxed myself into a corner here.’ Had I not met
him before, I probably would not have known what he meant by this
somewhat cryptic, unelaborated comment. He wasn’t referring to some
mundane complication with the technology or the fact that he was in
hurry to get somewhere else. He was instead referring to the inchoate,
improvisational aesthetic acts he used to organize his program. He was
telling me that the aesthetic logic which he painstakingly crafted and
applied to his show wasn’t quite turning out the way he planned. After
Chaka Khan, he played an unfamiliar Ben E. King tune, a Chiffons’
B-side called ‘Teach Me How’, before concluding his show with ‘Love’
by John Coltrane. As he took the headphones off after setting the next
pre-recorded program in train, he said a bit ruefully, ‘I was just getting
warmed up there.’
Over the course of several visits, he described to me his working practices. There are three key overlapping things I want to highlight here.
First are the broad sets of aesthetic gestures he makes in organizing his
shows. These gestures may or may not be immediately clear, but they
place a definitive stamp on the sound and feel of his shows. Second is
his engagement with the actual sounds and visceral experience of the
music he presents. Again, his logic in connecting one tune to another
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might not be immediately obvious, but it is a central force in shaping
his shows. Third is the specificity of the aesthetic logic he employs to
shape each program he presents.
This particular programmer was one of the most experienced and
meticulously prepared presenters I have ever met. For nearly every CD
he played on air, he created for himself an explanatory guide for each
track and kept these notes on precisely sized sheets of paper in their
respective CD cases. In his on-air descriptions of the music he played, he
usually noted the specific line-up of the ensemble which performed the
piece and the year it was produced. If relevant, he mentioned a song’s
highest chart position and a quick list of other hits by the same musicians for the sake of comparison. Inside each CD case he had with him
in the studio, he had pieces of paper on which he had painstakingly
inscribed the vital details of every song. Sometimes these notes were
voluminous enough to form an alternative set of liner notes competing
for space with the existing ones. It wasn’t just the obvious facts he noted.
On several CDs he had written out what he called ‘cheat sheets’ for himself. By this I mean he had mapped out the contours of several longer
pieces of music by artists such as Holger Czukay, David Sylvian, Caravan
or Eric Dolphy. He did this because he felt it was unwise or even indulgent to play such long form pieces in their entirety. Instead, he would
play substantial portions of them while provided his back-announcing
over the top. He did this because he felt the only way he could ‘get
away with playing this stuff’ was by presenting these longer form or
more experimental works underneath the community announcements
section of his show. He spent about 15 minutes each hour reading out
the details of upcoming events in various venues such as pubs, libraries,
art galleries or bookshops around Canberra. He would time his reading
to coincide with what he told me he felt were the less interesting parts
of a composition, allowing the more appealing moments to intercede
between the announcements. ‘It’s not ideal,’ he explained to me, ‘but
it’s better than not playing them at all.’
On a day I spent with him in the studio, he used Led Zeppelin’s
‘Rain Song’ to move from the fade out of Jimmy Page’s guitar into the
odd drone of a Czukay and Sylvian soundscape from their 1988 collaboration Plight and Premonition. The two sections had nearly identical
timbres – slightly metallic, just hinting at an acoustic texture. The presenter waited briefly and then did his back-announcing, paused again
and went into the community announcements. He was exacting in
shaping the sound of the show. His voice modulations and inflections,
necessary to the conjoining of disparate and related materials, were
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precise and precious. The community announcements came from the
Ghana Association, the Ark Theatre at The National Film and Sound
Archive and a photography exhibition called ‘Women and War’. When
he had finished, he played a song by the Outcasts called ‘I’m Stranded
in Pittsburgh and it’s Raining’, which led him directly led into a song
by Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet, an organ and acoustic guitar driven piece called ‘Mendocino’ which provided a stylistic echo to
the Outcasts’ song. Then he played ‘Rosalyn’ by David Bowie, which
also had a bit of slide guitar and a similarly quick shuffle beat. He threw
in an abrupt change to Hendrix’s ‘Third Stone from the Sun’ from Are
You Experienced? He was about to put on an H.P. Lovecraft tune and had
a Golden Palominos song ready to go after that, but decided against
each. Instead, his final flourish for the afternoon was a John Zorn version of an Ennio Morricone piece taken from A Fistful of Dynamite called
‘Duck You Sucker.’ Then he played a track by Material, an ensemble
founded by Fred Frith and Bill Frisell. He was moving constantly, choosing, rechoosing, managing transitions, writing in the log, writing in his
own log which he keeps, making additions to his cheat sheets, marking good levels for future use, adjusting them and always reworking his
original plans.
The preparations for his programs extended into his home, influencing the structure, content and placement of his entire music collection.
Each time I saw him, he had brought a small, battered, cardboard box
with him into the studio. It held about 25 CDs. These CDs would form
the basis for his show, although he often had a few special discs tucked
away in his backpack. If he played a track on a particular CD, that one
would be moved to one end of the box so he would know not to bring
it again the following week. If he brought a CD out but didn’t play anything from it, he would try to put back in the box roughly where it had
been before; he called these ‘near misses’. When he got home, the CDs
he played would be taken out of the starting line-up and placed on the
highest shelf of his CD rack, eventually making their way back down to
the bottom shelves, from which he usually chose titles to fill any open
slots in the on-air box. The near misses would remain in the on-air box
for another potential airing. He said that usually after a month or so, if
he hadn’t played anything off a near-miss CD, it would go back in the
rack at home, although they would not necessarily be relegated to the
top shelf.
He explained that in the 30 years he had been presenting music on
community radio, he had developed a distinct set of practices for each
type of program he has presented. He found that these practices worked
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for each type of show, and he seemed to think he had little choice but
to use them. When I asked him about how he linked all these songs
together, he did not seem particularly comfortable describing the aesthetic logics he was using. Instead, he relied primarily on visual or
pictorial references, using adjectives such as dark or light, referring to
the sparseness and density of the sound, the contrasts between each
piece and the overall contour of all of them collectively. Occasionally,
he mentioned some tangential instrumental or textural connection. He
was not using these terms in a musically analytic way. He was using
them as visceral terms, descriptive of the experience of sound, not the
formal, structural or technical qualities of music. It is his overarching
presenting philosophy, or more exactly his aesthetic ideology, that links
and contextualizes the music he plays specifically through this implied
sense of material connection.
He said his main goal was to try to facilitate the imaginative experiences of his listeners. To do so, he used the specific practices I’ve
described here as part of a larger practical regime of spontaneity and
change. He tried to make sure that he didn’t rely on habits or templates
by constantly subjecting himself to fairly detailed, constantly evolving,
organizational exercises to keep things fresh. He summed it up fairly
simply when he said, ‘How do people hear new things if all you ever
play are things everybody already knows?’ To keep making it ‘new’, he
tried to make his show the subject of the processes of transformation he
was trying to instill, not just in his listeners but also in himself. He spoke
as if the show had a force of its own and he was just trying to keep up
with it. Making the actual mixing decisions in the moment made him
feel he was doing things he wouldn’t have done had he simply planned
everything out ahead of time.
One obvious fact that struck me when watching this presenter work
was that he, like most presenters, can’t actually listen to his own
show. He was usually preparing the next several tracks, organizing
community announcements, preparing for interviews, writing out backannouncements or simply resting for a moment. For this presenter, his
show is only tangentially perceived, and its actual experience and consequences are largely imagined. It is important to acknowledge that the
immediate visceral pleasure of playing music on radio is only one of
many possible motivations for the presenters I’ve talked to and quite
often is not even an immediate concern for some of them. Given
the extensive preparations this particular presenter goes through each
week, I think it is clear that his immediate and primary concern is
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the outwardly directed communicative gesture, not just the subjective
pleasure of listening or presenting.
The second presenter approached his editions of The Album Show on
FBi (Free Broadcasting Incorporated), the ‘youth-oriented’ radio station
in Sydney, with a distinct set of assumptions, but also an underlying
commonality of purpose with the presenter described above. The idea
of playing an entire album all the way through on radio has a complex heritage. As noted, it was an act that is commonly associated with
the opening of the FM band and the growth and development of both
‘freeform’ commercial radio and underground community radio in the
1970s and ’80s. To some extent, the act was often a rhetorical marker of
a certain kind of social and economic freedom and also often an excellent way to fill the often gaping holes of air time on many nascent
FM stations (Post, 1974; Fisher, 2007:129–57). The presenter I spoke
to approached his program with a distinctly contemporary attitude.
Having grown up well before the advent of the internet and having
witnessed what he regarded as a gradual diminution of the album as a
valued and coherent art object, he wanted to infuse the form itself with
a relevance he felt it was losing. Two things suggested his underlying
motivations. First, he was working at FBi, a community radio station at
which a vague but explicit allegiance to ‘youth’ programming predominated. Second, he had a fairly long and full career as a commercial radio
DJ behind him, which made him almost unique in a station dominated
by people under the age of 25. He was directing his efforts at examining
this ‘important cultural form’ toward those frequently accused by others of ruining music with their low-quality mp3s, tiny iPod headphones,
ubiquitous mobile phones and chronically short attention spans (Ross,
2005:94; Easdown, 2009). But this presenter didn’t see things so simply
and clearly. He liked the openness and vibrancy of FBi and appreciated
the fact that it was a very well-run and organized place, imposing what
he saw as the exact right amount of discipline on the young staff and
volunteers.
Each edition of his program was notably free of condescending
rhetoric. Indeed, the show was almost completely free of any explicit
judgment of any kind. He presented each album through a series what
he called ‘issues’ important to the album’s identity and meaning. He
would ask, for example, who was the producer? What was their role on
the album? How was the album made? What kind of equipment was
used? Where does the album fall in the overall trajectory of those who
made it? Was it part of a series? Who released it? When I asked him how
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he decided which album to present for those editions of the show he
hosted, he paused and gradually explained, in fits and starts, his process.
He puts several albums into iTunes during those weeks he is responsible for presenting the show. Then he lets the music ‘rattle around for
a while’ until he makes a decision as to which album he will present.
This decision is not made only for immediate commercial or topical relevance. He tries to come ‘a little bit from left field’ from time to time
and present an album that would not seem to be the most immediate fit
for this particular radio station.
He doesn’t just play things he likes or even things he thinks are important. Instead, he wants to express the value of the specific album he
has chosen, but also the value of the album form more generally by
demonstrating how ‘The Album’ itself is a kind of transcendent expressive form. He thinks he can use the familiar form of the album to link
people whose tastes might be very different from his and for whom the
experiential basis of the ways in which they form their own regimes of
judgment might appear to have little in common. In some respects, he
was trying to confront people with tacit assumptions they might have
about the ways in which they listen to music and subtly suggest that
they think and listen again to something that may already seem familiar. He was implicitly trying to propose a different way of thinking about
their assumptions and to model a different way of listening. He was also
trying to defend the album’s relevance, suggesting that a good or even
great album will have a value that is greater than the sum of its parts.
An important aspect of this presenter’s musical practices is the fact
that he assumed that the music he presented could act as a resource
which we hold in common. He treats his albums as the same kinds of
threads of communicative connection as did the first presenter. This
is true both of the album form generically and of his specific choice
for each edition of his weekly show. This allows his audience, despite
the lack of immediate opportunity for reciprocity, to inhabit the same
social space as he does, a space not limited to the hour they might
spend in aural proximity but a space that might potentially extend as far
as their music collections. This might sound like garden variety music
presenting, except for the fact that he is engaging in a civil act of communication, not a commercial one. He is not trying to sell anything. He
is trying to say something. This fact alone grants his listeners at least
some measure of subjective autonomy in that there is nothing really
expected of them beyond their choice to continue listening. This creates a kind of virtuous circle in which the repository for the potential
truth value, social value or aesthetic value of these communicative acts
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resides not in presenter or audience, but in the space created between
them. The inherent distance created by this form of mediated communication is filled in, so to speak, with a kind of implied mutual consensus
that defies arbitrary social power such as that exerted by the strategic
action of the market. This presenter’s deliberative reliance on the presentation of music with only the implicit act of choice to indicate his
own relationship to that music leaves a great deal of room for listeners to roam around in what we can call that music’s ‘surplus meaning’
(Garvey, 2000:378). It is that ‘extra’ space in which the possibility for a
civil or democratic aesthetics exists.
A civil and potentially democratic aesthetics
I am calling these presenters’ practices ‘civil’ or possibly even ‘democratic’ because they are trying to express larger values through other
people’s music. Their programs are communicative acts directed outwardly. They are founded on a logic that may not always be clearly
expressed or even obvious, but is certainly always present. Further, these
presenters’ practices are defined by and directed toward equitable or
even egalitarian forms of public expression made through an organization defined by a mutuality of experience and circumstance, a defining
aspect of these kinds of radio stations (see Fairchild, 2005). As such,
understanding their musical practices can tell us two things of crucial
importance to the kinds of social relationships I am trying to describe.
First, each of these presenters is by definition centrally involved in the
production of open, public aesthetic relationships that have potentially
unforeseeable consequences. They are built not on the pursuit of a clear,
pre-established goal, but are instead founded on the logic and process of
their own discursive forms. The only goal either person has is to make
a certain type of sense. Second, the communicative relationships each
presenter is trying to foster contain the conditions for the momentary
subjective autonomy of those engaged in them. If these organizations
have the potential to reshape our relations of perception in this way,
then surely they can help refashion our perceptions themselves. The
important question to ask here is what kinds of civil and potentially
democratic aesthetics might allow for this refashioning so as to avoid the
kinds of social relationships required to keep consumerist public culture
running.
A community radio station would seem to be a fairly straightforward
enactment of a classically Habermasian model of communicative action
(Habermas, 1996:3–5, 14–24). The potential for civil or democratic social
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relations can be realized by creating a social space in which people
are freely allowed to reach various forms of recognition or consensus
through a rational and critical discourse defined by the transparency of
the conditions of communication (Habermas, 1989:27–30; 35–7). Equitable forms of intersubjective communication rest at the center of a
reasonably open and democratic organization, and the processes by
which discourse works are reasonably formal. As such, they have real
power within the organization. Importantly, at the heart of Habermas’
work on communicative action are several unavoidable elements of
discursive engagement: judgment, taste and mutual influence. These
define Habermas’ ideal forms of intersubjective communication, and
this includes aesthetic communication. As Eagleton argues, Habermas
is ‘defending the lived against the logical’ when he shows us that aesthetic experience is ‘one crucial place where the jeopardized resources of
moral and affective life may be crystallized’ (Eagleton, 1990:402). While
it seems obvious that musical discourses can often be vague, imprecise
and tend toward the esoteric, these too are built on judgment, taste and
the inevitability of social and communicative interaction and engagement. Music is not much of an experiential force without these intrinsic
elements of its social construction and material constitution.
The presenters described above are trying to say something, but they
are ‘saying’ it through other people’s music. Neither simply comes out
and actually says the words ‘Listen to how this Can song might imply a
certain formal relation with this Coltrane piece that might have escaped
your notice before’ or ‘Listen to how the fourth and fifth songs on this
Radiohead album imply a sense of aesthetic cohesion to this work as
a whole.’ Neither presenter offered much, if any, explicit critique or
assessment of the music they played. Nor did they direct their audiences
to think or feel something the presenter wanted them to think or feel.
Instead, they are demonstrating that there is something larger that connects us to one another and to this music. They aren’t simply presenting
a song or an aural gesture, but are creating a context in which a specific
form of understanding can occur.
To return to Eagleton, in the many forms of social engagement that
make our experience of the aesthetic meaningful, such as a community radio show, ‘a kind of shadowy public sphere may be reestablished’
that might shade our lived experience of the broader public culture
(Eagleton, 1990:402). ‘We speak to be understood,’ Eagleton observes,
and from this ‘certain validity claims are implicitly raised and reciprocally recognized; claims to truth, intelligibility, sincerity and performative appropriateness’ (404). If we can ‘extrapolate from our actual
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acts of communication and stylize their enabling conditions’, Eagleton
continues, ‘we can recover the political values of autonomy, mutuality,
equality, freedom and responsibility from their most routinized structures’ (404). Any act of social engagement has the potential to bring
with it, ‘a tacit commitment to reason, truth and value, establishing a
reciprocity [ . . . ] within which it is open to us to glimpse the possibility
of full human mutuality, and so the dim lineaments of an alternative
form of society’ (405). As I have already noted more than once, this
can include forms of communication that happen through commercial radio. The difference is that commercial radio is not trying to say
something, it is trying to sell something.
It should be clear, then, that we can build on Habermas’ ideals of
communicative action by drawing on a definition of aesthetic experience that takes into account its unusual character as a communicative
act. Specifically, we need to understand that those practicing a civil
social aesthetics are intent on establishing relationships between those
whom Thomas Docherty refers to as sovereign subjects of perception
(Docherty, 2006:1, 156). Here, social aesthetics produces the connecting
communicative strands linking perceiver and producer within which are
inherent opportunities for subjective change. The social aesthetics practiced by the presenters described above are primarily directed toward
the establishment and maintenance of various types of communicative
relationships constituted through moments of perceptual openness.
These lead inexorably to what Docherty argues is an inherent condition within the aesthetic, ‘unforeseeability’ (Docherty, 2006:x). It is in
the moment we experience the aesthetic that we can see most clearly
the potential for freedom the aesthetic contains (Docherty, 2006:x).
Music in particular seems unusually seeded with such moments of
potential in which we can imagine the impossible or experience the
unforeseen. Docherty suggests that it is the very mutability of the
freedom inherent in the aesthetic that produces the forms of subjective sovereignty he seeks (Docherty, 2006:xviii). The subject can only
become autonomous, can only imagine themselves to be sovereign,
by rending texts open and both accepting and participating in the
production of their inherently varied meanings by explicitly understanding what Bakhtin suggested were ‘the dialogic strands against
which every utterance brushes’ (quoted in Garvey, 2000:378). By situating oneself between the discourses which constantly course all around
us, we can then struggle for autonomy by acting as skilled manipulators of what Bakhtin called heteroglossia, or the multiple languages of
everyday life, subjecting these forms of public expressivity to critique
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and potential transformation (see Clark and Holquist, 1984; Hirschkop,
1999).
Perceptual relations that I view as civil and democratic are distinct in
that the conditions under which they occur must be conducive to the
specific kinds of discursive openness embodied by the ways in which
the presenters described above address their unseen audience. These
conditions must be formal to a significant extent if they are to be subject to consequential forms of critique and accountability. Community
radio stations provide a context for ongoing, formal social relations that
can draw out into the public realm what can often be the intensely
private aesthetic relations that music often fosters. They do so by creating a space in which the discourses of music can tend toward ends
that those involved cannot necessarily imagine or foresee while still
remaining recognizable forms of social discourse. The conditions governing the enactment of communicative relationships inevitably shape
the form, content and meaning of those communications themselves.
We can see this in the musical practices of the presenters I’ve described
above. When we use a discourse theory of deliberative democracy to
describe the communicative relationships each is seeking to create, we
can see how they need methods of creating what Habermas called
‘public-formed opinion’ that are potentially egalitarian and discursively
open (Habermas, 1989). But when I say opinion, I also mean subjectivity, and when I say subjectivity, I also mean experience. When we
analyze the subjective experience of music presenting, we have to understand it in relation to the specific practices and ‘situated knowledge[s]’
which facilitate, shape or initiate that experience (Docherty, 2006:xvi).
The specific contexts in which musical meaning is made and enacted by
music presenters and their audiences inevitably shape their presumptions and expectations. These in turn exert a defining influence on the
sounds that are produced, the order and context in which they are heard
and the strands of logic and meaning sought to connect them.
When the first presenter I described above stands in front of his CD
collection filling his well-traveled on-air box, he is in part submitting to
the imagined will of the very people he is trying to entice and inspire.
His choices are part of a larger discourse, the rules of which are embedded in the regulations shaping his use of the radio station and which
evolve through debates or conversations he has with other presenters
and community members. His musical practices are deliberately set out
in public for the validation and ratification of peers, compatriots and
strangers alike. When he enters the studio and begins his various musical improvisations, he is submitting to a logic he likes to believe is
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bigger than he is – one that, as he said, occasionally ‘boxes him into
a corner’.
When the second presenter chooses the one album he will play all
the way through for his unknown listeners, he is not necessarily trying
to impress with his superlative taste. Nor is he trying to enforce his elevation of one of the many such collections vying for our attention to
some exalted standard. He is trying instead to call attention to aesthetic
choices made by artists, choices that may not be immediately audible to
listeners. He routinely did so with very little obvious intent at displaying his own tastes and predilections. Instead he was modeling a way of
listening to music that was not limited by any one specific way of making meaning or any singular version of taste, preference, prejudice or
value. This presenter was trying to take musical materials we all hold in
common and ask his audience to approach these materials as something
from which we can all make a distinct kind of meaning through a distinct way of perceiving it. He was not trying even to imply where those
perceptions were supposed to lead.
The relationships each presenter is trying to construct with audiences
are shot through with an immanent potential for perceptual subjective
change. One of the defining aspects of the musical practices of each presenter is how each tries to work around their own habits, prejudices and
preferences which each views as impediments to the kinds of aesthetically communicative relationships in which each wants their listeners
to be enmeshed. Each produces an aesthetic of uncertainty designed to
avoid imposing a uniform set of values or specific and immutable aesthetic criterion for musical inclusion or exclusion. The first presenter
shows this most clearly with his careful arrangement of his materials
in specific relationships to each other, in his home, in his on-air box
and eventually on the radio itself. His programs are defined by gestures taken explicitly to enhance his audience’s perceptions of music
he hopes will be either unfamiliar to them, or defamiliarized through
careful, discerning yet improvisational juxtaposition. The second is no
less committed to communicative openness when playing an album all
the way through. He only wants to provide the opportunity to hear
differently. The rest is up to them.
Both presenters use their respective imagined communities to shape
their own behavior, not simply to serve their own interest but to serve
the interests of others as well, beyond any assumptions either thinks his
listeners may harbor. This takes the consequences of their work into the
realm of the unforeseeable. The logic each uses, the meticulous notations one maintains, the careful and exacting choice the other makes
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each week, the knowledge each gathers and disperses, are not simply for
self-edification or some patronizing display of trivial musical superiority.
They are the actualization of a community, creating a web of connecting particularities structured by a specifically civil aesthetic discourse
but not owned by it, tinged with the faith of ideal social connection
but not rendered passive by the sublime or the musically absolute. Each
aspires to express a contingent truth made through the momentary associations of carefully chosen aesthetic materials. Toward the end of our
last interview the first presenter described above summed his practices
up with characteristic concision: ‘You know, I could just burn a disc of
what I need every week, but it’s only in that moment when you find your
apotheosis, through that satisfying connection.’
Conclusion
To paraphrase Bakhtin, if a word always has a history that carries more
than the intent of its user, then a song most certainly carries far more
than the meaning it holds for these presenters. Both presenters discussed
here populated the music they played with their own communicative
intentions and accents, appropriating and adapting it to their own
respective expressive ideals. Each is a producer and a consumer of
musical meanings simultaneously. Each is trying to stand between the
boundaries of dominant media practices while remaining aware of how
tangled up in many of them they actually are. Each presenter’s awareness of the heteroglossia of musical practices that surround them grows
from the ability of each to situate themselves in relation to the existing
strands of common meaning within which each is working. The work of
each is defined by their desire to avoid reproducing dominant discourses
on music, familiar models of radio presenting and even their own habits
and comforts. In this way, the work of each embodies the potential the
aesthetic bears within it.
Both express an idiosyncratic sense of their experience of music. Each
works well within familiar traditions of radio, and in this sense neither
is a marooned outlier of radio practice. While both presenters were well
respected within their respective organizations, neither played on their
reputations to extract more than what either felt was their due. Neither was too bothered about whether or nor they were perceived as
innovators or musical gurus. Both relied on familiar practices of radio
presenting. Both were very concerned with that all-important corollary
to ‘saying something’, being understood. Importantly, both set out to
involve themselves in the production of open aesthetic relationships
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built not on the pursuit of a pre-established, instrumentalist goal but on
the inner logic of their own discursive forms. The material networks of
communication in which these presenters are enmeshed establish the
conditions for the potential for subjective change that is a primary precondition for civil or potentially democratic communicative practices.
These civil communicative gestures create circumstances through which
anyone who decides to become involved in the conversation can claim
a stake in the proceedings on their own terms. We will see in the next
two chapters exactly how these institutions create and maintain the
conditions and circumstances of a civil and a potentially democratic
aesthetics.
The sounds we hear on commercial radio have a dominant influence
over what radio writ large is supposed to sound like. The larger field of
radio broadcasting is defined and made real through expressive practices which have been honed by decades of gradual sharpening. They
are meant to foster and maintain social relationships that have only a
few acceptable or even recognizable forms of agency to animate them.
The sound of commercial radio is an aural marker of a form of power
made effective because it is based on gratifying the expectations of its
subjects through what Eagleton calls the ‘ultimate binding forces of the
bourgeois social order [ . . . ] habits, pieties, sentiments and affections’
(Eagleton, 1990:20). The power of all aesthetic experience, regardless
of its source, is a power grounded in ‘the living sensibilities of its subjects’, shifting its anchor ‘from centralized institutions to the silent
depths of the subject itself’ (Eagleton, 1990:27). The aesthetic assumes
the burden of making ‘an otherwise abstract, atomized social order’
coherent, helping to organize ‘social life as a whole’ (Eagleton, 1990:23).
However, while the aesthetic helps authenticate and maintain existing
forms of social power by placing itself ‘more deeply into the very bodies of those it subjugates’, it also produces the conditions of its own
subversion:
If the aesthetic is a dangerous, ambiguous affair, it is because [ . . . ]
there is something in the body which can revolt against the power
which inscribes it; and that impulse could only be eradicated by
extirpating along with it the capacity to authenticate power itself.
(Eagleton, 1990:28)
The work of the two presenters described above express this paradox.
Each seems to have some inchoate understanding of how their respective form of public expression contributes, however momentarily, to a
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social coherence larger than themselves. Neither purports to foster the
cognitive fealty that consumerism demands, nor do they require the
enforced loyalty demanded by the state. Instead, each wants only an
open acknowledgement of the potential which lies in the ambiguous
social relationships in which they are seeking to participate.
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Of Communities and
Constituencies: Radio,
the Market and the State
The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a
powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.
Antonio Gramsci (1971:238)
The elected are such willing partners.
Fugazi (2001)
This book is about several things. First, it is about the social relationships
people create for themselves with each other through music. Second,
it is about the forms of self-organization they use to do this and how
the voluntary relationships upon which these acts of self-organization
are based work. Third, it is about how the social contexts which foster these acts might be maintained and enhanced to make our society
and culture more open and democratic. I have chosen to look at how
people use community radio stations to do this. However, these organizations, by their very nature, are marginalized within the larger systems
of power in which they have no choice but to participate. They are compelled to deal with institutions such as the state and corporations that
have a great deal of power over them. The survival of community radio
stations is constantly threatened because they are constituted in ways
that these more powerful institutions do not recognize. As I will show
in this chapter, the logics that govern state and corporate institutions
often have consequences that are as deliberate as they are paradoxically
unintended and yet perfectly in keeping with their animating intent.
None of these dominant institutions explicitly set out to destroy the
community radio stations studied in this book, yet in several cases this
is almost exactly what happened.
Community radio stations are marginalized because they don’t work
like other radio stations. Therefore, their problem of the public is
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markedly different from that of commercial radio, as are the available options for solving it. Community radio’s problem of the public
is different because these institutions don’t just allow their publics to
participate in radio broadcasting. Members of a community radio station’s public are the very constitution of the organizations themselves.
Members contribute the time and material needed to keep these places
alive. Community radio stations must habitually rely on voluntary association and various forms of creative collaboration with their publics in
order to solve their problems of the public. This form of collaboration
defines how these organizations work. It also makes these organizations marginal, because this type of relationship between a radio station
and its public is directly contrary to the ways in which the dominant
institutions of our society work. This makes community radio’s survival
and longevity unstable and unpredictable. This unpredictability stems
from the fact that the relationships between community radio with the
two dominant forces in the world today, the state and the market, are
contradictory if not implicitly confrontational.
As I show in this chapter, several community radio stations in
Australia have been able to solve their problems of the public by creating, maintaining and participating in larger social networks defined by
what I call ‘constituency relationships’. I argue that their necessary dealings with the state and the market can only be successfully negotiated
by making these kinds of relationships the central fact of the ongoing
life of these organizations. I will give three examples of how three of
the community radio stations I studied successfully relied on such relationships to solve problems of the public that threatened the existence
of each.
Social networks defined by constituency relationships
In order to understand each of these case studies, we have to understand the central problem of the community radio: why does it exist?
Is it merely a safety valve for dissent or general public expression? Is it
a pressure point whose power is limited, but which can occasionally
be brought to bear in a consequential way? Or is it a lever of power
that people who are not in power use to empower themselves? There
is a significant literature addressing these questions (see Spinelli, 2000;
Riismandel, 2002; Carpentier et al., 2003; Dunaway, 2005; Stern, 2005;
Sussman and Estes, 2005). Making any crisp and brittle distinctions
between these social functions is neither necessary nor useful. Whether
we call it ‘radical’, ‘alternative’ or ‘citizen’s’ media, community radio
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can be all of these, sometimes simultaneously (Downing, 2001; Atton,
2002; Rodriguez, 2003). As I have suggested, community radio exists to
allow participants to engage in social relationships that are not available
anywhere else. They allow people to create social relationships that are
open, egalitarian and formed within a particular type of civil institution
that defines them not only as audience members, listeners or consumers
but as potential participants, whose relationship with the radio station
is defined by the fact that all such listeners are assumed to be potential
participants and contributors. As such, we are talking about what Ivan
Illich referred to as ‘politically interrelated’ participants (Illich, 1973: xii)
or, more exactly, constituents.
Constituency relationships have a distinct character. They are defined
by a mutual recognition of the rights of people to participate in formal organizations that are statutorily and ethically required to recognize
the agency of their participants in mutually agreed upon ways as the primary condition of their continuing existence. Community radio exists
to create a social space in which the structure and character of the
communicative relationships through which the organization is constituted are both shaped by and reflected by the experiences and practices
of its public. As I noted in Chapter 1, this is possible for all manner of
media organizations and institutions, but only a few seem to realize it.
In an era of so-called ‘self-regulation’, commercial and most public institutions are not held to the same standard. Further, the specific forms
of agency exercised within community radio stations are precisely the
types of agency commercial and public media are free from having to
recognize. We may exercise a variety of clever and creative forms of
agency in using varied forms of media. But there are significant differences between creatively negotiating access with a talkback radio call
screener or posting our viral videos and textual memes on social media,
and having a statutory right to access, produce and influence programming content and decision-making processes of an organization. These
are wildly incommensurate forms of agency.
There are a few reasons why I claim community radio should be an
organization based on constituency relationships. First, a community
radio station is what Ivan Illich a called a ‘tool for conviviality’ (Illich,
1973). Illich uses the term conviviality ‘to mean autonomous creative
intercourse among persons’ that takes the form of ‘individual freedom
realized in personal interdependence’ (p. 11). He notes that a ‘convivial
society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for
each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favour of another member’s equal
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freedom’ (p. 12). Illich imagined the use of modern technologies by
‘politically interrelated people’ not subject to managerial control and
direction (p. xii), but used in a directed and self-defined manner so that
‘no one person’s ability to express him- or herself in work will require as
a condition the enforced labour or the enforced learning or the enforced
consumption of another’ (p. 13). He imagined a society defined by tools
designed to be ‘easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired’,
the use of which ‘does not restrain another from using them equally’
(p. 22). As we will see in the second half of this book, the community
radio stations I’ve studied recall significant aspects of Illich’s stirring
idealism. They are tools made available to anyone, tools that anyone
is allowed master and tools through which anyone is able to produce
meaning. They are not subject to arbitrary managerial control, and they
foster autonomous creativity between people.
Second, this form of freedom-seeking, self-organizing conviviality
leads to specific forms of what Calhoun calls ‘social solidarity’ (Calhoun,
2002). Community radio stations develop forms of social solidarity
based on their expressive proximity to their publics, the shared ideals
they hold in common with them and the historical interconnection
they have with them. Through the shared construction of a collective social world, forms of solidarity bind members through ‘mutual
commitment in shared action’ (p. 152). It is the ‘exercise of the social
imagination’, as Calhoun calls it, that allows people to see themselves
as holding enough in common to forge the social relationships necessary to allow the public sphere to constitute this form of social cohesion
(p. 159). As Calhoun argues, we ‘hold in common a world we create
in common, in part by the processes through which we imagine it.
It is these processes that the social imaginary shapes’ (p. 163). Without this kind of solidarity, most community radio stations would falter,
if not fail.
Third, the fact that we engage with our collective social imaginary discursively is decisive for community radio. A community radio station is
primarily an organizational schema through which volunteers work to
create complex forms of what Habermas refers to as ‘communicative
action’ (Habermas, 1984). The purpose of ‘communicative action’, is to
persuade using what he calls ‘validity claims’ (Habermas, 1984:24–5).
These claims are largely hypothetical until tested, and become valid
only when they are subjected to debate or criticism through which those
involved come to a ‘communicatively achieved agreement’. These agreements can be regarded as valid only if they are deemed to reflect a recognizable kind of truth or sincerity and only if they are reached openly and
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transparently (Habermas, 1984:308–9; see also Goodman, 2006:113–16).
The sincerity and openness community radio stations must display to
make their claims to reflecting their constituents’ interests take a number of forms. They are largely expressed through the maintenance of
the status of the organization as a worthy community institution. This
is routinely demonstrated by the organization’s necessary and constitutive openness to the participation of community members on whom
the station relies for all aspects of its existence. This contextual and
political interdependence grows from the everyday practices of community members who program the music, maintain the music library,
contribute money during the fundraising drives and donate the time
and materials that keep the place running. The station itself and all the
sounds that come from it are constituted by the very community that
produces them. These are very powerful forms of validation.
Community radio is constituted in plain contrast with the dominant systems of value embodied in the state and corporations. The
goal of community radio is to create an organization in the form of a
communicative tool that works in ways consonant with and contributory to the expressive practices of those whose presence and practices
constitute it. These organizations do this deliberatively, discursively and
convivially in order to create the kinds of social solidarity that are
supportive of the longevity of the organization. However, these organizations and the communicative spaces they create can only persist if
they can successfully negotiate and maintain an officially recognized
role in a larger system of economic and cultural power that is fundamentally contrary to their interests. They cannot be understood without
explicit and thoroughgoing acknowledgement of the influence of larger
enveloping social and political forces. It is through the experience of
these larger systems and the practices enlisted as a response to them that
community radio stations find the edges of their worlds and bump up
against the practical limits of their work. To understand this, we need
to understand how the practices and experiences of those involved in
the processes of cultural production at community radio stations are
embedded in a context of multiple, overlapping systems of power and
understand how these organizations are distinct from those system of
power (Salter, 1980:113).
The struggle to exist and survive
In order to understand why community radio’s terms of use must be
made on the basis of constituency relationships and not consumer or
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citizenship relationships, we have to understand how the terms on
which community radio survives are distinct. First, community radio is
unavoidably part of civil society. It exists through the kinds of voluntary
participation in community institutions that defines this often misunderstood social arena (Deakin, 2001:4). Community radio stations are
self-governing, non-state actors that exist as non-profit-seeking expressions of the intent of ordinary people to effect social change (Deakin,
2001:10).1 This alone is enough to make it an ‘alternative’ expression
of citizenship and, given the ruthless attacks on the institutions of civil
society in many places in the world, even a radical one (Chang, 2002;
Maddison et al., 2004; Glatnz, 2010).
Second, community radio exists to create social networks through
means that are not market-based. The value placed on community
radio’s participants and audiences is not a commercial contract, it is
a civil one. Access is not based on one’s ability to pay for it, either
directly as a fee-paying subscriber whose money guarantees access to the
medium or indirectly as the specifically conjured and desirable demographic object sold to advertisers. While some argue that communitybased organizations must be more entrepreneurial, and not rely on
supposedly romantic notions of cultural or ideological ‘purity’ drawn
from some distant, irrelevant past, what might seem like a necessity can
often have unintended consequences (see Collingwood, 2005; El-Guhl,
2005; Bloustein, 2008; Luckman, 2008). The market is defined by forms
of power which cannot respond to even the most well-intentioned community procedures or deliberations. Market entities most often have the
effect of not allowing decision-making to remain a democratic community resource, turning it into a merely formal procedure carefully
constrained into foregone conclusions and predictable consequences
(see Fairchild, 2001:106–14).
Third, community radio is distinct not only because of the type and
character of the social networks it helps create or facilitate but also in
the ways in which these networks are constructed. Community radio
stations do not exist simply as sets of ideals, rules or regulations. Nor
do they simply exist as unique and dynamic relationships between
organizations and their participants mediated and linked by particular
kinds of content produced in particular ways. They exist as a series of
overlapping social networks based on the actual connections and lived
experiences embodied in a range of creative cultural practices shaped
and governed not only by regulations but also by the larger dynamics of power in which they are set. These networks stretch well beyond
the stations themselves. These relationships are structured by a wide
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variety of institutions, formal and informal, practical and ideological,
actual and conceptual. As I have argued elsewhere, community radio stations are constituted by a constantly evolving range of affiliations that
defines the contours and limits of the expressive practices that go on air.
The lived experience of these institutions is unalterably multidimensional. This multidimensionality is the central fact of the organization’s
ongoing existence. These places look different to everybody who comes
into contact with them. They reflect the literal experience of those who
populate them. They exist as places through which lived experience is
funneled and produced, embodied in a wide range of creative cultural
practices (Fairchild, 2005:308–9; see also Van Vuuren, 2002; Carpentier
et al., 2003).
The terms of use of these popularly constituted organizations are distinct in the ways in which the expected and necessary participation of
the public happens. For example, they have to take into account the fact
that almost anyone has the potential to be a legitimate and valid participant in the organization. Also, they do not produce consumer goods in
that they do not produce consumers. They do not sell their audiences to
advertisers in order to exploit the time and attention of their publics as
the means through which the organization survives. Similarly, they do
not produce ‘citizens’ because they do not ‘instruct’, ‘model’ or ‘teach’
the varied forms of ‘citizenship’ alleged to be lurking out there in the
‘mediasphere’. Terms such as ‘cultural citizenship’, ‘DIY citizenship’ and
‘consumer citizenship’ are mostly speculative, empirically uncorroborated synonyms for ‘identity’ (Hartley, 1999). The value sought in the
social relationships created within community radio stations by members of their publics is not based on the common, demonstrable expectations and assumptions that define these kinds of subject positions.
These terms are externally imposed metaphors used by social institutions to confer value or by individuals to assert status by constructing
a recognizable container for their ‘identity’. By contrast, community
radio stations facilitate a broad range of experiences, not in a ‘systemspaternalistic’ way or in ‘a manner that bypasses the communicative
power of the public of citizens’, but through a deliberative and discursive
way by creating the actual intersubjective conditions in which a civil
and potentially democratic culture might be created by its participants
(see Loehwing and Motter, 2009:229–36; Habermas, 1996:352–4). What
I want to do with the balance of this chapter is to give three illustrative
examples of situations in which the depredations of neo-liberalism have
had concrete effects on three community radio stations each of which
was solved through reliance on constituency relationships.
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The two cornerstones of neo-liberal globalization are deregulation and
privatization. The deregulation of broadcast media around the world
began in the USA in the late 1970s. Wherever media deregulation has
been implemented, the results have been the structural exclusion of the
public from influence over policy and decision-making, the exclusion
of the public and the public sector from influence over the performance
of private media companies, consolidation of ownership over all forms
of media, the domination of private corporate power over the determination of how the public interest is defined and served, and the
domination of decreasing numbers of people over increasingly large
swathes of public information, expression and communication.2
The process began in the USA, providing the signal example of the
process, goals and consequences of broadcast deregulation. Key elements of US experience have been replicated with impressive rigor
worldwide. Prior to deregulation, American broadcasters were obliged to
provide, in return for the free use of the public resource of the broadcast
spectrum, a significant amount of information regarding their programming and finances, a range of clearly defined services to the public in the
form of the addressing of issues of controversy and importance, some
accounting of their ability to provide free and fair access to differing
points of view, and some assessment of the promises they made in comparison to their actual performance. Implied within these requirements
was an actual forum in which the public could engage in criticism,
examine the performance of broadcasters and press for reform of the
broadcasting industry (Fairchild, 2001:67–75; Ramey, 2007:31–7).
Deregulation, by contrast, was guided by a sharply incongruous philosophy of the public good (Moss and Fein, 2003). The idea was that
only by removing all requirements to public service and accountability
could the airwaves be used to best advantage for all. The consequences
in the USA are important to understand as they were harbingers for the
Australian experience a few years later. Given their similarities, it should
not be surprising that the advent of ‘self-regulation’ in broadcast media
in Australia has been the same kind of abject failure as ‘deregulation’
has been in the USA, at least in terms of its purported goal of serving
the public interest (Turner, 2000; see also Johnson, 2000; Jolly, 2007).
One main goal of deregulating the broadcast media in the USA was
to resolve the contradictions in the broadcast market by altering the
role of the state from an adversarial role in the regulatory apparatus
to a role as a market facilitator (Federal Communications Commission,
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1999:1). As Moss and Fein show, the earliest broadcast regulations in
the USA were shaped to reflect the determination of policymakers ‘to
prevent a potentially dangerous concentration of political power’ (Moss
and Fein, 2003:390). Their study of the early legislative record clearly
demonstrates that, during the establishment of the foundational framework of media regulation in the USA, ‘democratic principles came into
conflict with—and ultimately eclipsed—economic ones’ in ways unique
to radio broadcasting (p. 391).
The contradictions between property and the state have held a central place in political debates surrounding broadcast regulation since
their inception in the 1920s and ’30s (McChesney, 1993; Streeter, 1994).
The balance of the 20th century has seen what was at first a gradual,
then a sudden, domination by private industry over the public airwaves.
As Calabrese argues, the final two rounds of deregulation in the USA in
particular illustrated ‘a continued pattern of government-industry cooperation in accelerating media ownership and the consolidation of media
power’ (Calabrese, 2004:107). One main consequence of deregulation
has been to allow an industry that was once regulated by the government to ‘capture’ the regulatory apparatus governing its operation.3
In this case, while insulating corporations from the interference and
influence of the public and the state was supposed to lead indirectly
to the enhancing of the public good, deregulation only succeeded in
transferring political, social and economic power to private entities who
are now largely unaccountable for their actions. The process of removing the public from any influential role in broadcast regulation has
enshrined the power of these cultural intermediaries, to the cost of the
public that the state purports to represent.
The effects of broadcast deregulation in the USA and elsewhere
have been clear. Broadly similar experiences have been repeated in
countries such as Canada, the UK and New Zealand as media regulations were ‘harmonized’ through bilateral and multilateral trade
agreements (Atkinson, 1994:146–50, 168–73; Winseck, 2002:798–800;
Thussu, 2007:2, 7, 38–41, 43–9). The consequences of particular relevance here are the unprecedented concentration of ownership in the
radio broadcasting industry (Huntemann, 1999; DiCola and Thomson,
2002:18, 22–8). The corporations which succeeded in growing quickly
by buying up their competition accomplished two things. They made
their markets less competitive and more predictable, and these newly
enlarged institutions took on substantial amounts of debt which then
needed to be paid off by cutting costs. These two factors worked in
tandem as fewer, more profitable yet more indebted, media institutions
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survived by cutting large numbers of employees, placing more and more
of their workers on short-term contracts, using more subcontractors and
freelancers, and centralizing key aspects of production, market research
and information gathering. Those left had less job security, lower
wages and less power within their workplaces as a result (‘Broadcast
Confidential’, 1997; Huntemann, 1999:401–2; DiCola, 2006).4 Second,
deregulation has resulted in the marginalization of the public and the
removal of any formal role for the public in setting or influencing policy and the domination of those forums in which policy is shaped and
enacted (Fairchild, 1999; Thussu, 2007:39–40). As with the concentration of ownership, the capture of the apparatus of state regulation and
the subsequent removal of any consequential forum for public influence
or accountability also served to make the commercial radio market far
more predictable and easier to manage. Systems of ‘self-regulation’ have
guaranteed the domination of those forums in which policy is shaped
and enacted by the very beneficiaries of the outcomes of those forums.
The question I will turn to now is this: how have deregulation and privatization affected those who either need or want the protection of the
state but can no longer access the state’s deliberative functions? After
all, it is rare for systems of power not to exert harsh penalties on those
excluded from them. Community radio stations are as dependent on
the state as commercial broadcasters are, but do not have the resources
to enforce their legitimate claims to be heard and have their concerns
addressed by the very entity that sets out and enforces the rules that
still determine the conditions of its continued existence. For the powerful, self-regulation means freedom from public ‘interference’; for the
marginal it means you’re on your own.
In Australia, the push to privatize public services and sell off a range
of publicly owned assets has been pursued with a certain mindless
consistency for decades. Few countries have pursued privatization as
vigorously (Walker and Walker, 2008). There has been virtually no sustained public debate regarding the continued sell-off of assets in recent
years. Yet the removal of any significant and direct public interest in
many areas of public life, including airports, roads, ports, power generators, communications networks and broadcast transmission networks,
has not only transferred material assets into private hands; it has also
taken large swathes of the decision-making capacity of the state and
placed them in private hands. The first two brief case studies that follow
show this very plainly. In the first, Canberra’s 2XX was taken off the
air, almost permanently, as a result of the privatization of the National
Transmission Network, the complex infrastructure that allows television
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and radio signals to reach people’s homes. In the second, FBi (Free Broadcasting Incorporated) had to engage in an unusually difficult battle to
start broadcasting due to indirect pressure put on the community radio
licensing system by the de facto privatization of the commercial radio
licensing process. In each case, the existence of these radio stations was
threatened, and in each case the threat came not from state regulators
or from a lack of community support but from private entities trying
to enhance or enforce their state-issued financial interests. The third
case points to a larger and more fundamental problem facing community radio stations when confronted with a state and private sector with
little interest in their existence or survival. ArtSound FM, which has
been a remarkable success from its first test broadcasts, had to fight an
unusually long battle to gain a full-time broadcasting license. At times,
the battle seriously dented the operational capacity of the organization.
The ArtSound case tells us that the problems facing community media
go far deeper than the immediate issues of neo-liberal governance or
state-corporate collusion.
One of the most insistent and aggressive purveyors of public assets
and private power, not just in Australia but around the world, is
Macquarie Group. According to a mostly fawning ‘biography’ of the
company, Macquarie seeks assets which have the following attributes:
highly predictable, stable, long-term cash flows; slight competitive
pressures with relatively high barriers to entry, preferably having
a monopoly or nearly so; and high revenue certainties with low
risk and volatility. Predictable cash flows are based on relatively
fixed operating costs, reasonably low ongoing capital expenditure
requirements, and contractual mechanisms for rate increases. As virtual monopolies, with competition limited because of the difficulties
of building a competing highway, for instance, and with captive
customers, the infrastructure assets generate dependable, nearly guaranteed, long-term cash flows.
(Solomon, 2009:3)
There are a few attributes of privatization not directly noted here.
First, the ‘captive customers’ are sometimes referred to as citizens,
and the ‘virtual monopolies’ are more accurately described as essential infrastructure. Second, the processes of privatization through which
Macquarie uses its influential financing model to ‘bundle’ this ‘new asset
class’ and offer it to investors around the world (pp. 2–4) is simply a massive transfer of wealth from the public sector to the private (Walker and
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Walker, 2008). Third and most importantly, ‘The Millionaire’s Factory’
(Cadzow, 2006:31), as Macquarie is known in Australia, is, like most
acquirers of public assets, very well connected politically.5
The standard justifications for infrastructure privatization are the
increased efficiency of the private sector in managing infrastructure,
which is largely made manifest in removing apparently ancillary costs
such as ‘above-market wages’ and ‘benefits’ like healthcare and pensions
for workers, as well as enforcing a ‘user pays’ system of access and use
(Solomon, 2009:16–18). While Macquarie claims it is well aware of its
‘community responsibility’ (p. 2), the case of 2XX suggests they must
have a very specific idea of what the words ‘community’ and ‘responsibility’ mean. The issue began in 1998, when the Australian government
was pushing through the enabling legislation to sell-off the country’s
National Transmission Network (NTN). At the time, the NTN consisted
of 550 sites around the country that provided broadcasting services for
Australia’s extensive national and international public broadcasting network as well as for hundreds of regional and local commercial and
community radio stations. It also provided services for all manner of
public and private telecommunications. If anything might be thought
of as essential infrastructure, this is it. However, despite meeting the
above-noted required attributes of attractive assets, such as highly predictable, stable, long-term cash flows and the fixed costs and negligible
competition of an actual monopoly, potential buyers must have sensed
the government would continue to aggressively pursue its privatization agenda regardless of the circumstances. During the pre-sale period,
anonymous bidders were quoted in the business press trying to talk the
price down so much that it raised ‘the prospect [that] the Government
could opt to retain its ownership of the assets’ (Mathieson, 1998:19). Not
surprisingly, the government pushed the sale very strongly (Sainsbury,
1998). It went through in late April 1999, with the successful bidder
being NTL Telecommunications, based in the UK. Despite an ambitious ‘vision to expand its range of broadcast transmission services
with both broadcast distribution and wholesale telecommunications
services’, adverse circumstances forced NTL to sell the NTN to Macquarie
in April 2002 for $850 million (NTL, 2000:4). Later that year, Macquarie
floated their new telecommunications fund set-up to operate similar
assets around the world (Hughes, 2002).
With the acquisition of NTL’s assets, Macquarie had acquired a
monopoly on broadcast transmissions in the Australian Capital Territory
(ACT) (Hughes, 2002). The entity through which Macquarie manages
this monopoly is called Broadcast Australia (BA). BA began to charge all
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radio stations in the ACT substantial fees to use the Black Mountain
Broadcast Tower, the only radio tower capable of reaching any substantial portion of the ACT’s population. There are few other places a
radio station could go to send out a comparable signal, hemmed in as
they are by the exclusionary regulatory system surrounding placement
and use of broadcast towers as well as the rolling hills of the Southern
Highlands of New South Wales. This is what Macquarie calls a ‘high
barrier to entry’ (Solomon, 2009). As an anonymous Macquarie analyst
noted in a 2005 press release, BA’s economic strengths include a predictable revenue base, potential for high revenue growth, predictable
operating costs, costs which are largely fixed, none of which Macquarie
incurred when Black Mountain Tower was built. In fact, at the time of
purchase almost all of the forecast revenue was ‘locked in with long term
contracts’, primarily to the national public broadcasting networks, the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting
Service (SBS) (Solomon, 2009).
This is a textbook operation in the annals of privatization: the risks
and costs of constructing the facility were socialized, and the profits
and power which resulted were privatized (Hughes, 2002; Macquarie
Bank). The public sector built the transmission tower, assumed all of the
associated costs, serving the public good through equitable access to a
common resource. But when the government sold the tower, this rather
cozy arrangement saw 2XX, Canberra’s oldest community radio station,
teetering on the brink of insolvency and dissolution. One month after
2XX was silenced by the market, interested parties found themselves in
the remarkable situation in which a policy designed to serve the public interest resulted in groups like the Quaker Peace Centre and the
Canberra Harm Minimisation, an advocacy group for drug users, saw
their donations to 2XX, the only station which gives either group a
public voice, go directly to a bank whose record-breaking profits have
come largely from squeezing every last cent out of what used to be
important pieces of what was once public infrastructure. As noted in
a mildly sycophantic profile of the company offered a mere six weeks
after the near destruction of this long-standing community institution,
Macquarie, ‘fat, hungrier than ever’, had offered its executive class the
lavish pay packets they had no doubt ‘earned’ (Robins, 2004:43).
Another kind of privatization which has been every bit as consequential as the aforementioned example has been the implementation
of a so-called ‘market values test’ in the public sector (Spurgeon and
McCarthy, 2005). Within the bureaucracy that deals with broadcast regulation, the institution of market values tests means that all decisions
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made by the public sector have to be analyzed for their potential harm
or benefit to the Australian economy. With the advent of a regime of
self-regulation for broadcasters and the auctioning off of commercial
radio services through the de facto purchase of frequencies, important
changes have been made to the ways in which radio is regulated and,
more importantly, the ways in which broadcast policy is crafted and
implemented (Farouque, 2002a). Acting as another significant ‘barrier
to entry’, the size of the winning bids in license auctions has even surprised some in the radio industry, with one bid garnering $155 million
(Frew, 2004). The extreme scarcity of any further licenses being offered
is widely considered to be forcing the results of any future auctions
upwards.
The ‘marketization’ of commercial radio licensing has had significant,
albeit indirect, effects on the community radio licensing process. When
FBi began broadcasting in late 2003, an important story emerged regarding the station’s decade-long struggle to gain a license. FBi applied for
its license in the late 1990s and won a license that covered the entire
Sydney region. The fight for this license was a difficult contest against
numerous other aspirants. One of these aspirants was called Wild FM.
According to the ABC’s Media Watch program, while Wild FM was listed
as a non-profit organization, it was closely connected to two businesses
run by its founder. ‘Media Watch’ reported that Wild FM made several
million dollars in advertising revenue from its test broadcasts alone, all
of which was collected by a separate ad agency run by the same company founder. Also, in the years prior to its application for a full-time
broadcasting license, Wild FM sold over 800,000 CDs under its own
name (‘Community Radio–Wild FM’, 2000). Wild FM was adjudged by
the Australian Broadcasting Authority to be a barely disguised commercial operation. Importantly, this was not enough to disqualify them
from being a ‘suitable applicant for a community broadcasting services licence’ within the meaning of the Broadcasting Services Act (ABA,
2001b:6).
Nevertheless, Wild FM’s license application failed, and they took this
failure very badly (ABA, 2001a; Davies, 2001). The company’s founder
said at the time that FBi’s license was worth $155 million and that
his organization was unfairly called a profit-making enterprise simply
because it had sold a few hundred thousand CDs and did really, really
well with advertising sales. Given the shape of the Sydney radio market,
it was clear to all involved that few community radio licenses would
be offered in the future. No doubt realizing this, Wild FM gathered
together supporters and made a mass application of memberships to FBi,
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in a transparent bid to stack the membership, elect a new board and
take over the license. FBi rejected the applications, and an extensive,
expensive and precedent setting court action ensued. FBi eventually
won. As one FBi staff member noted at the time, ‘[FBi] were just people who supported Australian radio and suddenly they’re dealing with
Supreme Court Equity Division challenges [ . . . ] the focus became “we’ve
got to save the licence” ’ (Molitorisz, 2003:5). However, the case significantly taxed the financial and operational foundations of the fledgling
organization, set back the launch of the station significantly and ‘raised
concerns the station would never get off the ground’ (Javes, 2003a).
This fight was unusual because it was an indirect consequence of the
marketization of the public sector. The length and intensity of this battle were exacerbated by the fact that the spurned applicant had no other
option than to gain a license, despite their demonstrated capacity to
profitably operate what was clearly a commercial radio station, marketing firm and record label all rolled into one. Their proposed broadcasting
service was not necessarily projected to be a huge revenue-generating
operation, but it would clearly use the license to funnel revenues to
other operations. As noted, commercial radio licenses in Australia are
extremely valuable commodities. This has the effect of pricing out all
applicants who don’t already have significant investment capital at
the time of their application, regardless of the potential public interest value of their future services. In essence, the licensing process has
been privatized, with market values trumping any public goods test in
the licensing process. This was cited in the 1992 Broadcasting Services
Act, the legislation that first implemented the change in valuing radio
licenses, its authors noting that the act ‘enables public interest considerations to be addressed in a way that does not impose unnecessary
financial and administrative burdens on providers of broadcasting services’ (quoted in Wilding, 2005:39). As a result, even those applying for
non-commercial licenses are finding it that much harder to make their
claims to the ostensibly public airwaves stick. These claims are increasingly being tested in unexpected ways, with demonstrable effects on
community broadcasters, forcing them to defend their claims to ‘free’
spectrum access beyond the formal terrain of licensing procedures.
In both cases, the existential crises faced by each radio station were
overcome through a variety of means, all of which were based on the
existing relationships each organization had with a variety of social
networks to which each was bound in relationships of mutual benefit. These interconnected individuals and organizations contributed the
means for survival, the only option in a context in which the state can
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only rouse itself to act as a market facilitator. Staff at 2XX noted with satisfaction and gratitude that, after a series of urgent appeals for support
went out through Canberra, they were inundated with offers of support,
helping them to raise over $10,000 in a matter of days (‘An Antidote on
Air’, 2004; ‘Community radio back on air’, 2004). This allowed 2XX the
time to renegotiate their debt repayments and engage in an impressive
publicity campaign that relied on their existing social networks which
reached into a broad range of local organizations and institutions. Not
only did these networks provide immediate cash, but they also provided some measure of political cover as these networks included local
politicians, the heads of recognized political lobbying groups and highprofile arts organizations. These organizations had and continue to have
a strong contextual and political interdependence with 2XX. Their campaign also raised the much larger issue of the exorbitant rates charged
for the use of broadcast infrastructure across Australia, prompting strong
arguments for reform. 2XX and their supporters had multiple interests
and values held in common. Each valued the work the other did that
resulted in mutual benefit. 2XX provided the kinds of ‘communicative
action’ that validated the work of these arts and political organizations
in ways the radio stations could not validate on their own. It is these
kinds of necessary and inherent social political interrelations spread
across a very large swathe of the local community that allowed 2XX
to survive this crisis.
FBi had not yet begun to broadcast when facing the legal challenge
to their membership. They were able to survive through similar means,
including donated services and extensive volunteer efforts to maintain
the subscriber base and their sponsorship relationships in the unusually
long run-up to their official launch. FBi used a clever mix of social organizing, solicitation of donations, continually expanding sponsorship
arrangements and full exploitation of the few market mechanisms open
to it. FBi triangulated between political organizing, volunteer support
and commercial solicitation through the unique array of relationships
constituting the organization. The dynamic was slightly different, however, given that FBi’s networks of support were nascent and not based
on years of demonstrated service. Instead, FBi had to make their arguments for support based on what they planned to do and on the values
they set out to embody. In this case it was the unusual commitment to
devote half of its total airtime to Australian music and half of that total
to music from Sydney. Not only did this attract a broad range of sponsorships from venues, record labels and the like, but it also provided an
immediate and clear purpose, one that has proven extremely popular
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and enduring. During the multiple test broadcasts and years of preparations, FBi has been able to create and maintain a base of support in
many of Sydney’s various music scenes that has garnered them the loyalty of many and the attention and appreciation of many more. Since
before they even began broadcasting, FBi has used this as a cohering
form of social solidarity as the basis for what has been so far a successful
organization.
The problems I am describing stretch well beyond the mostly formal
terrain of the regulatory apparatus and the fickle politics of broadcast
policy. The grand and arrogant gestures of the neo-liberal policy regime
often have dramatic consequences in the ordinary course of everyday
life in ways too numerous and detailed to be fully recounted here.
What is important is to acknowledge the ways in which the lines of
practice and experience that run through local communities can be
traced to connect a series of individuals, groups and institutions all of
which are affected by the larger systems of power in which all operate. The expressions of power that 2XX and FBi faced had dramatic but
largely unexamined effects on their ability to produce the musical cultures they imagined. This is also true in the case of ArtSound FM, whose
tortuous efforts to gain a full-time permanent broadcasting license are
a signal example of the problems faced by aspirant community media
organizations.
There is little question that ArtSound has been an unreservedly successful community radio station since its first test broadcast in 1983.
This has been due to the same array of factors that I used to describe
‘constituency relationships’ above, necessary networks of mutual benefit, contextual interdependence and political interrelationships between
the organization and its supporters required by any community organization for survival. The ability of those who established the organization
to create lasting organizational connections has proven to be its most
important attribute. Nearly all of its stated goals from the earliest days
have been realized, and it has a performance record that would be
the envy of most radio broadcasters. Yet it took ArtSound 18 years to
get a full-time broadcasting license. In what follows, I will focus most
closely on what kept ArtSound going during this long struggle while
also explaining what almost finished them off. As should become clear,
these two stories are deeply intertwined.
The records from the earliest meetings that sought to establish what
eventually became ArtSound FM took place in the early 1980s. It is clear
from the minutes of the first meetings of what was then called Canberra
Stereo Public Radio (CSPR) that the organizing efforts were undertaken
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by volunteers who were more than knowledgeable and well prepared for
the task they had set themselves. Among the list of tasks set at a meeting
of the Steering Committee on 12 October 1982 were the following:
PR Folder – including press releases, program summary, key players and supporters, funding basis [ . . . ] used to ‘sell’ concept to new
groups. Keep updating list of supporters on removable page.
(Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio Steering
Committee, 1982a)
The action items list also gives evidence of similar planning laying
out a blueprint of how the organization would develop from the formal expression of interest to the appropriate government department
to the production of an ‘Ascertainment study’ to the printing of a
‘Brochure soliciting individual, corporate subscriber support and donations’ and an item bearing the notation ‘Tear off promissory note?’
(Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio Steering Committee, 1982a) The letter produced by the Steering Committee to solicit interest in the project,
dated 20 December 1982, explains the nature of the venture. The volunteers sought to establish ‘a high quality stereo FM public radio station
for the ACT’ and CSPR would be pursuing ‘an “S” class public radio station in Canberra. “S” class licences, as distinct from “C” (Community)
or “E” (Educational) licences, are designed to serve a particular interest.’ The ‘particular interest’ here is those ‘who make up the growing
Canberra arts community’. ‘The station we propose’, the letter continued, ‘would bring a greater diversity and depth of cultural programming
to Canberra and would foster further the creative talents which already
abound here’ (Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio Steering Committee,
1982b). The solicitation concludes by asking the recipient to respond
with an ‘expression of in principle support’, publicity, ideas on how
the organization should develop and volunteers ‘enthusiastic enough
to work with on this project’ (Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio Steering
Committee, 1982b). A slightly more lively solicitation also appeared in
the local arts magazine Muse in May 1983 (Alcock, 1983:10).
The publicity and organizing campaign worked. Between the time of
the first test transmission in late 1983 and the formal license application in early 1984, CSPR could boast an ‘Office Bearers’ and volunteers
list comprising media professionals, media educators, theater directors,
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Grants – Look at arts and crafts grants – approach umbrella groups to
assist in identifying potential funding sources.
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music educators, musicians and instrument makers. It had also managed
to put together a section of their solicitation package called ‘What People Are Saying’, which assembled a series of supportive statements from
a range of arts luminaries, such as the Director of the Music Board of the
Australian Council, the Executive Officer of the Crafts Council of the
ACT, the General Manager of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra and
even the President of the ACT Storytelling Society. Those organizations
listed and thanked for their support include 30 arts and music community groups including The National Trust, the Canberra Art Workshop,
the Canberra Repertory Society and Musica Viva, one of Australia’s most
respected performing arts and arts education organizations (Canberra
Stereo FM Public Radio Steering Committee, 1983).
CSPR’s license application makes clear that the organization had
already obtained a series of operational and development grants and
in-kind support from a range of arts and public broadcasting funding bodies well before the application had been assembled. They were
also able to secure two major operational grants from local government
agencies. They had established working relationships with a range of
musical groups, entering into agreements to sponsor and broadcast live
events and also to provide local ensembles ‘with professionally produced
copies of their own work’ (Canberra Stereo Public Radio Incorporated,
1984a:40). They were able to collect a series of detailed testimonials
about their test transmissions from prominent musicians, conductors,
tertiary and secondary music educators, theater directors and academics,
supporting the voluminous statistical and demographic evidence compiled in the 20 appendices to their license application. ArtSound demonstrated that there was a burgeoning interest in both producing and
consuming the arts in all their forms on the part of Canberrans of all
backgrounds. Perhaps most importantly, even at this early stage CSPR
could already demonstrate it was providing what its application called
‘a badly needed communication network and information exchange in
Canberra’s arts community’ (p. 88). The documentary record compiled
and archived by members of ArtSound clearly shows that the social
networks, contextual interdependence and social solidarity required to
keep the organization going were all present and active from the group’s
earliest days.
There are two press releases that are among the more poignant documents of those to be found in the ArtSound/CSPR archives. One is a press
release that triumphantly announced the granting of a full-time broadcast license to CSPR. The group’s spokesperson optimistically suggested
that the ‘Tribunal’s decision reflects a growing belief that Canberra has
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“come-of-age” and could now support it’s [sic] own culturally-based
radio station’. The license decision was ‘one more step in banishing forever Canberra’s image as a public servant’s city with no soul’ (‘Draft Press
Release’, n.d.). In retrospect, the document is an almost wistful summary
of the ideals and years of hard work on the part of those who created
ArtSound. Unfortunately for them, it was never used. The other one was.
The other was an angry missive telling the public that ‘The Australian
Broadcasting Tribunal has recently made a decision which threatens the
independence of the public broadcasting sector in Australia. The decision endorses the use of public broadcasting licences to generate revenue
for commercial purposes.’ The letter, sent to all Members of Parliament,
accused the Minister for Communications of ignoring the guidelines for
the development of public broadcasting and said that the decision not to
grant CSPR the license was made despite the fact that CSPR was cited by
the Tribunal itself as ‘the preferred applicant according to the statutory
licence criteria’ (Canberra Stereo Public Radio Incorporated, 1985).
The palpable indignation of the widely circulated press release was
in response to the fact that the full-time public broadcasting license
was granted to Canberra and District Racing and Sporting Broadcasters Ltd. Their license application was compiled by an odd collection
of groups including sporting clubs, racing clubs and the ACTTAB, an
agency owned by the ACT government whose purpose is to facilitate
gambling on horse- and dog-racing. The ACTTAB and three local racing
groups were the proposed station’s principal funding sources (Government of Australia, 2000:21). The majority of the Board of Directors
were drawn from these groups. ACTTAB staff had helped to put the
application together, and prior to the license application hearings the
Chief Executive of the ACT Gaming and Liquor Authority had happily
suggested that ‘[w]e are interested in the group’s activities because the
achieving of a public radio licence could assist the ACTTAB’s revenue.’
He based this assessment on the increased revenue the organization saw
when regular mid-week race broadcasts were added to 2XX’s regular program schedule. After getting the license, those involved were quick to
note that the station would ‘be careful to avoid encouraging gambling’
and that no ACTTAB money would be involved, at least in setting up
the actual broadcast facilities (Robertson, 1983).
The reasons for the decision, beyond the bland claims of a large unmet
need for the public service of racing broadcasts on the FM band, are
important to understand. First, the racing and sport radio station comprised services that had already failed commercially in Canberra and
elsewhere. This was actually regarded as a point in their favor at the
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license hearings, with a research officer from the ACT Gaming and
Liquor Authority noting that the ‘station is not of a sufficiently money
generating nature to be run on a commercial station’ (Eggerking, 1984).
This is due in part to the fact that the primary revenues for the racing
industry, the dominant partner in the radio station, come from gambling and mostly bypass the station itself. Also, the authority was ‘under
no obligation to chase a profit’, according to its Director (Eggerking,
1984). More importantly, this also meant that the successful license
application would pose no threat to commercial broadcasters, a key
factor in any non-commercial radio license decision. Despite repeated
claims by those behind the proposed station that ACTTAB had little to
do with the station, the overarching influence of the ACT Gaming and
Liquor Authority was also important in understanding how this decision
was made. The carefully nuanced relationship between the authority
and the proposed racing and sport radio station suggested both the
financial and operational stability required for the station’s continued
existence but enough ambiguity to plausibly present an arm’s length
relationship between the two. Finally, it is easy to forget that Canberra
already had a ‘public’ broadcaster, 2XX. 2XX strongly opposed CSPR’s
application, arguing that nearly half of 2XX’s programming would be
duplicated by CSPR and that 2XX’s subscriptions were already at ‘saturation point’, a fact that the proposed existence of CSPR would exacerbate
(Dempsey, n.d.). While it is doubtful that the Tribunal was unduly worried about 2XX’s future, it is likely that they could find convenient
political cover in 2XX’s objections to declare the ‘public’ radio services
in Canberra sufficient, which they did.
This decision and its immediate aftermath show the kinds of forces
community radio aspirants have to contend with that are not relevant to other broadcasters. First, ArtSound had to face down longstanding assumptions about the inherent popularity of sport over the
arts in Australia, assumptions that go back at least a century and
appear to demand continual dispute (Australia Council, 1982; Throsby
and Hollister, 2003). ArtSound demonstrated in its license application,
through a well-researched and carefully compiled dossier of information, that interest and participation in the arts in Australia generally
and Canberra specifically were very high and that the city provided a
range of educational, performing arts and arts development institutions
comparable with any city in the country. Second, another important
obstacle faced by ArtSound was the apparent assumption of the operational advantages of the racing and sport applicants because of their
association with the ACT Gaming and Liquor Authority. As in the case
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Of Communities and Constituencies
Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
of FBi noted above, the fact of commercial activity seemed not to be a
detriment to submitting an application for a community broadcasting
license, yet there has been an obvious and unresolved tension between
these two aspects of the licensing system for decades. Third, the background noise of the power of commercial broadcasters always lurks
behind any non-commercial license application. Several such broadcasters made it clear that they supported the sport and racing station
over other options (Downie and Rollings, 1985). Finally, the competition from within the community radio sector, while not always coming
directly from other community broadcasters, is often used as a convenient excuse. The tumultuous history between 2XX and ArtSound
played a damaging role in ArtSound’s licensing saga as well.
It would be 16 years before another realistic opportunity would arise
for ArtSound to become a full-time community broadcaster. The social
and political networks that held the organization together all that time
were tested, but they proved resilient. There were several factors that
helped ensure ArtSound’s survival. First, the fight against what their
supporters and volunteers saw as a manifest injustice provided a good
deal of validation for ArtSound within the Canberra arts community.
Within days of being denied a broadcasting license, those at CSPR had
filed an appeal in Federal Court. The publicity involved in the controversy over the license award as well as the appeal greatly raised CSPR’s
profile. Further, it is clear from the documents filed for the appeal that
the process had strengthened the resolve and sharpened the pens of
CSPR’s founders. They did not simply argue that they were the better applicant. They argued that the sport and racing group were not
fit to hold a public broadcasting license because they were primarily a
commercial organization. They argued that ‘racing interests, including
ACT.TAB [sic], dominate and control the structure of the organization’, and because of this the proposed station ‘is not a community
initiative’ (Canberra Stereo Public Radio Incorporated, 1984b:1). Further, they argued that the very nature of what was then called ‘public
broadcasting’, but what is now called ‘community broadcasting’, was at
stake. If licenses were provided to organizations dominated by commercial entities, the very definition and philosophy of public broadcasting
would have to change. Justice Sheppard of the Federal Court agreed. He
stated that ‘there can be no question that the evidence establishes that
the prime purpose of the company seeking the licence is to foster racing [ . . . ] The consequence will be increased revenue to the authority
and to the clubs’ (‘Sports Radio Ruling Overturned’, 1985). While the
full court reversed this decision and the original license award stood,
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the Minister for Communications appeared to take a few lessons from
the controversy. Shortly thereafter, he initiated the long process of abolishing the different classes of community broadcasting licenses and
pushed the expansion of the community broadcasting sector along. He
proposed a series of legislative amendments to the Broadcasting Act
that would eventually make multiple community broadcasting licenses
available in most urban and regional areas (Duffy, 1985).
Second, the fact that CSPR was so close to gaining a license only
seemed to spur the supporters and volunteers to work harder. Given
that their extensive social and political networks were in place, they
decided to use them and use them aggressively. With the possibility of
more licenses being awarded, CSPR decided to continue its formal campaign to lobby the government for changes to the Broadcasting Act.
They began writing to the Commonwealth Ombudsman. They began
lobbying to change the rules on test broadcasts so they could be allowed
to make more regular programming. They kept up a campaign of public argument and criticism to shake new policies loose from the Federal
Government. They lobbied to change the thinking about community
radio licensing on the part of the government. Their meeting notes from
1985 and 1986 are replete with references to public statements made
by the Tribunal and the Minister about these issues. The President of
CSPR noted with some satisfaction that ‘[a]pparently there is a flurry of
activity at the Department of Communications in an attempt to answer
the Ombudsman’s request for information about the Department’s planning procedures, especially in relation to CSPR’ (Canberra Stereo Public
Radio, 1986). Their responses to the department’s letters were detailed
and sharp. It is clear that for several years the main business of CSPR
was concerned with a seemingly quixotic campaign to change the very
nature of Australia’s community broadcasting sector.6
Third, even though they weren’t ‘statutorily required’ to, they did
what they said they were going to do from the beginning: they made
radio. They reached an agreement with ‘Radio One – Print Handicapped
Radio in the ACT’ to broadcast a weekly arts magazine program. Radio
One found it an appealing way to meet their spoken word requirements
and ArtSound just wanted to get on air. The program was called ‘Fine
Tuning’ and was broadcast for one two-hour block per week. They produced 10 to 12 spoken word items per show and by September 1987 had
produced and broadcast over 250 such pieces on the arts in Canberra.
They interviewed artists, theater directors, musicians, conductors and
arts administrators. They recorded performances by local musicians and
ensembles, reviewed concerts, exhibitions, broadcast poetry and stories
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Of Communities and Constituencies
Enforcing and Evading Rationalization
by local writers and started producing what would eventually become
one of ArtSound’s most popular items, a five-minute round-up of arts
activities in the region that would eventually be called the ‘Arts Diary’
(Canberra Stereo Public Radio, 1987a, 1987b). They also began to create
another defining aspect of the organization, a state-of-the-art recording
studio that could be let out to local artists.
Then, when the rules regarding test broadcasts were relaxed, they
began broadcasting a ‘Festival of Music and the Arts’ every weekend for
a month, three times a year from 1989 to 1991. The festival expanded
to a 19-day ‘festival’ in late 1992, and then morphed into three months
of weekend ‘festivals’ offered only a few months later in March 1993.
And they waited. Finally, in October 1998, the Australian Broadcasting
Authority, the successor to the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT),
released a ‘Licence Area Plan’ for Canberra. It offered two new community radio licenses. While they received no special consideration
and faced a strong field of aspirant broadcasters, ArtSound succeeded.
Since 2000, the station’s activities in all of the above described areas
have expanded and improved. The organization has improved its grantwriting capacity, its broadcasting and recording infrastructure and its
programming. It continues to provide a fairly rigorous training program
for volunteers and remains as well organized as it was in those early
meetings.
Conclusion
The existential crises faced by each radio station noted here were caused
by a range of factors and were solved through the existing relationships each organization had with a variety of social networks. These
were the only options open to these organizations in which the state
acts as a market facilitator, not a guarantor of the public interest. The
case of ArtSound demonstrates the problems community radio organizations face, not just in terms of getting licensed but also in remaining
viable community organizations. The problems that arise when one
takes democracy seriously rest in the mundane and ordinary acts it
takes to exercise those freedoms, freedoms that grow out of the contradictions, contests and negotiations that exist between the world we
live in and the world we imagine. Community radio exists through
and because of these kinds of contests and contradictions. One inherent consequence of the deal community radio stations make with their
constituents is exactly this sort of public negotiation. The public participation and organizational openness on which community radio is
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founded inevitably brings a tenuous hold on the future. As a result
these organizations have little choice but to embrace what Liora Salter
has called a ‘multidimensional media politics’ (Salter, 1980). That is,
they must recognize their audiences as constituents who exist within
complex webs of power. They are not just consumers or listeners but
participants, and they are political constituents. In order to survive,
these stations must balance themselves carefully within the full range
of their participants, and recognize these participants as the people who
do (or may one day do) the work that keeps them going and gives
them purpose. They must offer their constituents a stake in the organization and accept the ways in which that agency is exercised, constantly
negotiating between many possible futures.
In recognizing this, they must then set about transforming those
forms of agency into conviviality, solidarity and the expressive and
organizational openness that will justify and validate the investments
of their constituents’ time, skills and imaginations. Community radio
exists in a sphere in which the difficulties encountered in trying to
construct a social network based on constituency relationships are not
simply helpful ideals. They are the whole point of the enterprise. It is
a broad and contradictory set of social facts that define the range of
practices for most of these radio stations and sustain them on the very
thin and volatile margins of a public culture that is constantly evolving
through rules and forces larger than all of us. The kind of cultural production upon which they base their existence becomes more and more
necessary even as the conditions needed to produce it become harder
and harder to maintain. In the second half of this book, I will set about
trying to show how these organizations are maintained, often against
all apparent good sense and seemingly reasonable expectation.
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Part II
Making Radio, Making Meaning
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4
Basically try and avoid the prural [sic] when talking to listenrs [sic]
The reason for this is that radio is a very personal and intimate
medium. It works best when used in this manner. In these days of
television, hi-fi etc, people seldom gather around the radio in groups –
Even if they do, it shouldn’t preclude you from talking as if to a single
person. A good idea is to imaging [sic] a friend, flatmate or relation
as your sole listener and direct your show at that person. Imagine a
different person for each show you do or for each hour of your show.
‘Guidelines for Announcers’, December 1976, 2XX1
Early on in this project, I went to conduct an interview with a longtime music presenter and volunteer at ArtSound FM. The presenter had
kindly agreed to take me through the process of preparing her drivetime mix program. We met in the station’s music library, and over the
course of about an hour she explained to me how all the sonic bits and
pieces of her two-hour program got assembled. The building in which
this radio station was housed at that time was tiny and cramped. As I sat
in the music library, I had a nearly comprehensive view of the entire
station, including the reception foyer, the editing rooms and the on-air
studio. During the interview, I noticed something that I would only later
recognize as important: the on-air studio had been almost completely
vacant of any noticeable human presence for the entire hour or so that
I had been conducting the interview.
This confronted me with a methodological conundrum. How do you
do ethnography in an empty room in which nothing seems to be happening? Is the on-air studio merely a conduit for meanings produced
elsewhere, or is there more to it than this? The problem got more confounding the more I thought about it in the intervening years. Radio
105
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Sound Like?
Making Radio, Making Meaning
often happens in empty rooms in which nothing appears to be happening. More than this, radio programming is a ceaseless torrent of sound
that continuously pours out from these often empty places for thousands of hours every year. We can barely even sample it for the purposes
of analysis. The best we can do is to drop a thimble in the stream and
hope that the resultant scraps of sound can be made sensible to others.
Further, the specifically musical content of this endless stream of sound
is very reasonably thought to be ontologically elsewhere; that is, the performances and recordings that make it up start their meaningful lives
elsewhere and continue them elsewhere. The mediation of these musical materials can often appear to be a transparent process that merely
acts as a vehicle for the spatial furtherance of their potential meaningfulness. Add to this the fact that the experience of radio happens at an
uncountable number of unknown other places that can only exist as a
comprehensible entity through an act of the imagination and we have
the makings of a very complicated problem. How do we make analytical
meaning and sense out of these mundane acts of mediation when they
are sometimes so hard to see, hear and find?
The second half of this book is devoted to addressing this question
by adding some material heft to the claims of the first half. Over these
three chapters, I will examine the sounds produced by the four radio
stations I have been studying and writing about between 2004 and the
present. In some cases, I will describe how and where these sounds were
produced. In others, I will tell you what they were made from and why
they were organized the way they were. In others, I will be able to align
what people have told me about their work, what I observed while it was
being made and what the resultant sounds felt like. In all cases, I will try
to tease out something far more elusive and subtle. I will try to explain
how these sounds become meaningful and why the particular kinds of
sounds produced by these stations are considered valid by those making
them. To do so, I will examine each of the four stations from which these
sounds emanate and explain how each station’s distinct aural profile has
grown from the kinds of conviviality described in the previous chapter
to become specifically contextualized forms of social solidarity, validated
through the very means that produced them in the first place.
Validation happens through the construction of a variety of social
relationships at each station. Beneath the immediate surface tangle
of the diverse sounds each station produces, lurks a coherent sonic
‘assemblage’, or particular combination of sonic, discursive, material,
technological, social and historical mediations that are the result of the
multitude of social relationships that hold each assemblage up (Born,
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2005: 8). This collection of relationships forms the context in which the
claims made by individual presenters and their organizations to some
credible form of representation to an organized public are made, tested
and assessed. It is within these social relationships that any claims to
truthfulness or sincerity go from hypothetical to actual. These claims
take a wide assortment of forms. Some presenters claim to represent
entire musical cultures, while others claim to uphold the banner of one
local scene or another. Some claim to continue a tradition of valued
radiophonic practice, while others imagine an entire way of life condensed into the carefully arranged sounds of the music they love. All
of the presenters I spoke to and observed made presumptions about
what listeners listened for and what aesthetic practices would reach
them. These presumptions are central to how the actual sounds of these
assemblages are produced. These presumptions are created in collaboration with the organization itself, guided by its rules, stated mission
and explicit and implicit values. The practices presenters use and the
meanings they make with music also rest on a series of larger, often
unexpressed, ideas about what music can and should do in the world.
My arguments, descriptions and explanations in the second half of
this book rest on a series of assumptions, several of which have already
been addressed. These bear brief reiteration in order to tie them more
specifically to the concerns which follow. I am arguing that the value
drawn from the aesthetic experience of music does not lie solely in the
intent of the producer, the materiality of the text, or the constructions
of the listener, but is substantially formed by the circumstantially specific relations between these formations and the means and character
of the multiple mediations to which music is made subject. In order to
figure out exactly what it is we are talking about when we talk about
‘playing music on the radio’ I will show how there are very specific
kinds of communicative gestures involved when music is played on the
radio. These shape how the presenter and the listener meet one another
through radio, a form of contact which I will examine by arguing that
it is a specifically aesthetic encounter. Finally, I will examine the range of
contextual factors that can tell us something important or definitional
about this encounter.
The constituent elements of the ways in which musical meaning is
made and mediated through radio broadcasting are varied and complex. They include the intentions of the presenters, implicit and explicit
presumptions about the expectations and experiences of the listener,
the context in which relationships between presenters and listeners are
made real, the structure and character of the organization which makes
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Making Radio, Making Meaning
these relationships possible and the many contextual factors which govern the longevity of the social relationships in question. Throughout
these three chapters, I am going to turn my attention to a series of
examples of radio-making that I have plucked from the endless torrents
of sound produced by all four radio stations I have studied in order to
build up real-world corollaries to the layers of thought and meaning I am
placing around these tangible pieces of human musical agency. This will
help us to understand what is it that we are actually talking about when
we talk about ‘playing music on the radio’.
Social aesthetics and the visceral ontology of radio
The first question I want to ask is what is the ‘it’ that I am talking about
when I am talking about playing music on the radio? As I suggested in
Chapter 1, the aural intimacy created by radio has no ‘place’ to it, collapsing as it does, the necessary and literal distance between presenter
and listener into the immediate visceral experience of the sounds they
are sharing in common (Kahn, 1992). Yet despite eliding the specificity
or actuality of the places from which the sounds flow, the experience of
radio does not eliminate that specificity. Radio always comes from somewhere else. We can more completely understand the sometimes empty
rooms through which those endless streams of sound flow through the
idea of what Marc Augé has influentially termed ‘non-places’ (Augé,
1995). Augé uses this term to draw a distinction between the kinds of
places traditionally constructed through ethnographic description and
those contemporary spaces which are characteristic of what he calls
‘supermodernity’, such as motorways, airport transit lounges and the
like. For Augé, anthropological places are purposeful, symbolically constructed spaces that are routinely invested with meaning to become
more or less stable places of identity and ritually reiterated expressions
of social order, such as churches, schools or memorials. ‘Non-places’, by
contrast, contain and enact ‘the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral’
(Augé, 1995: 78).
Augé does not pit places against non-places, but instead argues that
they exist in opposing polarities to one another; places are always
present or potential in non-places. Both are spaces within which we
continually reconstitute social relations (p. 78). As Augé notes, ‘the word
‘non-place’ designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces
formed in relation to certain ends (transport, commerce, leisure . . . ) and
the relations that individuals have with these spaces’ (p. 94). He notes
that ‘non-places mediate a whole mass of relations, with the self and
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with others, which are only indirectly connected with their purposes.
As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places
create solitary contractuality’ (p. 94). That is, there are formal and
informal rules, expectations and understandings, that shape the use of
non-places and these are experienced both individually and collectively.
We can see this very clearly in the empty on-air studio I evoked
above. Most radio listening is a solitary experience, but it is also a
collective one. All listeners hear the same sounds at the same time,
and each can imagine some larger experiential communion with others. The relationships mediated by a non-place such as an on-air studio
are anonymous and unquantifiable in any direct or meaningful way.
We can’t know who else is listening, when they tune in or out, or in
what configurations. These sounds transcend any individual experience
of them as they will continue if we aren’t listening. The non-place of the
on-air studio is a transitory, present-tense space, a referent or connecting
form for things that are meant to happen elsewhere. If anthropological places are founded on what Augé calls the ‘complicities’ of shared
experience, understanding and identity repeatedly evoked and restored
over time, then non-places are ruled by the exigencies of the immediate (p. 101). The empty on-air studio is a space through which we
enact the transforming work of human agency through sound. Playing
music on the radio is an act that makes a great deal of human agency
momentarily real.
However, a community radio station needs to create larger forms of
collective and collaborative will that will allow it to survive. How can
the non-place of an on-air studio do this? To answer this, we need to
understand how the discourses produced by these radio stations create
the conditions for the construction of meaning. Then we need to understand how these forms of meaning produce durable social relationships.
We can know how they create the conditions for the construction of
meaning when can understand the nature of the encounter between
presenter and listener as a specifically aesthetic one. It is this kind of
encounter that has the potential to create and maintain what Jacques
Rancière calls ‘communities of sense’ (Rancière, 2009:31). Rancière uses
this term to mean the ways in which groups of people create recognizable patterns of sensual experience using heterogeneous elements drawn
from different spheres of experience. The ability of people to make sense
from the range of materials that surround them helps to form ‘symbolic
universes’ which ‘constitute a means of recognition’ for those who live
within them (Augé, 1995:33). As Rancière also notes, communities of
sense can provide us both with a kind of continuity in our perception
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Making Radio, Making Meaning
and understanding, but also with what he calls ‘breaks in our perception’
based on specific relationships between the expected patterns of aesthetic communication and unexpected ones. It is the tension between
the two that is constantly changing and challenging our existing ways of
framing of the world (Rancière, 2009:38–42). It is here that the potential
for a civil or democratic social aesthetics exists.
The symbolic universes in which the radio stations under examination here exist are pervaded by a range of what Comaroff and Comaroff
call ‘discursive flows’, or rich streams of local, regional and global
‘narratives, incidents, activities, dramas, material exchanges, conversations and representations embedded in the “natural” discourse of
different and complementary public spheres’ (Comaroff and Comaroff,
2003:165–6). They form a kind of continuous circumstance within
which we are all subsumed. These flows form complex networks of
communicative connection and rupture, consensus and disagreement,
familiarity and strangeness. They shape our perceptions and contextualize that which we recognize as meaningful, valuable or true. We experience them through our various communities of sense, which help
us make some kinds of communicative gestures and relations possible. They define the conditions for the aesthetic encounter between the
radio station and its public.
While these flows are inherently open and flexible, they have within
them what the Comaroffs call ‘focal centres’, or moments of articulation
(p. 166). These focal points ‘are the crucibles in which contemporary vernacular concerns—whatever they may be, whatever phenomenal scale—are construed, enacted, played out, socially contextualized’
(p. 164). It is these moments of focus and articulation through which a
community of sense can cohere and begin to produce durable social relationships. Community radio programs often constitute such moments
of clarity, focus and articulation. They are always carrying a lot more
than their sonic content. They carry certain implicitly present expectations and recognitions about the social relationships they embody.
Importantly, the programs can also carry certain implications about
what kinds of communicative gestures can and should be present
in these relationships. To put it simply, articulation is worth little
without recognition and understanding. There is little point in saying something if you don’t think you will be understood and taken
seriously. When radio programs are validated through the means of
communicative action described in the previous chapter, then the constituency relationships I also described can begin to form and persist
over time.
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I have found a series of moments of focus and articulation that the
music presenters I have interviewed and observed have drawn out of
the larger, more diffuse discursive flows of music that surround them.
I examine these in detail in the rest of this book. These moments of
focus are specifically aesthetic in that they are articulated through the
music these people play on the radio. As I suggested in Chapter 2, the
presenters don’t simply say what they mean in words. The sense they are
trying to make is expressed and experienced as sensual patterns of sound
that are understood within the particular communities of sense that act
to validate them. Several of the more pervasive ideals that shaped these
moments of focus at all four stations I have studied are an ethic of service to a larger public, an attachment to particular kinds of localism,
efforts to place other people’s music in new and unusual configurations to expand a listener’s knowledge and understanding of music, and
efforts to inculcate others into their communities of sense.
These moments of focus and articulation are often hard to separate
out from one another and are often expressed in complex and even contradictory ways. I have found presenters who present music that they
might not particularly like but which they think is important for others
to hear. I have spoken to presenters who are convinced their work makes
no difference but who continue making radio for years on the off chance
it might help someone think differently about the world. Many presenters seem to want to make radio only to express their own personal
musical tastes and values. Yet not one of the presenters I spoke to across
any of the four stations I studied ever suggested it was acceptable only to
use radio to express themselves. Some called their imposed constraints
‘staying relevant’, while others simply called them ‘responsibility’. The
ways in which presenters’ own tastes were formed and expressed were
not simply ‘theirs’, but always expressed an implicitly present commonality. These kinds of discursive flows underlie, shape and are embodied
in the programs themselves. They inform and shape all the sonic forms
in which the social relationships on which these organizations rest are
made real. These are by no means a comprehensive set of ideas even
about music present within these organizations, much less an even
vaguely representative sample of the full range of programming produced by these radio stations. The programs I examine represent only
a small collection of the sounds it might be possible to hear at each
station. However, in examining a range of music programming from
these four community radio stations, I will try to show more precisely
the nature of the forms of social solidarity and collective will that make
possible the civil and democratic aesthetics I see existing in these places.
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Making Radio, Making Meaning
Earlier in this book, I suggested that the very idea of the ‘problem of
the public’ rests on the fact that publics look very different depending on what a radio station might want to get out of them. In what
follows I will present brief portraits of each of the four radio stations
studied in this book. Then I will describe how one characteristic program from each station sounds, in order to explain how each station
makes meaning out of those sounds. My goal is to explain why it is that
each radio station, despite imagining their publics in such manifestly
similar ways, nevertheless produces very different sounds. Each does so
by imagining its public to exist in a distinct world of circumstance, made
tangible to us by the many discursive flows that surround us and constitute so much of our social relations. Most importantly and decisively,
each station presumes their listeners are there to listen and to learn, and
specifically to learn something new about music. The moments of articulation each creates are produced for this one overarching reason. Yet
each also presumes that its public is different and experiences the world
differently. They just know that their community of sense will respond
to these sounds made in this way in this time and place.
2SER and FBi: Emerging from the shadow of JJJ
We’ll start in Sydney with 2SER (Sydney Educational Radio) and FBi (Free
Broadcasting Incorporated). These stations represent two very different
assemblages of radio-making. Despite the fact that the historical trajectory of each organization is substantially different, both 2SER and
FBi were born in the shadow of the legendary Sydney radio station
2JJ. 2JJ was an experiment in ‘youth radio’ undertaken by Australia’s
state broadcaster, the ABC, as part of a much broader expansion of
radio programming explicitly designed to challenge what was a staid
and reflexively conservative commercial radio establishment. 2JJ was
licensed in Sydney as an AM station in 1975. In 1980, 2JJ become 2JJJ as
part of a move to begin use of the newly available FM band, the use of
which was much delayed in Australia due to the resistance and power of
commercial AM broadcasters. The press secretary for a government minister at the time was excited by the prospect of a youth radio station,
arguing that rock could ‘be the language of cultural radicalism’. The
new station, he said, would ‘put people in touch with their emotions’
and might ‘free them from an automatic acceptance of the rhythms
of urban and suburban life. In a very real sense, JJ is a deconditioning
agent’ (quoted in Inglis, 1983:375–6). The ‘jean-clad’ presenters on 2JJJ
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Presumptions of listening, practices of presenting
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played ‘whole albums of rock instead of only single tracks’ and talked
‘about the music in what was for the ABC an unusually informal way’
(pp. 375–6). The broader programming on 2JJJ was innovative for the
time and provoked both passionate support and vicious condemnation
(pp. 375–6; see also ‘Double Jay: The First Year,’ n.d.; Austin, 2005). 2JJJ
became a popular Sydney institution. When, in the late 1980s and early
’90s, the ABC expanded the station into Triple J, a ‘National Youth Network’, the programming was radically reformed into more mainstream
fare, leaving a substantial absence in Sydney radio. Both 2SER and FBi
tried in their own ways to follow on from 2JJJ, which alternately acted
as pioneer, template and foil for the community stations. For 2SER, 2JJJ
acted as a kind of telling stylistic contrast. 2SER was far more explicit
and constructive about its politics than was 2JJJ. For FBi, 2JJJ acted as a
forerunner and model for a Sydney-focused ‘youth radio’ station, albeit
in a form of faux radical chic well tempered to the new consumerist
epoch.
2SER was licensed in 1979 as part of a larger effort on the part of the
Australian government to create what it called a ‘public broadcasting’
sector distinct from both commercial and state-run media. The goal was
to have prominent educational broadcasters in each major city in the
country. The effort was in some respects a political compromise that
would respond to widespread pressure to open up the Australian media,
but without the controversy the 2JJJ caused. As a result, mostly ‘fine’ or
‘classical’ music stations or ‘educational’ stations were licensed. 2SER’s
structure and early publications and program guides bear this out. The
Board of Directors was comprised entirely of academics from Sydney tertiary institutions. Those who produced and presented programs for the
new station included the United Nations Association of Australia, the
Workers’ Educational Association, the Art Gallery of New South Wales,
the Aboriginal Education Council and a range of tertiary institutions
including the University of Sydney’s Department of Adult Education,
Macquarie University and what is now called the University of Technology Sydney; the latter two are still major institutional supporters (2SER,
1979a: 2–3).
The station’s self-presentation was sober and worthy, as was a good
deal of the programming. The program schedules from the first five years
or so provided listeners a panoply of news, current affairs programs on
human rights and international development, economics, indigenous
rights, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, labor rights, a lot of in-depth
media criticism, extensive coverage of environmental issues including
an extensive series on climate change, strong science programming and
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Making Radio, Making Meaning
Well, what is this alleged difference? The thing you’ll notice is the
amount of talking we’ll be doing. Not lecturing. Not speech-making.
Not classroom stuff. But good, solid, down-to-earth informative talk.
2SER’s an educational broadcasting station. But that doesn’t mean we
have to be dull.
(2SER, 1980:12)
2SER’s early music programming, most of which was confined to latenight slots, focused on presenting music that did not get much airplay
elsewhere in Sydney. This included classic and contemporary folk, local
and international jazz, survey programs of ‘progressive, avant-garde,
spontaneous and electronic music’, a particular and long-standing focus
on country music, a film music show and a series of speciality music programs that traced the lives of closely related artists or presented close and
focused programs on specific genres. This included programs on figures
such as George Gershwin and Stephen Sondheim, in a series about the
American musical, and a series of programs on Afro-Brazilian popular
music, as well as forays into Afro-Caribbean and west African popular
music (2SER, 1979b:14–19; 2SER, 1981:6–14).
By the mid-1980s, 2SER’s music programming had begun to expand
the kinds of music on offer as well as making the music speciality programs increasingly prominent in the program schedule. The range of
music presented at 2SER expanded to include a swag of new music, especially from independent labels and unsigned bands, but also electronic
dance music programs, vastly expanded country music programming,
as well as bluegrass, folk, soul, blues, jazz, rock, punk and the expanded
presence of an important kind of music program, the specialist music
program in which one specific type of music would be the exclusive
subject. These kinds of programs usually relied on the knowledge of a
single presenter and would gradually become a staple of 2SER’s program
schedule. They included shows such as ‘Tokyo Hitbeat’, exploring new
Japanese rock and punk, ‘From Funk to Punk’, which played a range
styles that either grew into or from rock and roll, and shows such as
‘The Demo Show’, ‘Local Product’ and ‘Australian Independent Music’,
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individual programs produced about Asian, Latin American and African
cultures and politics. 2SER also presented programs produced by and
for members of Sydney’s Chinese, Serbian, Croatian, Greek Orthodox,
Jewish and Portuguese communities. In the early years, the station struggled to gain enough subscribers and to convince people that 2SER was
‘different’:
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all of which featured local, unsigned and independent bands (2SER,
1984, pp. 22–33). Importantly, the development of 2SER’s music programming between the mid-1980s and the present clearly follows the
tracks laid down in the station’s first five years of broadcasting. A thoroughgoing review of the station’s operations and policies in 1985–6 set
in place the music policy which had been developing slowly for several
years. The policy stated that 2SER was committed to presenting music
programming designed to:
explain and illuminate music itself; reveal insights into the social,
political and cultural aspects of societies; encourage a discriminating
approach and expand the musical horizons of the audience.
(2SER, 1986)
Over the next several years, the 2SER program guide reflected an expanding range of efforts to accomplish these goals. The series of ‘Music
Specials’ continued, featuring programs on individuals such as record
producer John Hammond Jnr, a feature program exploring the links
and mutual influence between the music and fashion worlds and an
extended interview with the composer and artist Laurie Anderson on
the release of her Mr Heartbreak album. By the late 1980s the 2SER program grid took on the broad outlines of the form it has had up to the
present, with talks and music programming presented in alternating
blocks throughout the day. Speciality music programs ran from 12 pm
to 4 pm and 7 pm to 10 pm weekdays exclusively. They comprised most
of the 10 pm to 12 am slots most days, and overnight mix programs
ran from 12 am until 6.30 am. Within these blocks of music programming, individual programs have come and gone with some regularity.
The huge blocks of country music have long since been replaced with an
ever shifting line-up of hip-hop shows, DJ sets and break beat programs.
But many stalwarts remain, such as experimental and electronic music,
so-called alt-country, local and independent music programs, roots and
blues music as well as a range of genres from around the world. 2SER
has taken to producing a substantial number of programs which mix
music, arts and culture events, interviews and current affairs reporting under the organizational banner ‘Real Music, Real Radio’. Former
Program Manager Ian Coombe noted in 2004 that the station ‘made a
conscious departure from an activist, underground base’. Coombe suggested that 2SER’s ‘talk programs have become more challenging and
considered. Not more conservative, but less polemical, less soap-box,
than they were in the early years’ (O’Keefe, 2004:26).
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What Does a Civil Society Sound Like?
Making Radio, Making Meaning
FBi is one of the youngest urban community radio stations in
Australia. As noted in the previous chapter, it began broadcasting in
2003, after years of struggle to establish a firm hold on its license and to
construct the necessary infrastructure to fulfill the terms of that license.
The central fact of their license is their very large broadcast signal, which
covers almost the entire Sydney region, a massive geographical catchment that can potentially reach over 4 million people. It is one of the
most powerful broadcast signals ever given to a community radio station
(Javes, 2003a). According to its founders, when 2JJJ went national, there
was a huge hole left in Sydney radio. The expansion of so-called ‘youth
radio’ to cover the whole of Australia was experienced as a sharp loss by
many in Sydney. The core group of people who originally decided to create FBi made two key decisions that have shaped and defined the station
in important ways. The first was to create a youth-oriented radio station
at which ‘youth culture is not defined by age, but rather by an interest in new and innovative cultural expression’, and to do so in Sydney,
by pledging half of its music programming to Australian music and
half of that to music made in Sydney (Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), 2001a:35). FBi itself suggested as much in a recent pitch to
potential sponsors: ‘We speak to the young “Creative Class” who are
seeking new music, emerging artists and alternative sounds’ (FBi, 2011).
Beyond this, FBi also staked its claims to representing ‘Sydney arts and
culture’, not simply music, by managing to establish secure marketing
connections across the city’s multiple art scenes. This showed in FBi’s
early and aggressive sponsorship of long-established events such as the
Sydney Film Festival and the Sydney Festival, as well as newer highprofile events such as the Vivid Festival, the many well-attended inner
Sydney neighborhood festivals and a continuing series of what are now
referred to as ‘boutique’ music festivals strewn across the city and the
calendar year.
FBi’s self-presentation has been substantially different from 2SER’s.
In the beginning, FBi rarely used the term ‘community radio’ to describe
itself officially, preferring the term ‘independent radio’ or at a pinch the
more generic-sounding ‘community-based radio’. According to some
within the station, the very term ‘community radio’ spoke of ‘an obsolete aesthetic’. They only seemed to fall back on the ‘community radio’
tag when things were financially desperate and they needed to remind
their listeners that they had a direct stake in the survival of the station.
I was told bluntly, and tautologically, by several staff members shortly
after the station got up and running that the very idea of ‘community radio’ was no longer relevant to the ‘youth’ FBi was targeting and
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intended to serve. Instead of pursuing ‘communities’, FBi was pursuing demographics. They did so through a graphically sophisticated and
content-heavy website that featured all manner of social media mod
cons from live streaming to chat rooms to podcasts to free music downloads to Myspace links to Facebook events and Twitter feeds, all of which
have come and gone in line with the expectations and moods of their
core demographic.
Their design identity grew first from a splash page, an introductory
page to their larger website, that was used for several years but which
has since fallen from favor. The images, all designed by local artists,
traded on a hyperbolic self-image that was calculated to be well over the
top. Using catch phrases such as ‘Kill Your Idols, Dig the New Breed’,
‘Freaks Become Icons’ and ‘Fresh as a Fucking Daisy’ while posting their
logo liberally across each artfully evocative image, the pages conveyed
nothing so much as branded attitude. The station managed to tread
a fine line between arrogant self-regard and sarcastic disregard by asking ‘all wannabe artists are encouraged to submit photos, images and
designs that reflect the city in all its flavours—either creating something
from scratch or sending an existing artwork or photo that just fits the
bill’ (FBi, 2003b). The images drew on all manner of street art styles,
from the ghostly silhouettes of stencil art to the sharp day-glo outlines
of comic book images and the puffy tags of graffiti. They also displayed a
vast range of manipulated photographic images that placed the station’s
radiating waves logo throughout an illustrative collection of Sydney’s
sprawling networks of laneways, music venues and iconic locations,
symbolically and simultaneously claiming the city’s space and creative
life as its own. It was a bold and optimistic gesture for an organization
that, as I noted in the previous chapter, almost never got off the ground.
FBi’s sponsorship network was touted from the start. The network of
those willing to put their names to the fledgling venture was by any
measure impressive. The list included major record labels such as SonyBMG, Universal, EMI-Virgin, smaller labels such as Shock, Vitamin, Ivy
League and Inertia, local heavyweight media store JB Hi-Fi, and numerous venues and festival promoters. Its board of directors boasted an
imposing range of interests and experience, including producers of highprofile music festivals and events, arts and music promoters, marketing
and management specialists and the former Station Manager for 2JJJ,
who oversaw its expansion to a national network (FBi, 2003a). It was
sponsors like these that made FBi’s forays into building a base of listeners and subscribers credible enterprises, mostly through an uncanny
ability to garner a great deal of attention for itself.
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What Does a Civil Society Sound Like?
Making Radio, Making Meaning
FBi’s ability to make itself known throughout Sydney’s crowded media
environment has been a strong aspect of its survival. For example, the
station sponsored a continuing series of innovative live music events
that has confirmed its credentials, not only as a repository for music
and the arts but also as an important facilitator of high-profile creative projects. In only its first year, the station secured its own stage
for unsigned Sydney bands at the Livid Festival, then one of Australia’s
largest music and arts festivals. They hosted their own evening of music
at the Beck Festival Bar of the Sydney Festival, an extremely popular
event which has continued to the present, and they have sponsored a
series of fundraising nights at major inner city music venues that helped
launch the station to their carefully targeted audience. Since 2004, FBi’s
efforts have only become more ambitious and inventive. In addition to a
series of unique CD releases of live sets from local venues by both local
and international artists, the station also hosted their own live on-air
block party, a one-off ‘Club Night’ called ‘Sydney Underground’ featuring ‘Sydney’s hottest independent bands’, VJs, DJs and performance
artists, and a night of live radio plays, the latter two set at the Sydney
Opera House’s ‘edgy’ venue called ‘The Studio’.
Their most audacious publicity stunt was the 2009 ‘A$K Richard’ campaign, in which they offered $50,000 to anyone who could convince
Richard Branson to give the station $1 million. The campaign, created
by a local PR firm, was a characteristic expression of FBi’s careful, studied
tone of insolence and humor. Under a blue stencil outline of Branson’s
familiar flowing hair and goatee, the text read:
Right now, FBi needs a million bucks, so we thought ‘F%$k it, let’s ask
Richard Branson’ the billionaire, philanthropic, stunt-pulling businessman who loves attention. To do so, we need your help to give
him some. We don’t care how you do it – just get him to give us the
cash and you’ll take home $50k.
(FBi, n.d.)
The story become international news when ‘an unidentified Aussie girl’
was said to have swum several miles to get to his private Caribbean
island (AAP, 2009; Lake, 2009). The only problem, of course, is that the
campaign was a scam. Despite Branson’s insistence and FBi’s amateurish dissembling, there was no such ‘Aussie girl’, no daring swim and
Branson never offered the station $1 million. He did offer several ‘generous prizes’ along with the publicity coup the station was after. The
prizes were supplied by Branson’s new international airline, which just
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so happened to be starting up new routes to London and Los Angeles
around the time of the campaign (Crook, 2009). In his live, on-air ‘new
subscriber’ interview, Branson managed to mention four of his product
lines in quick succession on the non-commercial, but necessarily compliant, ‘community-based’ radio station (‘Richard Branson Interviewed
on FBi’, 2009). Perhaps more substantially, the escapade put a fine point
on the station’s desperate struggle to pay off the debt it had accumulated during its long gestation period in order to come to rest on a more
stable foundation. Around the same time, over a hundred local bands
organized a series of live shows to benefit the station. The successful
series then evolved into a permanent venue called the ‘FBi Social’, featuring the same kinds of bands and artists that FBi plays on the air. The
consequences marshaling a substantial portion of the local music scene
saved the station from the devastating loss of corporate sponsorship in
the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Those who have run FBi between its launch in 2003 and the present
have not been shy about acting like a commercial enterprise but have
been very shy about talking like one. Those representing FBi in the
media act every bit as ‘educational’ as those at 2SER. When asked about
FBi’s fifth birthday, the music director said that FBi was ‘driven by passion and enthusiasm . . . We’re not just about reflecting the city back
to itself – we want to move the city forward. We want to do that by
jumping on music that we think is exciting’ (Zuel, 2008). In a separate
interview, he suggested that ‘more than anything, we provide access for
the music community. We try and show people that there’s amazing
music in this city and that it’s easy to get off the couch and engage
with it . . . We will listen to a song in a vacuum and then decide how
best to use it’ (Zwi, 2010:12). Despite the purported detachment, FBi has
been increasingly effective at shaping Sydney’s music scene throughout its brief history, primarily by demonstrating its ability to provide
the requisite context for its sponsors’ lines of merchandise. The music
labels, venue operators, festival promoters and art galleries get a lot
back for their sponsorship. While the community radio licensing regime
in Australia prohibits commercial relationships from determining what
gets on air, FBi has painted an intricate mesh of fine lines around its
many efforts. By and large, it has worked. A Sydney journalist who had
followed the station’s twists and turns for several years concluded in
2004 that ‘the consensus among musicians, promoters, record producers
and music fans seems to be that FBi has more than met expectations’,
with one local record store owner suggesting that ‘FBi has helped put
Sydney back on the musical map’ (Javes, 2004:3).
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What Does a Civil Society Sound Like?
Making Radio, Making Meaning
2SER is an institutional and comparatively stable organization. While
they have faced their fair share of crises, they have maintained a certain
educational ethos in their programming throughout their existence. FBi,
independent and not afraid of the carefully calibrated publicity campaign, is always trying to keep itself running just ahead of the curve of
perceived ‘youth’ coolness. It is constantly constructing and reconstructing the ‘newness’ of its public as much as responding to it. Each station
sees its respective and overlapping publics as embedded in larger discursive flows that constitute the experience of their worlds in very different
ways, and both produce programming that reflects this, despite the clear
commonality in their distinct approaches to ‘educating’ the public. 2XX
and ArtSound FM in Canberra also approach their work with the same
mission: to educate, inform and expand their listeners’ knowledge of
the world. They do so in ways that are more confrontational in the case
of 2XX, and more professional in the case of ArtSound.
2XX and ArtSound FM: Music or politics?
2XX began its long and occasionally tortuous existence when the student radio station at the Australian National University (ANU) began
broadcasting on the AM band in 1976 as part of the first round of licensing of ‘public’ radio stations. While at first their license was classed
as ‘experimental’, and they faced the real possibility of dissolution
in their first years of broadcasting, they received a full-time class ‘C’
license in 1978 (2XX, 1977c). Along the way, 2XX has faced several
arson attacks on its transmitter, public attacks by local and national
politicians, several difficult political splits within the organization and
a 20-year struggle to move from the AM band to the FM. A description of the program ‘Interchange’, which ran from 1976 until 1982,
will suffice to present the broad outlines of 2XX’s talks programming
as well as the nature and extent of its existing community networks in
its early years. The program was run by an ‘education collective’ from
ANU’s Centre for Continuing Education (CCE). Among the members of
the collective were CCE staff and ANU students, as well as journalists
and editors from the local alternative press (Kriegel, 1979:7). The program topics were to include ‘social and community change and new
developments in the Third World and how we can learn for them’, a
story about a Prime Ministerial trip to China, an examination of the
church in South Africa, a discussion of elections around the world and
examinations of East Timorese society, the Polish film industry, models of alternative societies and interviews with a group of ‘squatters’
at a government-run hostel in Canberra (Kriegel, 1979:7). ‘Interchange’
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Throughout the world, the vast majority of people have no control
whatsoever over the decisions that most deeply and directly affect
their lives. They sell their labour power while others who own or
control the means of production accumulate wealth, make the laws
and use the whole machinery of the State to perpetuate and reinforce
their privileged positions.
(2XX, 1979a)
Despite the rhetoric, the range of community organizations making use
of the station through programming partnerships or interviews early on
was by no means restricted to the left end of the political spectrum. Partners included local and national arts organizations representing music,
theater, visual arts groups, political and social welfare groups, trades and
labor councils, sporting groups and art galleries, music ensembles and
venues. It was this array of civil society organizations that would begin
to shape 2XX’s identity.
The station’s programming grid from its earliest editions appears similar to 2SER’s. Large blocks of mixed-genre programming, including
music, news and interviews, alternated with ‘magazine of the air’ style
programs such as ‘Interchange’. 2XX also provided a large range of
public lectures offered live or recorded, topical programming about current events and politics, formal educational courses such as two series
on child development and the Japanese language, and shows dedicated to specific topics such as the extensive long-term coverage of the
global solidarity movement and a multi-year set of programs on class
conflict in Australia which ran under the title ‘If Blood Should Stain
the Wattle’. Also, 2XX featured 90 minutes of non-English language
programs every weekday evening, a constant feature of the station’s
programming through to the present (2XX, 1977a; 2XX, 1977b; 2XX,
1977c; 2XX, 1977d; 2XX, 1978b).
The organization’s role in its early years as Canberra’s only ‘public
broadcaster’ also meant that it produced programs similar to 2SER’s
offerings on environmental issues, women’s issues, race relations,
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provides a reasonable lens through which to understand the broad scope
of 2XX’s current affairs programming throughout its existence, which,
while resembling the educational tenor of 2SER, was already pushing
very strongly to the left from the beginning. One edition of ‘Doublextra
News’ from 1979, the magazine for station subscribers, summed up the
station’s mission under the title ‘Self-Management (and the Function of
2XX)’:
Making Radio, Making Meaning
aboriginal issues and international development and human rights
programming as well. From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, ‘public
broadcasters’ such as 2XX were meant to cater to a broad diversity of
interests not addressed elsewhere. ‘Doublextra News’ provided extensive coverage of upcoming programming, but also in-depth writing on
issues raised by that programming, including a good deal of writing on
music, media history and politics, and news from the world of community broadcasting in Australia and internationally. 2XX was not just a
‘local’ radio station. It produced a substantial print periodical that did
not merely supplement or even complement the radio programming
but constituted a media forum in its own right. For a fairly small, and at
that time, somewhat marginal town such as Canberra, 2XX was of great
significance for its subscribers and the larger community.
2XX’s early music programming, like 2SER’s, was innovative for the
time. By their own measure, they offered ‘more than background music’.
They provided the kind of music programming ‘offered by no other station in the Canberra area’ (2XX, 1977b:4–5). In addition to the music
offerings that accompanied the blocks of morning and afternoon mix
programs, 2XX offered specialist music programs in the late evenings
and at weekends. The latter were assigned their own days of the week,
with Monday set aside for ‘Classics’, Tuesday for ‘Traditional Folk’,
Wednesday for ‘Contemporary Jazz’, Thursday for ‘Blues’ and Friday
for ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’. They also offered shows dedicated to 1950s and ’60s
nostalgia, rock, big band, soul, medieval and avant-garde music (2XX,
1977b:4–5). They presented interviews with musicians such as Stéphane
Grappelli, Jean-Luc Ponty, The Commodores and Renée Geyer, but also
programs introducing new styles such as punk and new wave to their
audiences as early as 1977, a time when it was very difficult even to get
such recordings in Australia, much less get them played on air (2XX,
1977b:4–5; 2XX, 1977d). 2XX also offered local musicians the opportunity to play live in a specially constructed studio and sent out producers
with tape recorders to capture live performances in local venues by the
many national and international musicians who would travel through
Canberra while shuttling between Melbourne and Sydney. ‘Doublextra
News’ included concert and record reviews of new acts and new releases.
One edition featured a three-page report on music radio in New York
from 1977 written by 2XX’s chief engineer. He profiled one station in
particular, the legendary Pacifica station WBAI, pointedly noting its
‘astonishing similarity’ to 2XX in its open approach to programming
and its efforts to support local music events as well as playing forms
of music not played elsewhere (2XX, 1978a). The impression given by
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the healthy collection of documents 2XX has produced over the years is
of an organization managing a broad range of discursive flows from all
around the world to a dedicated local audience that was not shy about
critiquing the station and demanding more from them.
2XX’s music programming evolved in ways somewhat similar to
2SER’s during the 1980s. More country music programs were added, as
was a reggae program, a ‘trad jazz’ show, a continuing series of music
specials profiling artists such as Ed Kuepper, The Fall and Brian Eno,
and a music review program designed to provide critique and assessment of the performance of classical music. They also instigated, of
all things, the ‘XX Chartzz’, a standard-looking chart used for several
years to highlight favored artists. There was one small proviso. The chart
positions were ‘entirely subjective’, and ‘no responsibility is accepted
by the editors for the value judgements of the Chart Compiler’, making these charts an intriguing reflection of the musical culture inside
2XX (2XX, 1979b). 2XX’s music in this period featured such artists
as The Angels, Ian Dury, Joy Division, Patti Smith, Redgum, Graham
Parker, The Sports, Mental As Anything and as a growing range of ska
and reggae artists. In support of ‘their music’, 2XX also began sponsoring an increasing number of music events, such as regular nights at
The Civic Hotel and the ANU Bar, and a series of one-off events and
fundraisers using traditional rock shows, folk concerts and bush dances
as their chosen vehicles. Music features in ‘Doublextra News’ supported
and expanded on these efforts providing extensive coverage of developments in Australian, British and American music through interviews
with artists such as Howard Devoto, The Go-Betweens, Jerry Jeff Walker
and the Gang of Four (2XX, 1980a; 2XX, 1980b; 2XX, 1981a; 2XX,
1981b).
By the late 1980s, the music programming had evolved to include
much larger blocks of speciality music programming each weekday
evening and the weekends from the mid- to late afternoon until late.
The programming expanded to include a Monday night slot for experimental radio programming, not just experimental music, expanded
offerings of Afro-Caribbean music going well beyond reggae and ska to
include dancehall, soca and calypso. New entrants included Canberra’s
first metal and hip-hop programs, the latter also presenting house and
go-go along the way. At the same time, shows dedicated to new jazz,
folk, country and rock-derived styles proliferated (‘2XX Communique’,
1986a:11–13, 1986b:15–18; 2XX, 1987, 1989). From the late 1990s to
the present, similar types of evolutionary changes appeared on the
program grid. There were slightly more personally defined genre-based
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What Does a Civil Society Sound Like?
Making Radio, Making Meaning
programs, including popular music from the Pacific islands, world beats
and Latin beats programs, goth, punk, metal and its many, many subgenres, more time for house, dance, techno, hip-hop and their many,
many subgenres, as well as new ambient electronic music programs. Yet,
with 2XX, there have been some programming types that have persisted.
2XX still provides folk music from Australia, the UK, Ireland and the
USA, country music from all over, music shows by and for Australian
aboriginal peoples and an impressive constancy in its offerings of
myriad forms of jazz, swing and big band.
This brings us to ArtSound FM, also in Canberra. While I dealt with
perhaps the central fact of ArtSound’s history, its epic struggle to gain a
full-time broadcasting license, I have yet to deal with the way in which
its programming has evolved over the life of the organization, nor have
I dealt with the circumstances of the birth of the organization, following
an ugly split within 2XX in the early 1980s. If we go back to some of
ArtSound’s earliest planning documents, we can see the template for
most of the station’s future programming emerging very early. A list of
‘Basic Concepts’ the organization was to pursue presented an ambitious
range of objectives. Of particular interest, however, are the following:
1. Programs – of specialty music, about music, the arts, craft, theatre,
drama, design, national heritage, music education;
2. Emphasis on local artists, performers, craftsmen etc;
3. Emphasis on Australian content;
4. Friendly and competent presentation;
...
10. To have a presence in the community;
11. Live broadcasts and live recordings.
(Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio Steering
Committee, 1982a)
Similarly, the explanatory sheet entitled ‘Specialty Music: What
Do We Mean?’ provides a clear outline of what would eventually become
ArtSound’s stock in trade:
1. Pre-classical–renaissance, baroque, medieval; 2. Classical–romantic,
modern; 3. Electronic-experimental; 4. Jazz; 5. Folk–traditional,
folkoric, revival; 6. Country music; 7. Sacred music–gospel, choral,
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While these two documents were drawn up as part of a larger brainstorming session, they show a certain prescience. Over the next two
decades, ArtSound would stay very close to their original ideals. There
are at least two reasons for this. First, these ideals were expressed repeatedly and with unusual clarity and consistency over a very long period
of time, and, despite their best efforts, those who created and maintained ArtSound in the long pre-license era had a lot of time to practice
implementing them before gaining a full-time broadcasting license.
The main idea behind the development of ArtSound’s programming
was that Canberra was ‘coming of age’ and the growing arts community deserved the ‘greater diversity and depth of cultural programming’
enjoyed in other urban centers (Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio Steering Committee, 1982b; Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio, 1984/85:2;
Wallace-Crabbe, 1983). As a publicity letter from 1983 argued:
There is no doubt that Canberra’s cultural life has blossomed in the
last ten years, to the point where it is recognized as a significant
centre for cultural activity in Australia. Expansion of the Schools
of Music and Art, the opening of the Australian National Gallery,
establishment of professional theatre and dance companies, and significant maturing of the crafts, ensure that Canberra will continue to
grow as a creative and cultural centre. Yet the Nation’s Capital is the
only major city in Australia without a local FM public radio station.
(Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio Steering Committee, 1983)
ArtSound’s solution to this problem was to create a program schedule with blocks of programming styles alternating throughout the day.
During their first round of test broadcasts in 1983, each weekday featured a morning music magazine program followed by ‘Personal Choice’
and ‘FM Morning’, a music mix program. This was followed by three
hours of topical programs on the arts, education and science, and ‘FM
Afternoon’, another music mix program. After a brief interlude for a children’s hour, the rest of the schedule alternated between arts interview
and discussion programs and music programs. In the evenings, the programming featured live performances recorded by ArtSound volunteers
in local music venues. The weekends featured speciality music programs
on film music, jazz and early music. The live recordings in particular
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organ; 8. Brass bands; 9. Blues; 10. Bluegrass; 11. Topical song;
12. Rock; 13. Music of the 78’s era.
(Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio Steering Committee, 1982a)
Making Radio, Making Meaning
were among the most developed parts of ArtSound’s programming
(Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio Steering Committee, 1983). Each edition of their subscriber publication, Fine Tuning, featured reports on
local performances volunteers had recorded. The goal of the recording
agenda was to create a unique archive of material for later broadcasts.
These included performances by well-known jazz musicians, musical
theater performances, recitals at local tertiary institutions and music
from ensembles from around the world passing through Canberra.
The notes for the board meeting immediately after the test broadcasts featured detailed documentation of the board members’ reactions
to the test broadcast. The concerns noted would reappear throughout
ArtSound’s documentary record and would have a strong shaping influence on the sound the station sought to produce and eventually would
produce. A major area of concern was the music mix. One board member noted a ‘very restricted choice for the mix programs’, while another
noted ‘too much repetition of some records’ and ‘too much classical
and jazz’. The general consensus was that the station needed a ‘more
discriminating mix’, with ‘more voices’ and a ‘greater variety of instruments. It’s good discipline,’ the meeting notes suggested, ‘to pick records
before going on air’ and some felt the station ‘lost control of the mix
when people came in with their own records’ (Canberra Stereo FM Public Radio, 1983). This element of preparation and control would become
central to ArtSound’s identity.
After an involuntary four-year hiatus from broadcasting, ArtSound
began broadcasting its arts magazine program ‘Fine Tuning’ on what
was then called Radio for the Print-Handicapped, also called Radio One.
When the rules for test broadcasts were relaxed, ArtSound began its
series of weekend broadcasts which eventually grew into weekly and
fortnightly broadcasts referred to as a ‘Festival of Music and the Arts’.
The first several of these were broadly similar to the 1983 test broadcast while including a few new initiatives such as an hour of radio
drama, shows dedicated to writers and poets and music programming
that allowed for slightly more freedom on the part of presenters both
during the day and in the late night hours from 11 pm to 1 am
(Canberra Stereo Public Radio, 1987a). By 1992, ArtSound was broadcasting 24 hours a day during its ‘Festivals’ and had initiated a program that
I will examine more closely below, the use of a customized automated
music mix overnight and on weekday mornings. The programming followed the patterns established early in the station’s existence, but the
programming was more distinct and each content style was starting to
have stronger and more definitive contours. So, for example, instead
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of presenting ‘arts programming’ they would present programs called
‘Meet the Artist’, ‘Arts World’, and ‘Arts Topical’. Also, the music mix
and genre-based shows began to take on more specific identities, such
as ‘Traditions’, which would feature topical examinations of specific
musical traditions and practices or ‘Patchwork’, a mélange of folk traditions from around the world (Canberra Stereo Public Radio, 1989, 1991,
1992/93).
ArtSound’s presence in the community expanded in the 1990s to
include location broadcasts of the National Folk Festival as well as special live broadcasts from local markets and community events. By the
time the station got its permanent full-time license in 2000, the program grid had an extremely well-defined structure that has persisted
to the present. On weekdays the schedule began with ‘Sounds Early:
The Arts for Breakfast’, several hours of classical and low-key music mix
programs, arts news and interviews across multiple hours in mid-day
followed by classical music in the afternoons and speciality music programs preceding the drive-time mix programs. The evenings were given
over to speciality music shows (ArtSound, 1999a, 1999b, 2000). The program schedule was open enough to accommodate new programs but
stable enough to cater to the seemingly unchanging expectations of an
audience which, by this point, those at the station knew very well.
How do these sounds convey meaning?
Drawing on these profiles, I would like to present a description of one
program from each station that I think acts as a characteristic example of that station’s larger programming philosophy and history. It is
the broad sweep of this history that provides a tacit understanding of
how each program acts as focal point of articulation in the larger experience of each station and the broader discursive flows in which each is
set. All of the sounds described below have been validated in the ways
in which each is set within a larger collection of sounds and social relationships. These relationships work to help these sounds make particular
kinds of sense to those presumed to be listening. The presenters or producers of these sounds use them to make both implicit and explicit
claims about the truthfulness and sincerity of themselves and their radio
stations. These claims are made through the above-noted assemblages,
those aggregations of mediations and social relationships that contextualize and give meaning to the materials these people present and claim
as their own. In each case, these sounds take a substantial part of their
meaning and value from the broader trajectories of change described
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Making Radio, Making Meaning
above. It is the sounds described below that allow for the continuation
and evolution of these meanings and values into the future.
One program from 2SER that is a salient example of the kinds of ideals which have guided the station for most of its existence is called
‘The Attic’. It was broadcast on Saturday afternoons during the time
I was researching the station. It was part of 2SER’s long tradition of
presenting what it called ‘Music Specials’. One edition of the show
demonstrates long-standing aspects of 2SER’s programming rationale.
The show consisted of an hour-long profile of the singer and songwriter Scott Walker. The presenter took nothing for granted and made
an argument on behalf of the music. Given that his presenting skills
were at best adequate and that his arguments were not necessarily fresh
and invigoratingly original, the show was regarded as valid because the
presenter was not selling the music. He was not arguing that if his audience listened to this music they would be inculcated into a lifestyle
that would make them better people. He was not trying to demonstrate
that he was cool or had some secret pathway to some new brand of
cool that he was kindly bestowing on his public. Instead, the presenter was trying to demonstrate that this music deserved to be heard, not
by simple acclamation but by making an argument and supporting it
with evidence. The carefully prepared but often uneasily delivered patter was replete with personal interjections and extensive biographical
information. It was an attempt to show that, despite his clear partiality
to and knowledge of this music, he was still trying to create an open,
‘educating’ space for the listener.
The edition of the show from 19 June 2004, profiling Scott Walker,
began with a sharp and instructive contrast. Following on from an
upbeat, sharply and trebly piece of techno and the same program ID,
came the lush balladry of ‘Love Her’, by The Walker Brothers. The sound
of the song was incongruous, following on from a piece of smooth,
clean, dance music and a station identification and program ID that
shared a similar aural profile. The contrast in these sounds marked
the Walker Brothers’ song out as other because it sounded like music
recorded in an era with very different sonic and expressive priorities
from our own. With its soaring trio of richly echoing vocal lines, string
and low brass lines winding around the broadly resounding drum kit
and timpani beats anchoring the cadences, the song was also marked
as a sonic notation of a distinct set of sonic and expressive priorities.
After an awkward transition, including an abrupt fade-out and audible
technical adjustments, the presenter set the tone for the program,
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2SER’s ‘The Attic’: Making the case for real music
What Does a Civil Society Sound Like?
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Hello and welcome once again to ‘The Attic’, 2SER’s weekly music
special. Thank you for joining me today as we look at one of pop’s
biggest voices and certainly one of its most enigmatic figures, Scott
Walker, lead singer of the group The Walker Brothers in the mid- to
late ’60s and at the time marketed as part of the ‘British Invasion’,
although the Walker Brothers were neither British nor actual brothers
nor even named Walker. Scott Walker was born Scott Engel in Ohio in
1944 and by the late ’50s had started to make records, a whole bunch
of teen pop singles that didn’t really go anywhere or truly highlight
the tremendous voice of which we was in possession of. He moved to
London in 1964 with two Californians, Gary Leeds and John Maus,
and together they became the Walker Brothers, having a great run
of hits between 1965 and 1967, typically big, booming ballads with
soaring melodies and a grandiose production that flanked Scott’s at
times Sinatra, at times operatic voice. Scott Walker, quite an unusual
and reluctant pop star in his day.
The contrast between the ‘early’ Walker and the ‘mature’ Walker set the
dynamic for the program. Within the specific and carefully rendered
biographical portrait, we found an artist at odds with his context:
While his contemporaries were experimenting with psychedelics
in the summer of love, he was engrossed in the films of Ingmar
Bergman, flirting with socialism and taking cultural trips, as he called
them, to Moscow for two weeks at a time. Quite the serious young
man . . . Recording sporadically throughout the ’70s he also had a
turn at creating some strange left field electro-pop, releasing one solo
album in the ’80s and one avant pop album in the ’90s . . . Certainly
taking a decidedly uncommercial route musically for the last 35 years
or so. And he’s been a very reclusive and private character, with
rumors of battles with the bottle and failed suicide attempts which
I suppose only add to the whole mystique surrounding him.
As this edition of the show progressed, this dynamic got more pronounced and personal. In outlining the agenda for the program, the
presenter easily slipped into the use of the familiar and the rhetorical:
I’m going to concentrate today mostly on the four solo albums Scott
released between 1967 and 1970. Four extraordinary albums. Quite
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which was to be an appreciative exploration of Scott Walker’s work. The
characteristically awkward patter started as follows:
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Making Radio, Making Meaning
In pursuing this agenda, the presenter also injected a tone of predestination into ‘Scott’s’ artistic and personal development, suggesting that
while ‘he recorded some schmaltzy pop numbers recorded when he was
still Scott Engel’, this early work was necessary and instructive, ‘definitely hinting at the distinctive vocal style that would become his
trademark in a few short years’. The Walker Brothers duly ran their
course,
enjoying some huge commercial success and teen hysteria as well.
The band would be regularly mobbed by teenage girls, but by 1967
the hits had dried up and Scott was definitely yearning for something
else, another avenue for the introspective and at times morbid ballads
that he was writing. He wasn’t afraid of composing songs that were
shrouded in gloom whether it would be musically or lyrically.
The presenter then noted how Walker ‘hired the very best arrangers of
the day, people like Wally Stott, Peter Knight and Reg Guest’, working
with them to produce orchestral arrangements that were ‘extraordinarily beautiful and at times a little left of center, not the usual straight
ahead style that many other crooners of the day used, and that probably, those other records by the other crooners, probably sound a bit
tired and clichéd as a result’. The preparation and collaboration paid
off as the ‘four albums that Scott recorded between ’67 and ’70 contain
some of the most angst-ridden, moody and tortured tunes ever committed to vinyl. They might be some of the saddest songs in the world,
but they are also some of the most beautiful.’ The narrative this presenter constructed was a familiar one as the contours of Walker’s life
and music snugly fit into the mythology of the great artist. With a palpable sense of retrospective inevitability, the presenter is clearly trying
to perform a kind of salvage operation on the reasonably well-known
Walker. Yet he does not seem to take Walker’s accomplishments or abilities for granted. Instead, the presenter makes a detailed case in support
of his plainly obvious but unstated thesis by marshaling a broad range
of carefully presented evidence. This is an act of care and respect, despite
the hagiographic mode which defined the program.
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an incredibly creative burst, too. But first we’ll revisit a couple of
Walker Brothers hits and also an early solo thing recorded as Scott
Engel that I’ve dug up for you as well as check out what he’s been up
to more recently.
What Does a Civil Society Sound Like?
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There are a series of sounds made by FBi in its early days which draw a
strong contrast with the straightforward sounds of ‘The Attic’. They take
the form of station IDs and promos from FBi’s first year. These promos
consist of carefully constructed audio collages between 10 and 50 seconds long. They tend toward the implicit demonstration of the value
of FBi, as opposed to any explicit claim of it. They appear to reflect
FBi’s purported focus on ‘youth’ and, while the station’s license application did claim to take a youth-of-all-ages approach, these sounds clearly
seek to grab the attention of actual youth. While FBi worked very hard
to attract a youthful demographic, it also actively constructed a vision
of its audience that was, of necessity, a very limited vision. Some who
worked at the station in its first years imagined a young audience inured
to the media pitches which surrounded them, conjuring a young public
immune to traditional marketing appeals. They concluded that the traditional pitch made with traditional sounds and voices would not work
for them. They responded by creating an aural profile for the station
consisting of a calculated form of informality and a slick way of presenting what they thought was innovative radio. This aural ideal is well
demonstrated by their promos. As one station member told me quite
simply, ‘it only sounds informal.’
One set of promos was designed to signal FBi’s birth in 2003 with a
set of sounds that were cut and pasted in a variety of configurations
across several station IDs. The sounds themselves are an interesting collection. Each station ID contained a highly compressed female voice
saying ‘Bring it on’, dragging out the word ‘on’ while speaking with a
sharp pattern of enunciation for each word. Then there was a reversedelayed guitar that thudded dynamically into the foreground from a
very quiet start, landing hard on a power chord, not of the type used
in heavy metal but the kind used in indie rock, higher in register and
not nearly as thick in texture. Underneath this were gated, sharp electronic drum sounds marking out eight beats of up-tempo rock. Lurking
around these instrumental sounds were voices. One provided a countdown from five to the words ‘We have ignition’, all spoken as if through
a walkie-talkie, evoking nothing so much as the first days of MTV. Also
in the mix were other spoken voices providing only the barest hints of
words or sentences. One said ‘Okay’, drawing out the ‘ay’ in a skeptical
tone, while another said ‘How ‘bout that?’, a third singing tunelessly
in the background, and still more unintelligible words and guttural
sounds such as laughing and belching, all of which were intertwined
and overlaid with one another. The overall effect was complex and
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FBi’s promos: Seeking the demographic
Making Radio, Making Meaning
contradictory. The strong announcement of FBi’s ‘ignition’ and ‘lift off’
underlaid by the cadential guitar was immediately or even simultaneously undercut with the collection of voices laughing, singing and
belching. These calculated aural collages were exactly what some at FBi
were imagining at the start.
Another set of promos provided a slightly different kind of announcement by using brief snippets of live shows by well-known Sydney artists,
all of whom were thanking FBi for their support. One began with what
was clearly a drop from a DJ consisting of a rapidly repeated stab from
the final cadence of an R&B song. Then a male voice announces, ‘Represent. This song goes out to FBi. They’re some really hot dudes.’ This was
followed by an almost child-like female voice saying ‘FBi, 94.5’. A second promo in this genre enters with crowd noise and a male announcer
saying ‘Hermitude, Ladies and gentlemen’. This is followed by the stopstart sounds of the popular local hip-hop band Hermitude preparing to
play a song and a band member saying, ‘Okay, okay, okay, we’re back on
track now. Thanks FBi’ just as the song starts. This too is followed by the
same child-like female voice saying ‘FBi, 94.5’. A third also begins with
crowd noise with an unidentified band also preparing to start a song by
saying ‘Big ups to FBi, local Sydney radio. It’s all for you’, again followed
by the same tagline. Each of these was an extremely effective, brief and
largely implicit claim to some form of credibility and validation, Yet, for
a station that would boldly claim to ‘represent’ Sydney, at least some
of these claims had to come from another validating source, the bands
being an excellent resource in this respect.
One much longer promo for FBi’s support of live music, however, was
entirely explicit. It began with two voices – one male, one female –
saying ‘FBi’ and ‘Live’ in a tightly edited spoken-word hocket. Then
a female announcer enters. She begins with ‘Who did you have playing at your 21st birthday party? Your Uncle Harry’s old band? A Moby
disc dude? Bet you wish you were the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Metro”
section. ‘Cos for its 21st birthday bash, check out who’s playing.’ After
each question there followed a musical interjection, first of the distant
warble of what was presumably Uncle Harry, then a brief stab of, well,
Moby, and then an aural list of each band on the bill underpinned
with short grabs from each. The potentially off-putting sarcasm of the
opening is leavened with a male announcer who tells us that this is a
fundraiser to help build FBi a second studio and concludes with a female
voice asking us to ‘help gear up your station for music, arts and culture’.
One final set of promos solicits listener involvement and uses the
same, mildly sarcastic humor and honest offers of participation, mixed
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with a constantly changing array of sounds surrounding the speaking
voices. The first begins with a female voice saying, ‘Your trousers are
tight, your drummer has finally kicked that little drinking problem and
you’ve got a demo that’s going to rock the world. Wha’cha gonna do
now?’ after which immediately follows a sizable chorus of mixed voices
shouting ‘Send us your demo!’ Then, a male announcer enters over a
rhythmic, harmonically static introduction to an indie rock tune and
makes the following offer:
Here at FBi we play heaps of demos and unsigned artists and are
constantly looking for new Sydney music. So if you’re a band or a
producer and you’ve got the new shit we want to hear it . . . You can
address it to a certain show you think will like your music or attention it to Demos at FBi. FBi: 50 per cent Australian music and half of
that from Sydney, and all of it good.
At the end of each sentence the musical style playing behind the
voiceover changed, first from indie rock to electro pop, then to a semifunky tune with a male vocalist saying ‘I wish I was depressed again, I’d
write some better stuff’, concluding with a heavily compressed and distorted guitar rock tune landing on a final cadence right on cue. A similar
structure was used for another promo soliciting memberships. A female
voice suggested, ‘If you listen to any other radio station, you pay for
it, either through taxes or having to suffer endless ads for products you
don’t care about. If you listen to FBi you pay for it by becoming a member. Simple.’ Each ad was underpinned with the same music, a light
techno pop tune leading into a descending indie rock cadence. One
final pitch was a solicitation to participate in FBi’s once extensive web
forums. Again, we have the same sardonic humor spoken over quickly
alternating sound sources. A female announcer recited the following:
It’s frustrating, isn’t it? You’ve got so much to say and no way in
which to say it. Well, your release from bondage has finally arrived.
Jump onto the website forums at fbi.org.au and get those scalding
issues off your well-formed chest. We want to hear what you love
or loathe about FBi. What rocks your world? And where can we find
it? Hop on board and right the wrongs of this sorely troubled world.
fbi.org.au.
Throughout the pitch, each sentiment was punctuated with a sound,
from a squeaky bath toy to a cheesy ‘orchestra’ stab alert noise, all the
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2XX’s ‘Lunch Box’: Imagining the unbroken past
We can once again find a ready contrast with a program that reflects
how 2XX has worked over the years to provide very different sorts
of focus and articulation. ‘Lunch Box’ is a program that is part of a
larger suite of programs on 2XX that provide music, events listings
and community information. The station has done this as a core part
of its mission since the beginning. While such mix programs are common across all of the radio stations studied here, 2XX’s ‘Lunch Box’ is
a distinct form of expression. Not only is it a certain way of making
sound on radio, but it also represents a particular tradition of doing so
long in evidence at 2XX. Each edition of the show provides particular kinds of free community announcements that may seem like a relic
of another era. Two segments in particular, ‘Ease On Down the Road’
and ‘Vacant Lot’, feature announcements offering rides and affordable
accommodation respectively. They feel like throwbacks to a time when
such forms of community self-organization were more common. However, even ‘Wot’s On?’, a seemingly standard events listing for those
in the 2XX community, can often take on a distinct cast. The station allows a great deal of latitude for the ways in which presenters
accomplish the tasks set for them, often permitting for a good deal of
expression and invention. The edition of the show from 15 November
2007 articulates a specific form of tradition and expression long present
on 2XX.
The program began with extended excerpts from John Fahey’s Fare
Forward Voyagers from 1973, a set of long-form improvisational fingerpicked guitar pieces. The moody, often intense minor-major harmonic
shifts as well as strong dynamic and rhythmic shifts played behind the
extensive voiceovers, which presented not only community announcements, but also substantial and complex descriptions of the music the
presenter played. The presenter timed his interjections to perfection,
allowing the guitar pieces to swell and develop. Then, as they eased off,
he would enter with his spoken-word content. Using a slow and deliberative speaking style and a softly spoken voice, the presenter described
the Fahey pieces this way:
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while presenting a furious typing sound in the background, all rounded
off with a flowing major-key cadence. FBi’s attitude, by turns funny,
sarcastic and generous, is on full display in these promos. Each played a
part in establishing the station’s sound and defining its pitch to a public
the station had already decided in advance it would require special tools
to attract, engage and hold.
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American guitarist, the late John Fahey, or American primitive guitarist, to use his own term. From a 1973 album which all these
years later is still regarded as his finest album, Fare Forward Voyagers.
An album he made during a period in which he seemed to augment
his Christian faith with an interest in Eastern religion, in particular
yoga. The original album cover featuring what amounts to an advertisement for a spiritual community called Yogaville West in Northern
California.
He allowed the piece to progress a bit further and then continued
speaking:
Good afternoon, you’re here with the ‘Lunch Box’ program, news
and community announcements through until two o’clock . . . During
‘Breakfast’, ‘Lunch Box’ and ‘Sunset’ programs each weekday on 2XX
FM, we bring you ‘Ease On down the Road: Lifts Offered and Wanted.’
No messages at the moment. But you can place a message if you’re
looking for a lift or have a lift to offer, or perhaps you’d like to set up
a car pooling arrangement. Just call us during business hours.
He then continued with the community events announcements, which
included notices for screenings at the Ark Cinema at the National Film
and Sound Archive, which included This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated,
a sharply comic anti-censorship documentary tracking the Motion Picture Association of America’s ‘faceless classifiers’ and Parting Glances, Bill
Sherwood’s ‘landmark queer feature which has recently been restored’.
This presenter created a seamless mélange of music and information,
with the Fahey piece filling in all available aural space, acting as a kind
of pedal point for the first hour of the show. Importantly, all of the
community announcements were offered free of charge. This particular
presenter wrote each announcement, drawing from available information and media releases. While the ‘Wot’s On?’ segment might seem to
be an excellent sponsorship opportunity to other radio stations, 2XX
did not charge for any of these services, regarding them as part of its
mission, ensuring autonomy for the organization and its volunteers in
the bargain.
The range of music played on this edition of the show fits in with this
ethos, being drawn entirely from the period between 1968 and 1975
and reflecting a particular preference for British folk rock contrasted
with the odd humorous musical interlude. The first hour’s playlist
began with Fairport Convention’s ‘Decameron’ from 1968 followed by
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Pentangle’s ‘Pentangling’, also from 1968. The mood was broken by
the song ‘Dear Doctor’ by the Rolling Stones from their 1968 album
Beggars Banquet. Interestingly, this faux country-blues, with its exaggerated vocal delivery, cyclical harmonies, simple melody, three-part vocal
harmonies and syncopated waltz-time meshed well with the texture at
the end of ‘Pentangling,’ dominated as ‘Pentangling’ is by improvised
acoustic guitar and dobro and a similarly syncopated feel. After the
Stones, we returned to the almost hypnotic combination of John Fahey
and the presenter’s smooth, fluent delivery and also returned to more
announcements, including a message about the ‘Arawang Activate Fete’,
a school sports day with games, body arts and a second-hand bazaar.
Also offered was a poetry slam workshop in which one could ‘find out
how poetry slams work, learn practical skills, bring along your own
writing and get feedback from experienced spoken-word performers’.
Another announcement told us of a free program called
Stepping Forward, a continuation of the YWCA of Canberra’s Steps
Program. Stepping Forward aims to enhance the well-being of young
pregnant and parenting women aged 13 to 25 and their children. The
program provides information and support to young women through
a series of weekly workshops on general health, positive parenting,
healthy lifestyles, supportive relationships, budgeting, self-esteem
and community connections.
And John Fahey played on and on. This was then followed by Caravan’s
‘In the Land of Grey and Pink’ from 1971, another folk-rock tune with
a more traditional song form and a lyrical sentiment to do with some
kind of longing for escape, however temporary it might be.
For decades, a great deal of the programming on 2XX has acted as
a kind of collective witness and reminder. The station has chronicled
wars and strikes, documented the coming of globalization and climate
change, and marked the evolution of the music that matters to them,
from the rise and fall of punk to the coming of hip-hop and electronica
and the remarkable persistence of the kinds of music noted above. Those
within 2XX have explicitly taken on the task of connecting their public
to an imagined unbroken past that many within the station fervently
believe still matters. This edition of ‘Lunch Box’ demonstrates how the
presenter plays his part in this larger flow of recognition and rupture,
stretching his ‘community of sense’ by articulating a range of social
and historically informed mediations that link the familiar, historically
grounded music he plays with the extensive musical descriptions and
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announcements he writes and then reads. But he is also able to articulate something else, something that just eludes immediate notice. The
cumulative effect of the smooth, ceaseless flow of music, the mundane
news and weather reports but also the series of event announcements
which the presenter has cobbled together from a pile of papers and
emails sent to the station by all manner of organizations, shows us,
aurally, the everyday connections and networks that cohere around this
radio station and have done so for 30 years, surviving all manner of crisis and challenge. These connections are not simply notional to those
trying to make them, nor are they taken for granted. They are very real,
and they must be created and maintained afresh, every day, by acts as
straightforward as reading out a sheet of paper over, after and before
what the presenter feels is the exact right piece of music. ‘Lunch Box’ is
no less an exacting sonic assembly than FBi’s promos are, but it is based
on a very different set of associations, forging different connections,
making different meanings.
ArtSound’s ‘The Soundspace’: Community-based robot muzak
The final program of interest is ArtSound’s daily, automated program
‘The Soundspace’. The show is run by the airplay programming software on the station’s computer system. The show runs for two hours
without a break or any identification of the pieces being played and
is constructed by drawing from a carefully constructed database of
music of the station’s characteristic mix of music including ‘classic’ jazz,
placid and somewhat sober instrumental music, so-called ‘world music’
and the European art tradition in the form of decidedly ‘light’ classics. ‘The Soundspace’ is a concentrated aural expression of ArtSound’s
musical identity. However, in light of ArtSound’s complex history,
‘The Soundspace’ also carries with it implicitly present expectations
and recognitions about the social relationships this music facilitates.
While there is clearly an effort to accumulate cultural capital here, ‘The
Soundspace’ is also a complex marker of ArtSound’s history and identity.
The surface detail of one edition of ‘The Soundspace’ from 20 June
2011 can tell us a few things about the meaning and intent of this show.
Taking only the sounds from the first half-hour, we find ArtSound’s
familiar collection of sounds. The show began with the ArtSound
stand-by, the ‘Arts Diary’, a listing of arts events in the Canberra
region spoken by a female announcer in a quiet, understated and carefully enunciated manner over a light, major-key acoustic guitar piece
underpinned by delicately played drums. The program began with a
contemporary ‘light classic’ piano piece, dominated by soft, major-key,
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rhythmically uniform sound clusters, initially with languid harmonic
motion then moving through a series of key areas before landing back
where it started. After a slight moment of silence, a ‘classic’ or ‘heritage’
jazz tune began. It sported a traditional structure with a head introducing a series of instrumental solos which eventually landed us back where
we started. The piece moved at a rapid clip trading off solos across the
main members of an ensemble which included clarinet, piano, a vibraphone played with yarn mallets, and drums played with brushes. This
was followed by a piece of contemporary instrumental jazz piece with
a slow tempo, smooth textures, long notes in melody and accompaniment, and slow harmonic motion. The structure was the same sort
of standard-form heard in the previous piece. This was followed by
a medium-tempo light instrumental ‘rhumba’ played with soft muted
drums, acoustic guitar and mellow plucked lead electric guitar which
trade solo lines between themselves and a violin.
This brought us to about the 20-minute mark and, after a slight
moment of silence a light, short minor-key contemporary piano piece
played in a ‘classical’ style began, sporting varied tempi, regular harmonic motion and a familiar cadential flourish. This was followed by a
very brief station and program ID which provided the break needed to
change direction to a ‘classic’ 12-bar blues ballad with a female singer.
The song featured regular, cyclical harmonies, brass and piano set in the
background and standard blues lyrical themes. Just as the blues song
was about to reach its obvious and expected end, a west African ensemble piece overlapped with it, dominated by virtuosic improvised kora
playing, regular cyclical harmonic movement and heavy reverb. After
a slight moment of silence, the next piece began, which also featured
plucked string instruments in the foreground and ocean sounds underneath. The piece was also highly reverberant and featured slow, cyclical
harmonic movement as well as long passages of melodic and harmonic
stasis.
We can hear a few musically defining features that are characteristic
not only of this program but also of the music found on this station
more generally. The music and voiceovers are muted and refined. There
are few significant contrasts in texture or tempo. Each piece is linked to
those around it through easy and obvious overlaps in style, genre, tempo
or instrumental sounds. We can hear textural and structural similarities
between a range of pieces. We can look at a program such as this as
a strategic and tightly controlled form of expression to gain and hold
a particular audience with smooth, unchallenging, predictable sounds.
This would be a reasonable analysis, but it would also be insufficient and
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somewhat misleading, because it doesn’t take into account ArtSound’s
history and the very particular social connections that have grown from
those experiences.
Instead of acting as a form of what one station presenter derisively
referred to as ‘robot muzak’, ‘The Soundspace’ has been aesthetically
validated by ArtSound’s community in a number of ways. First, it is
a daily, two-hour expression of ArtSound’s painstakingly constructed,
hard-earned musical identity, a kind of concise mnemonic reminder
of why a community member might be listening to ArtSound in the
first place. The sounds are smooth, subtle, predictable, and they rub up
against each other in ways that a real ArtSound devotee would implicitly
recognize as valid. The easy transitions from a classic jazz tune to a west
African kora soloist to a harp piece with ocean sounds rustling underneath suggest a larger world of muted and non-threatening exoticism.
Second, the use of automated programming software began during one
of the organization’s ‘Festival of Music and the Arts’ from the mid-1990s
and was used to occupy the overnight time slots. Given ArtSound’s
already recounted struggles to gain a full-time license, the ability to
use every second of airtime available had a larger symbolic value. One
of ArtSound’s most important priorities in their pre-license era was to
demonstrate its professionalism. The music director, who was an important member of the group that founded the station, decided that a good
way to do this was to use the station’s new programming software which
he had set up to fill every possible minute they could. For an organization that had been essentially squatting in the ether for two decades,
the symbolic power of filling the airwaves with ‘their music’ in order to
strengthen their hold on ‘their space’ cannot be underestimated.
Finally, the core group of people who created ArtSound all used to
work at 2XX. When that station was taken over by what was colorfully
described to me as ‘a cabal of doctrinaire Marxists’, the rift in the organization expelled a small group of music lovers who decided to create
their own station. Little did they know that they would struggle through
test broadcast after test broadcast, through rejection after rejection of
their exemplary license applications for years until they finally got a
full-time broadcasting license. The twists and turns of this process created a subtle sense of insularity and bitterness among some of this core
group of radio enthusiasts. ‘The Soundspace’ is a reflection of this organizational history: an automated, seamless stream of sound drawn from
a tightly constructed and controlled playlist of songs churning away
automatically without any identification of the specific pieces on offer.
Further, ‘The Soundspace’ has persisted despite complaints from within
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the station made by people who thought that the use of this time slot
in this way was a waste of a valuable community resource. Those who
wanted the program to continue told me that the decision to keep it
going was made in response to a large number of listeners who said that
they found it to be the exact right program to listen to at the exact right
time of day. These listeners, it was alleged, enjoyed the polished, seamless yet occasionally surprising, unique blend of music they found there.
I have been studying community for nearly 20 years and have done so in
three countries, and I have never once heard of a community of listeners demanding that they receive less human intervention in the flow of
sound they get from their radio station. Yet, for more than a few people
involved with the station, ‘The Soundspace’ represents an articulation
of the station’s very identity, history and distinctiveness, which, after
such a long struggle simply to exist, should not to be taken for granted.
Conclusion
The music programming created by these radio stations is part of a larger
set of sounds produced by each station that are constant, cyclical and
repetitive. Each program momentarily focuses the longitudinal listening
habits of listeners and shapes and informs the practices of producing
and listening to music on the radio to which we can ascribe some kind
of circumstantial, historical and aesthetic meaning. As Georgina Born
has argued, the cultural forms that ‘result from creative agency condense or embody social relations by spinning forms of connectedness
across time and space’ (Born, 2005:16). She further argues that ‘music’s
mediations have taken a number of forms, cohering into what we might
term assemblages, which themselves endure and take on particular historical forms’ (p. 8). As Born suggests, ‘if we can accept that the patterns
of meaning projected into music are routinely stabilized’, then we can
understand the conditions that inform and perpetuate these meanings
(p. 14).
The people who work at these radio stations have sought to articulate
and fix not so much a specific understanding of the music they play
as an expression of the social relations that their agency and practice
have brought into existence. For 2SER, the station’s mission is to tell us
things we should know and to play music for us we should hear, because
they think it matters, to all of us. Because it matters, they don’t simply
‘let the music speak for itself’. Instead, they make a case for us. They
explain to us why it is this music matters. FBi also wants to educate us,
but theirs is a different form of learning. They want us to think we are
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the ones in control, the ones who can accept or reject their offerings as
we see fit. They are joyous and loud, but also funny and seemingly selfeffacing. 2XX, on the other hand, acts as a kind of collective witness and
a reminder, connecting us to an imagined unbroken past that they say
still matters. ArtSound wants us to rise above the everyday and embrace
what many there see as a unique form of aesthetic agency that they
make freely available to all, in its many varied forms. All of these radio
stations have sought both to structure and simultaneously to reflect the
contingent and collaborative meaning-making exercise that their radio
stations aspire to be. In doing so, they try to leave some tangible social
residue on the larger musical worlds of which they are a part.
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People kind of find each other in places like this.
2XX presenter
Like effective town planning and architecture, community radio must
express the unique qualities and sensibility of the place and times,
and be a strong statement in sound of that region.
Canberra Stereo Public Radio (1992/93)
The local music scenes in Sydney and Canberra are mostly populated
by artists you have never heard of, whose music you will never hear.
After only a few years, most of the bands and artists featured on the
programs I recorded for this book between 2004 and 2007 have only a
few poignant traces of their existence left. There is the occasional press
release here, an awkward band photo there and the odd interview or gig
review somewhere else. Looking back at these bits and pieces, the optimism of some of these musicians is touching. They speak of the future
and what they hope people will take from their music. You can almost
see the work they’ve done to fit themselves into the accepted template
of the band interview. Many look like what we expect bands to look
like and talk how we expect bands to talk. Yet any conventional measure of ‘success’ eluded them. It is precisely such bands and artists that
make a local music scene work. These legions of forgotten artists don’t
simply fill out the bill. They provide endless hours of mostly unrecompensed labor to make sure shows get put on and to make sure people
show up. They also provide an extraordinary amount of content to local
media that cover the music scene. In both Sydney and Canberra, the
flows of information on events, shows, gigs, festivals, new releases and
new music are complicated and rich. They include community radio,
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the so-called ‘street press’, or freely available news magazines on music,
multiple extensive and content-heavy websites, a national ‘youth’ radio
network, several new digital radio services, some television coverage on
the national public broadcaster and increasing integration into a number of social networking sites. Within these local, regional, national and
global discursive flows, the place of the four community radio stations
studied here is of great interest. Each claims a loyalty to the ‘local’ as a
core part of its reason for being, and each provides the kinds of access
to local musicians that does not exist elsewhere.
The ways in which these radio stations create and maintain relationships of mutual advantage with local musicians and those who support
them are numerous. These radio stations help musicians, independent
promoters and event organizers, learn to use the ‘convivial tool’ of the
radio station. They empower musicians to empower themselves in a
kind of virtuous circle of service set in a collection of social relationships that to a significant extent exist outside the formal market in
music. They make their local music scenes more open by revealing those
seemingly straightforward things about them which demystify them for
musicians, listeners and others. And they solve their own ‘problem of
the public’ by creating the kinds of open relationships defined by the
transparent and accountable exercise of equitably distributed power that
I have argued provides the basis for the civil and potentially democratic
social aesthetics I have been describing throughout this book.
As I will show here, each radio station has its own way of focusing
and articulating the local. These organizations provide moments of clarity and focus within a larger and often bewildering range of information
about music. Members of ArtSound have been traveling across Canberra
for years recording local recitals and concerts as well as constructing
two state-of-the-art recording and live broadcast studios which they use
to add to their valuable stock of unique archival recordings and live
broadcasts. With far fewer resources at hand, 2XX has made its studios available on a more everyday basis for musician interviews and
event information as part of its work since it started broadcasting. 2SER
(Sydney Educational Radio) has done the same, producing some unique
inflections on what the term ‘local music’ means. FBi (Free Broadcasting
Incorporated) has staked a huge chunk of its credibility and reputation
on its support for local music. They have worked keenly to inculcate
musicians into the Sydney music scene. In each case, the idea of the
‘local’ is not limited to musicians or professionals or even to the geographical reach of station’s signal and influence. The idea of the ‘local’
here is a means to facilitate the assertion of power and influence by the
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people in their social networks over the local, regional, national and
global flows of information and sound within which we all exist. This is
a power few other broadcasters see fit to allow their publics.
Each of the radio stations I am writing about has made strong efforts
to push local music forward, but in the case of ArtSound, it is not too
much to say that its survival indirectly depended on its ability to record
local music. As ArtSound developed, an important, and occasionally
decisive, source of income came from the organization’s sound restoration and archiving work. On the back of such work ArtSound was able
to build up its recording and broadcasting infrastructure to a very high
standard, both through paid work and through expanding its capacity to generate grant income to purchase equipment. This infrastructure
allows ArtSound to digitally record, produce, master and duplicate CDs,
hire or loan out their location recording services, convert all manner
of sound-recording formats to digital as well as restore sound recordings to archival standards. They also broadcast live performances from
their own studios as well as broadcast live on location. In the late 1990s,
ArtSound was able to acquire a small van for location recordings that
included a transmitter, portable control room, mixing desk, recording
desk and an interview suite tucked away inside. The van is routinely
used to broadcast from and record substantial portions of events such
as the National Folk Festival (usually between 75 and 125 hours’ worth
each year), the Australian Jazz Festival and the Canberra International
Chamber Music Festival, and makes regular broadcasts from local shopping centers and open-air markets. Importantly, a good deal of the work
in creating some of the key components of this infrastructure was completed by ArtSound staff, including a good deal of the fit-out for the
van as well as the station’s custom-built console, which was in use
until they moved to their new facilities in 2005–6. These skills have
become invaluable to the development of the organization. Between the
in-house studios and on-location capabilities, ArtSound has been able to
amass an impressive archive of unique recordings which are constantly
sprinkled throughout their average broadcast week, allowing the ‘local’
to abut the ‘global’ without explanation or apology.
ArtSound’s ‘Concert Hall’
For years, ArtSound’s ‘small but intrepid team of recording people’ has
ventured out to record ‘concerts of classical instrumental music, all sorts
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of choral music, concerts of songs and opera excerpts, piano and organ
recitals, musical lecture/demonstrations, cabaret and a great range of
entertainments’ (ArtSound, 1999a). The results are edited and broadcast from 6.30 pm to 8 pm on Saturday evenings on a program called
‘Concert Hall’. Those producing the program have used their location
recordings to create and sustain regular long-term relationships with
ensembles, venues and institutions, including local groups such as the
Oriana Chorale, Fortune Brass, Canberra City Opera, the Australian
Chamber Singers and the Macquarie Trio Australia. They have also
recorded a wide range of the many international performers who routinely perform in the national capital region at venues as humble as the
Reardon Theatre in the small town of Port Fairy in Western Victoria, to
the National Gallery in Canberra and even the High Court of Australia,
whose brutalist form was used to present a percussion concert along
with a related architectural talk. The recordings are used in such a way
as to maintain the live feeling, usually including both introductory and
concluding applause and crowd noise.
One edition of the program from 15 December 2007 is a good example. The concert was by the Oriana Chorale and the Fortune Brass.
It was called a ‘Venetian Christmas’, and the program consisted of music
from the 15th through the 17th century presented at University House
on the campus of the Australian National University in November 2006.
The concert started in a large, open room, not a formal concert hall. The
conversations of audience members who had not realized the program
had started are audible throughout the recording. As the recording came
to a close, the presenter noted:
Fortune Brass setting the scene with some foyer music, hence the
rather loud audience noises because they didn’t seem to realize, well
I suppose they actually thought, ‘Well the concert hasn’t actually
started yet’, which I guess is true enough.
Those who produce and present the program do so for straightforward
reasons. They have good deal of love and appreciation of the music they
record and present. They want to demonstrate the rich array of concerts
offered in their region each year and wish to do so by presenting what
one presenter characterized as ‘full works of art’ in context. The effect
of their efforts is show that Canberra’s musical arts community is an
equal member of the broader international music scenes and networks
of which many Canberran musicians are a part, furthering the case that
their town is as ‘mature’ as any other when it comes to making such arts.
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Another way of managing the relationship between national, global
and local flows of music is the musician interview. All of the radio stations I’ve studied produce ample amounts of such interviews. In many
cases, presenters seem to take prodigious care of their local interviewees.
They help them get accustomed to the studio, show them how to use
the microphones and how to talk into them if necessary. One example from November 2004 shows what I mean. It was 2XX’s ‘Sunset’
program, a program similar to ‘Lunch Box’ in its mix of community
information and music. Each daily edition is presented by a different person, who is responsible for two hours of news, weather, music,
announcements and information about community events as well as
the interviews. At the time, 2XX was housed in the old Griffin Centre
in Civic, Canberra’s central business area. The Griffin Centre was a twostory complex which housed all manner of community organizations
from 2XX to the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Info Shop, a storefront where anyone can get any kind of publicly available information
on the activities of government. At the time I was there, 2XX appeared
to be falling apart. Its street-level storefront offices were crammed with
piles of unsorted press releases, CDs and papers. The old on-air studio
was the size of a decent walk-in closet and still boasted the original
board the station had used since the late 1970s. Presenters were still
making surprisingly common use of reel-to-reel tapes, with one program host recording his show at home and mailing it in every week.
An ancient bulk eraser routinely gave off a disturbing series of electrical
noises when doing its work of refreshing the spent reels. The old studios
were like a walk-in center, often buzzing with people and activity. They
were shabby and often a bit crowded and chaotic.
When the guests arrived for this afternoon’s program, they looked
visibly nervous as they entered and waited for the presenter. The informality of the place was perhaps a bit off-putting for them. However, the
presenter was a seasoned veteran. Despite the enormous range of materials he was scheduled to put to air that afternoon, from the interviews,
promos, the specific slots for new music, old music and local music,
not to mention all the rest of the music he simply wanted to play, he
exuded a distinct air of unflappability. He was able to make the many
guests he had lined up for the first hour feel calm and relaxed. It was
obvious that his first interviewee was quite nervous. She had never been
on radio before, as it turned out, but the presenter kept her engaged by
calmly and clearly explaining everything he was doing, even if it wasn’t
directly related to the interview. He matter-of-factly narrated his actions
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by telling her what he was doing as he was doing it, allowing her to
feel some involvement and control over things. It was very clever. The
presenter was in nearly constant motion for two hours. He was grabbing
CDs, logging what he played, grabbing promos, shuttling between three
CD players. The promos were all burned onto CDs, as were weekly sets
of songs that were meant to be put in high rotation. He brought in some
vinyl to play a few very particular songs. He played a segment called ‘The
Retro Album of the Week’, in this case, Pink Floyd’s first album. Then he
played songs by several local folk artists. He played a Laibach cover of
Queen’s ‘One Vision’, exposing what the presenter called its latent fascist sentiments, followed by an Eiensterstende Neubauten ‘song’, then
concluded with Stone Roses’ ‘Fool’s Gold’. In between, he was able to
calmly escort the first interviewee out of the studio, and greet and walk
his second set of interviewees into it.
In his second interview, the presenter engaged in the same pattern.
He was chatting with two musicians who had recently produced their
own CD, mostly of electronic music that lay somewhere between experimental and electro-pop. He had a fairly extensive conversation with
them before and after the official interview. In fact, the interview that
was actually broadcast felt like a relatively small part of a much longer
conversation. These musicians were grateful for the publicity. In some
ways, they have nowhere else to go. 2XX is the only place that will,
almost without question, promote local independent music. The station
will take a few CDs, put them in rotation and sell them at the station.
The two musicians were Australian National University (ANU) students
who formed an informal club of sorts, the Physics and Maths Students’
Music Society. They told the presenter how much they appreciated being
on the air before they started. Also they chatted about where else they
could go to get some publicity. All of this was off-air. After these musicians had left, the presenter told me their CD was locally produced and
wasn’t particularly good, and yet he proceeded to treat these guys about
as well as one can imagine.
FBi’s ‘The Bridge: Unsigned’
Another example of the convivial experience of music made locally
comes from FBi’s ‘The Bridge’. This program has aired from 8 pm to
10 pm every weeknight and features only music made in Sydney. For
several years, the Monday edition of the show featured music made
by local bands not signed to a record label, routinely referred to as
‘unsigned music’. One edition of the show happened to fall on the tenth
anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and the presenters decided to run
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a ‘Nirvana Tribute Show’ consisting of covers of songs written or played
by Nirvana, all recorded by ‘unsigned’ Sydney bands. Characteristically,
FBi had put out a call for bands to record their favorite Nirvana-related
song and send it to the station, allowing the young station to expand its
range of contacts, create a fresh take on ‘local’ music and allow bands to
spruik themselves in a slightly off-center way.
The program began with what sounded like an informal and deliberately awful singalong to the song ‘When Will I Be Famous’ way off-mike.
Amid the laughter and commentary on how bad the singing was, the
show began. The line-up started with a version of ‘Very Ape’ recorded
by a studio project called ‘drive, elizabeth’, with thin, flat, trebly drum
sounds, fuzzy guitar and highly compressed vocals. This was followed
by a version of ‘Dumb’ by a band called The Winters doing their best to
channel the Brian Jonestown Massacre through a beautifully recorded
acoustic guitar anchoring a series of repetitive, clear, smooth electric
guitar lines winding around the upper register during the verses and
grinding fuzzily through the choruses in the middle register. This was
followed by a delicate, rhythmically shambolic and cheeky rendering of
‘In Bloom’ by The Crustaceans featuring a tightly recorded and lightly
strummed acoustic guitar, brushes on drums, a winning trombone solo
and some impressive three-part whistling. Then the presenter re-entered
to explain the show:
Now we did have a bit leeway with the Nirvana covers tonight. I mentioned before you could do a cover of a cover Nirvana did, so you
might want to do ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. Unfortunately
nobody did. But the band known as Talamere have taken their own
slant on it and have covered a track by Mary Lou Lord. Mary Lou
Lord’s the woman who was famously dumped by Kurt Cobain in
favor of Courtney Love, and this is a track she wrote just after she
found out watching an MTV interview.1
The song, called ‘Camdentown Rain’, was performed with acoustic guitar and female voice, acting as a poignant reminder of Kurt Cobain as
something other than a stereotypically doomed rock star.
ArtSound, 2XX and FBi each engage in the ‘local’ in their own characteristic ways. The Nirvana edition of ‘The Bridge’ was more than just
fan gushing, but instead became a weird kind of freeform exploration
of the band’s place in the world. The presenter and producer were able
to create an imaginary togetherness among people who had not much
more to do with each other than an interest in playing Nirvana songs,
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not exactly a small club. They managed to put a slightly aberrant spin
on Cobain, regarded by so many as the universal rock artist, in an
idiosyncratically local way. ArtSound’s recordings take advantage of a
local music scene that is unusually rich with opportunities for hearing
a wide range of music drawn from the European art tradition. Their
engagement with that scene is an obvious outgrowth of the social and
artistic networks and connections on which the station was founded
and which it serves in an almost rigorous way. Similarly, 2XX’s copious number of interviews with local musicians are also a product of
that station’s several decades long engagement with Canberra’s popular music scenes. These interviews are little different in purpose from
the reams of interviews and publicity ‘Doublextra News’ provided to
local musicians in the early 1980s, and the station’s ongoing commitment to those musicians remains unmatched by any other local
broadcaster.
DIY A&R: Inculcating musicians and presenters
into their own music scene
One of the main reasons to have musician interviews is to push people
to get out to gigs and buy music. However, another reason to have them
is to get musicians to talk about their experiences in the music industry.
FBi’s strong focus on and support for local music have meant that the
staff and volunteers have made this a clear priority throughout their
programming. They do so in a lot of different ways, and the overall effect
is to help inculcate musicians into their own music scene. FBi strives to
establish and manage a kind of baseline of cool in Sydney. Their ‘Open
Day’ allows musicians to get some direct advice on how to record and
publicize their music. This framework of implicit and open access to
information provided by station staff helps empower musicians in a very
direct and practical way. 2XX also helps musicians in very direct ways.
However, as I compare two kinds of ‘local’ music programming here, we
can see that the significant differences between Sydney and Canberra
show how context-dependent the efforts of both stations are.
FBi’s ‘Amplified’
In the middle of an episode of ‘The Bridge’, we can find a strong example of this kind of programming. A segment called ‘Amplified’ featured
interviews with two experienced band bookers at the Hopetoun Hotel, a
then thriving inner-city music venue in Sydney, in support of a scheme
organized by the musician support body Music NSW. The goal was
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As a live music venue the Hopetoun’s been going for about 20 years
and over that time has seen a lot of the sort of more established acts
today kind of come through it and play at one stage or another in
their early days.
After establishing the credibility of the venue, the female announcer
entered. She asked, ‘So are you in a young band? Do you want to play
the Hopetoun Hotel in Surry Hills? Find out how to kick-start your rock
star career.’ Two venue bookers offered their suggestions to bands on
how to approach a venue:
Promoter 1: We generally get bands emailing us saying ‘This is our
band’ . . . So instead of just emailing us or sending us a CD, they’re
best off sending us a whole history and what they’re up to and what
they’re doing and future plans because we get so many demos they
tend to just get lost.
Promoter 2: We really like to be I guess given a really good feel for why
bands want to play here . . . If you can sort of email us a bit of a pitch
on what you’re about we’re going to have a idea in our heads of how
to accommodate that.
Then the announcer explained that FBi was trying to publicize The
Hopetoun Incentive Program, a scheme designed to get young bands
into the Hopetoun in order to build their profile. The bands would play
early in the week, learn how the booking system operates and how to
pull off a live gig. Both venue bookers also made further suggestions on
how to go about playing gigs:
Promoter 1: There’s also a way of like younger bands approaching
sort of the bigger bands who are able to play the Thursday-FridaySaturday . . . and trying to get on the bill with those guys.
Promoter 2: Particularly young bands, don’t be afraid to go to those
bands that you think your audience would definitely love to see
you play with or you know yourselves you might sit well with them
musically. People in bands don’t get hit up as much as you probably
think so, you know, if you’re going there as a fan anyway, take along
your demo.
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to get new bands into established venues. The segment began with
one of the venue bookers speaking over a swathe of mid-tempo indie
rock:
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Promoter 2: I think the worst thing you could ever do is treat the venue
like a rehearsal studio . . . Think about the shows that you are playing
and really, you know, really work hard for them.
Promoter 1: We found this over and over again, people coming in and
they’re getting their first chance and they’re just not bringing anyone and I mean that kind of really, sticks in our head . . . . Another
pet hate is that you’ve got people wanting to build a career in the
music industry . . . yet they themselves aren’t going out to support
other live music and I guess that’s kind of frustrating and to get
people calling us wanting to play at the Hopetoun who live locally
who have never set foot in the venue.
This two-minute segment not only provides useful information on
avoiding the common mistakes bands make in pursuing their careers,
but it also gives FBi some credibility. It demonstrates the station’s ability
to establish working relationships not only with musicians but also with
different, perhaps less prominent, elements within the music industry,
showing that the station has the musicians’ interests in mind as well as
their own.
2XX’s ‘Micfest’
A similar interview was presented by 2XX during their live broadcast
from Micfest, an open-air festival of music run by students from the
Woden campus of the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT). The
festival was part of their studies and was intended to allow them to
get hands-on training in event promotion and management. The host
interviewed a staff member from CIT whose charges were the students who organized and ran Micfest. The interview itself started very
awkwardly, in mid-sentence. The staff member, who was never identified, was speaking about CIT’s various qualification programs, including
music production, music business and performance and composition
diplomas, as well as qualifications in technical areas and venue, event
and band management. The host and interviewee then engaged in a
long, halting conversation replete with interruptions and overlaps that
eventually got a few key points across:
Host: How long have you been running out here?
CIT Staff: We’ve been running about eight years, actually since the
training packages have come in, the government sort of, um
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Interestingly, each also had some advice on how bands could be good
‘music scene citizens’, as it were:
Making Radio, Making Meaning
national training packages agenda, I don’t know if your listeners
would be familiar with it. I won’t give you the long story, but
its nationally recognized, um, competency-based training. So any
uh . . .
Host: So if you come to Woden CIT then the diploma or the degree or
whatever . . .
CIT Staff: Or in fact if you do one subject and it’s got three or four
competencies in it, you can take that anywhere in Australia and any
other organization that’s issuing qualifications in music industry
will have to recognize those competencies.
Host: So what you’re saying is what we’ve got here is on par or better
than what is offered anywhere else in Australia.
CIT Staff: Yep, I’m saying, it’s not a case that it’s being better. It’s recognized. Portable, nationally portable, so you do your sound course
here and industry all over Australia knows what you’ve got ’cos they
had a say in what the training is.
These kinds of issues can often be very dull, and yet their practical relevance is not always made clear to potential students, who might be
dreaming more of rock stardom rather than running an AV board for an
events management company.
When the CIT staff member was abruptly steered onto the topic of
the value of Micfest itself, he was able to force out a few points that may
have gone some way toward making Micfest more than just a stage for
some future imagined career as a great artist:
CIT Staff: Micfest is uh, you know, someone said to me the other
day, one of the students was interviewing me for some of this
radio stuff and they said ‘What is it?’ and I said well it’s a state of
mind really, Micfest, because it’s student projects, uh, juxtaposed
with other student projects. So you got students who are doing
the business thing who are, you know, planning events, marketing the whole thing, organizing it, running it, making sure the
logistics are all going. You’ve got the technical students who are
ensuring all the technical aspects of it are working so we’ve got,
you know a team of tech students running around, you know
mixing the sound, tweaking the sound, doing all the, you know
laying cable, all the rest of it and uh, a lot of the students who
are doing the performance are actually performing here and being
assessed.
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Host: So the Micfest is part of their assessment.
CIT Staff: It’s totally an assessment thing.
Host: It’s a hands-on practical assessment.
CIT Staff: Hands-on, real, you know.
Host: So there’s fraught nerves, there’s tension today?
CIT Staff: Ah there’s a lot of tension . . . There will be some people who
don’t quite cut it and that’s all part of the learning.
Host: That’s all part of the music industry as well.
CIT Staff: And really you’re going to go out there you might as well
learn how to do it by doing it and uh, our students get jobs . . . It’s
not writing essays about it, you can look it up in the encyclopedia, you know, ‘What is a sound mixer?’ It’s actually getting dirty,
mixing, doing . . . What’s great about this event for me is just to see
the emerging talent, and I’m just in awe of how much creativity
and enthusiasm that an event like this just seems to focus and
galvanize –it’s just wonderful to see students doing it.
FBi’s ‘Music Lessons’
In a similar vein, FBi produced a series of monthly podcasts starting
in 2007 called ‘Music Lessons’ which also focused on practical aspects
of the music industry. The first two episodes were between 10 and
15 minutes long and appeared to deal with seemingly basic but in reality
complex and involved issues about the music industry not always immediately grasped by musicians. As the introduction to the first episode
suggested, ‘playing music, writing it, being in a band, performing and
whatever you may do is, whilst not easy, easily understood. The business
side of the industry, however, is not as transparent.’ The episode featured an interview with a publicist for Remote Control Records which
seems to be mostly a management and publicity outlet in Australia and
New Zealand for a wide range of artists from all over, and secondarily
a regional ‘starter’ label. The host asked a series of questions seeking to
demystify how record labels work. As with the segment ‘Amplified’, the
music industry representative offered advice and suggestions to bands
on how to manage their relationships with record labels. The representative explained that Remote Control was part of an international group
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We can see here again that, despite the awkward and sometimes
confusing nature of the interview, the interviewer and interviewee
addressed issues that made the music industry into something beyond
the excitation of fantasies of musical stardom and celebrity:
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We get a lot of demo submissions . . . and you know we try to handle them as delicately as possible. It is hard to get back to everyone
just because we’ve got such a huge volume of work to do . . . and you
know, you listen to something and if it’s not grabbing you straight
away then its probably best not to force it. So those artists that are of
interest to us straight away, then yes, you do develop a line of communication, but with the other artists that you don’t necessarily fall
in love with straight away, you kind of just have to put an end to it.
She then explained the process of getting a label to talk to you:
I think that there’s no black-and-white way to do it. I mean, it’s really
hard to get people’s attention because the nature of the industry is
that most offices are understaffed and most people are overworked
and its really hard to get a hold of people . . . If I were a manager
I would not send in a demo without making contact with someone
at a company in the first instance because if you’ve made contact
there is a personal relationship there, however small . . . Find out who
you need to address your stuff to, not just send it in to A&R or whatever, then just be really considerate and delicate of the fact that most
people are so busy.
When asked what does the label do for the band, the publicist replied in
specific relation to the Beggars Group regional label:
It depends on what kind of deal you have with the label. For example, ‘Dot Dash’ is a developmental label, so as we get to second
albums . . . with a lot of those artists we become a lot more involved,
not in the recording, but with input into the A&R [artists and repertoire] process and are able to make more suggestions. We are able to
take care of marketing and publicity, which you know means getting
together the artwork for production posters and the CDs, presenting
the music to the media, liaising with the distributor, making sure they
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of independent labels operated under the Beggars Group name. This
means that Remote Control has different kinds of relationships with
different artists depending on where they come from. They are basically
sent artists from overseas to promote in Australia and New Zealand and
are asked to find new artists based there to send overseas.
The publicist then explained the situation bands are in when dealing
with demos:
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The second episode followed on from the first and examined what
makes a good demo. It featured interviews with an A&R representative
from Universal and FBi’s Music Director, who at that time was largely
responsible for running FBi’s ‘Open Day’. Both go through the many,
many demos each gets sent. The podcast followed the same format as
the first one, beginning by asking Universal’s A&R rep how she got
demos:
Demos usually get sent to me in abundance. I get many, many demos
sent to me, but the other main way I will get a demo is obviously, if
I’m at a gig, with a band that I’m sort of into I will actually go up
to them and ask them for a demo, so yes, I would love to say I get
through all of them very, very quickly, but sometimes it is quite a
time-consuming process.
The second question followed on directly from the first, asking how a
band might get someone to actually listen to said demo:
The best way to get an A&R person to listen to your demo is to get a
buzz about yourself out in the marketplace. That is the best thing that
you can do and what I mean by that going out there, getting yourself
gigs, getting yourself written about in street press, try and get a song
on community radio like with you guys on FBi. Get your name out
there as much as possible. I read street press every week. I go online
and read about bands as well and, you know, obviously we all talk to
each other within the music industry . . . we all sort of have conversations about what sort of bands we’re all digging at the moment and
if I notice a band’s name in street press a fair bit or if I notice a few of
my friends mention them to me . . . and the name’s sort of out there
then I’m like, okay, this is really interesting. I should see what these
guys are about and I might actually write to them . . . and I’ll definitely
make sure I get down to a gig.
The interviews on ‘Music Lessons’ were not geared toward critique
or explaining how a band might go about forging a sustainable and
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have all the information they might need to get the CD into retail
and dealing with the management, making sure that any opportunities they are able to secure for their artists and, that we’re able to
make the most of those opportunities.
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Well, for me it is totally all about songs. You know like, you gotta
have the songs. So if you’re a band out there and you’re looking
to record a demo, don’t worry about spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on the production on the recording, although that
stuff is nice if you have it and you want to do that that’s great,
I guess that does help, I don’t know, it more helps you with stuff like
community radio play to have like good production on your demo,
however, if what you’re looking for is a reaction from A&R people,
its all about songs. So if you’ve four okay songs and a $3000 budget
for a demo, don’t you dare go and record those okay songs. Focus
more on writing the songs. Because it’s just going to take that one
song, track one on your four-track demo for that A&R person to listen and go, ‘Oh my god, hold on a sec I need to know about this
band.’
Similarly, when a band plays live, they should strive to repeat the
effect:
Once you’ve been able to pull that A&R person to the gig because
you’ve got that fuckin’ awesome song, then once they’re there they
go, ‘Oh my god, this is something that is making a difference to me.’
You want to write a song that makes people feel and makes them
want to react and makes them want to buy your CD.
FBi’s music director continued the theme in his interview. For him, the
goal of is fairly simple:
I guess with any demo it should be as well recorded as the band wants
to put forward. If you’re in a lo-fi band, then you should represent
yourself as best you can and that’s what a demo is, it’s a demonstration disc to represent you as best as it possibly can in terms of the way
it’s recorded to the songs right through to the presentation and what
you put in a bio. I mean all of that, it’s all to give people context and
a perspective on what your band is and what sort of music you make,
and often you may only have a minute or two to make that impact,
so you have to think about what you need to communicate and how
quickly you can communicate it.
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independent path in their careers. Instead, each recounted familiar,
time-honored platitudes about how to be a rock star:
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The reason we have an Open Day is because it is quite unique. It isn’t
easy for unsigned bands to get their music to radio stations . . . and
talk to someone about their music, ask for any advice, and also find
out what happens to their music, so I guess given the amount of
demos we receive and the amount of Australian music we play, ‘Open
Day’ was a really obvious thing for us to do.
FBi’s reputation and credibility as a valid source for local music are based
on efforts such as the ‘Open Day’ and on its ability to stay ahead of
the purported cool music curve. To this end, the station has succeeded
and has been widely credited with breaking several highly successful
new bands and artists. This is in part why their many simple, basic and
uncritical explanations of the music industry are a credible and valid
articulation of the organization’s larger purposes and goals. The stories
they tell are not all that complicated. FBi exists to get ‘good’ music out
there, and the music industry exists to do the same. They are realists, not
idealists. They have strong connections in the music industry, and they
use them very effectively. A substantial part of the regional branches
of the global music industry is headquartered in Sydney, as are a heaving mass of those businesses dedicated to promotions, public relations,
advertising and marketing. FBi can draw and has drawn on an extraordinary range of expertise in getting people’s attention. Yet at the same
time they have rarely demonstrated much critical autonomy from the
music and media industries on whose expertise and creativity they have
relied so often.
2XX’s efforts at presenting local music and musicians to the local public are made valid in very different ways. While 2XX’s programs are
far less technically sophisticated, their programming about local music
and musicians is created using similar programming tools and practices.
But 2XX’s network of social connections with the local music scenes in
Canberra is very different. Canberra has few if any regional corporate
headquarters for major record labels. It has only a few music venues
dedicated to ‘unsigned’ bands and much less in the way of the youthful
‘creative class’ that FBi so assiduously courts. The assemblages that the
two stations rest on produce programming that sounds different, feels
different and means different things, despite the fact that the two stations work in very similar ways using very similar tools, guided by very
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FBi’s solution to dealing with its relationships with musicians was an
admirably direct one, a monthly ‘Open Day’ for bands to come to the
station and talk about their music with station staff:
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I’m not really a musician, but . . .
The last two examples of ‘local’ music come from two inventive radio
programs that stretch the very idea of what ‘local’ music is. The first
is FBi’s ‘Out of the Box’, a program which allows us to ‘meet people
through their music’. An ‘ordinary’ listener is asked to play their favorite
music for an hour and talk about what it means to them with the program host. The second is 2SER’s ‘Jailbreak’, an informational program
for and about people in prison and people who know someone who is
in prison. All of the music featured on the latter show is recorded at
correctional facilities in the Sydney region.
FBi’s ‘Out of the Box’
First, I will look at an episode of ‘Out of the Box’ from 20 September
2007. The show began with several songs chosen by the guest, followed
by a fairly lengthy and mostly scripted introduction. The combination
of the two established the relationship between the playlists and their
authors. The show began with show’s promo and then moved directly
into The Clash’s ‘London Calling’, followed by another promo for this
program. Then The Horrors’ song ‘Count in Fives’ played, moving seamlessly into Goldfrapp’s ‘Satin Chic’. The three-song set was surprisingly
well integrated, with The Horrors’ vocalist Faris Badwan’s hoarse and
shouted singing style recalling Joe Strummer’s and the band’s rhythmically unified riffs also hinting at The Clash’s throbbing, stark constancy.
The Goldfrapp song, while a textural and timbral contrast, dominated as
it is by rich, tuneful female vocals and a clever blend of synthesized bass
and keyboards, merged perfectly with the end of ‘Count in Fives’ as the
decay of The Horrors’ organ and guitar allowed the buzzing on-the-beat
quarter notes of the Goldfrapp song to enter almost without notice as
the tempi and key of the two songs were identical. Right on the abrupt
end of ‘Satin Chic’ the program host introduced us to our fellow FBi
listener and guest programmer:
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similar ideas and goals. Those who work at both stations support local
musicians, venues and events because they value their local scenes, and
they do so because they are an integral part of those scenes. However,
those at 2XX know very well how few bands ‘break’ out of Canberra,
while those at FBi can be relied upon to reel off the impressive roster
of artists the station has supported who have gone on to bigger things.
In these two cases, ‘local’ music simply means very different things.
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Host: You’re listening to ‘Out of the Box’, where every Thursday at
mid-day I bring someone into the studio to have a chat about their
favorite records and their life and how those two things intersect.
Today we have a guest who was born and bred in Wollongong but
now lives in Sydney and who has musical tastes ranging from Body
Count to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to the Muppets, or at
least there’s some Muppets in her record collection. She’s involved
with an organization called Doggie Rescue and she also likes to go
really, really fast.
It is clear from this introduction that the host is trying to establish a few
clear themes to work on for the hour. While the fondness for dogs and
fast transport had little to do with her musical tastes, it was offered in
service of a larger picture of the guest.
The program established a rhythm where the presentation of three
songs would be followed by extensive back-announcing with biographical detail mixed with personal reflections and interpretation of the
music as well as the kinds of stories so many like to tell each other about
their favorite music:
Host: So Goldfrapp we heard from just then. What do you like about
Goldfrapp?
Guest: I guess it’s that old glam kind of riffy, but electro feel, um, yeah,
they’re just really, you know up music.
Host: You can’t help but move your butt to it. And ahead of that
we heard from The Horrors, a band with some fairly spectacular
haircuts. Do you remember the first time you heard The Horrors?
Guest: Yeah. It was on the radio. Um, but, it just conjures up images
of a really cool live gig, I think with the really crazy hair and they’re
reminiscent of The Cure.
Host: And at the top, we started with an all-time classic, The Clash’s
‘London Calling’. Is that a track that you remember from your
youth particularly?
Guest: It is. It was my first school crush. It was a guy who wore tight
black jeans and bobber boots and a Clash shirt. I didn’t know who
The Clash were and I got into them after that. That was in Year Ten.
Throughout the episode, as the host alternated between the short sets of
music, she was also asking a series of leading questions for the guests, for
which they were obviously prepared, which elicited various reflections
and stories about the music the guest was playing. This guest recalled
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Guest: Saw Beck for the first time at the V Festival with my girlfriend
and it was one of those moments where, yeah everything was going
really well and it just kind of sticks in my mind and, yeah, just a
really good memory.
Host: He was rocking some pretty strange fashion, well not strange
fashion, but strange fashion for Beck that day. Do you remember he
had this kind of Bob Dylan look going on. He had a kind of Bob
Dylan in the ’70s look going on.
Guest: And then he had that Mormon-type guy doing all that really
cool dancing and jumping out with the tie and the short-sleeve
shirt. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool and then they were
playing the things they were eating off. Remember that?
Host: Oh, no, I missed that.
Guest: They sat down and they called it the feast and they started
eating, but then they started playing the plates and all of the cutlery
and stuff.
Host: I must have been at the bar. [Laughter]
This was followed by one of those classic fan stories:
Host: Before that we heard from The Cure. Now a little birdie tells me
there might be a story behind your love of The Cure.
Guest: Just a little one that my friends have heard far too many times.
Host: Tell, tell, tell.
Guest: Yeah, so, they were touring and we went and hung out and
managed to meet a friend of theirs and later on that same friend
came out with The Cure and I was there with my partner that
night and knew that the band was there that night and went and
had a chat to him and he said yeah come back tomorrow and he
had a backstage pass for me and a friend. Caught a train up from
Wollongong and my friend missed the train and I went backstage
with this massive big bright pink backstage pass. I managed to get
backstage while they were getting dressed and just hang out and
then walk around. I played their drums on stage and yeah, it was
pretty cool. And then after the concert, I kind of went with them,
waited out the side gate for them to get into the car to go wherever
we were drinking next and little did I know like all of the goths
were hanging outside of the fence area kind of pressing against it
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a few stories about some of the bands whose music she played. After
playing Beck’s song ‘I Think I’m in Love’, the two had a chat about it:
Local Music for Local People
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‘Out of the Box’ provides a distinct forum for a common, if not pervasive, form of talk about music. It does so in an intimate yet structured
way that encourages its guests to take ‘their music’ and present it to
strangers as if they were only talking to a friend.
2SER’s ‘Jailbreak’
‘Jailbreak’ on 2SER is a very different kind of program and offers the
voices of local people with whom most of us living in Sydney would
have little to no contact: prisoners. The program fits into 2SER’s long
history of social justice programs that present the voices and testimony
of people denied a voice elsewhere. In this case, ‘Jailbreak’ consists of
the testimony of people who have committed crimes, been convicted of
them and have gone to prison. This includes inmates telling the stories of their lives before incarceration and inmates providing advice
for other inmates, inmates providing advice to those on the outside
who have family members in prison as well as discussion of law and
order issues from the perspective of those on the other side of things.
For example, one program featured a ‘Panel of Expert Inmates’ talking
about the ‘truth in sentencing’ guidelines which have mostly abolished
parole or reduced sentences in New South Wales (NSW). The show is
sponsored by the Community Restorative Centre, a support service for
prisoners, ex-prisoners and those connected to them. All of the planned
shows must be submitted to the Department of Corrective Services of
the NSW state government, and some of these plans have on occasion
been rejected (Javes, 2006).
One of the major sources of program material is the songs and poetry
of inmates recorded in NSW prisons and similar correctional units. The
range of styles on three editions of the show gives us a reasonable
representation of the music that often appears on the show. On 23 May
2004, for example, the first song that appeared, after the inmates’ ‘round
table on truth in sentencing’, was a bright, major-key song strongly
marked by the influence of South African pop, especially the interplay
between the lead and backing vocals as well as the harmonies and structure. The lyrics were poignant, asking listeners to . . . if they ‘lend me
your hand or cross over the road because I can see so far away’. This song
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yelling out ‘slut’ to me, that was pretty, and then they’d actually
clipped the fence and cut it down so when the band came out the
fences went down and I got picked up by the seat of my pants and
thrown into a limo with, um, Simon Gallup and thrown into his
lap headfirst.
Making Radio, Making Meaning
was written by a South African inmate and featured a simple ABABAB
structure and the common cyclical use of the I-V-IV chord progression
drawn from mbube and related styles. The second song played during
this edition of the show was slightly up-tempo hip-hop tune. It began
with minor-key keyboard riff that was then doubled by a female vocal
with a strict electronic percussion sound ticking away underneath and
a rhythm guitar holding the center together. There were also occasional
stabs at synthesizer that mimicked a DJ’s drops and ornamentation. The
lyrics, written by an MC who called himself ‘Mystery Man’, followed a
familiar path, spoken with the familiar observational distance common
to much hip-hop:
I dropped, stood up, recovered and came up begging, hoping this
generation would start understanding peace is the only chance for a
good ending, and what’s around me is making me crack to insanity.
I remember back in ’90 kids were playing on the street with water pistols now grown up thinking they’re immortal with their automatics
on auto bloods getting shed like there’s no tomorrow.
At the breaks, the female voice re-entered, languidly singing the lines
‘I really don’t want to fight no more,/ Peace is so much easier.’ A didgeridoo entered at the breaks as well and was placed well in the background
as a low bass note, echoing off into the distance. The program closed
with a song called ‘Jesus’. The artist was not identified. It featured a fingered and strummed acoustic guitar, with three male vocalists, one who
sang in English and another in Spanish. The song was slow and gradually grew more and more rich and lush, with synthesized strings and
backing vocalists, all drenched in reverb and echo. The men sang, ‘Holy,
holy burning bright,/ Come and feel our hearts tonight./ In the quiet
of our soul,/ Speak to us and make us whole./ For the father of men,/
Bring us back to you again., Hold us in your hand so tight/ Closer to
your guiding light./ Father, Father God.’
On 6 April, an inmate performed a vocally rangy version of Robbie
Williams’ ‘Better Man’, accompanied by an awkwardly strummed
acoustic guitar. After hitting some of the higher notes, he would cough
and clear his throat, and several times, upon re-entering the verse, he
would have to take a few stabs to get the opening chords right. Yet
despite the challenges of the song, the sound of the recording, audibly reflecting the acoustics of the small room in which it was recorded,
allowed Williams’ somewhat hackneyed words, such as ‘As my soul heals
the shame,/ I will grow through this pain,/ Lord I’m doing all I can/
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To be a better man’, to take on new shades of meaning. Hearing this man
sing the lines ‘walk me out of here, I’m in pain’ while feeling the resonance of the room he is in, knowing what kind of room it is, transforms
the song.
One final episode of the show from 20 April 2004 featured an awkwardly slow and poorly recorded cover version of the Jackson Five’s
‘I Want You Back’, shorn of everything but the chorus. The rendition
featured a piano and bass playing a simplified version of the iconic
bass line, a rhythm guitar providing some rhythmic solidity and slight
hints of percussive DJ drops or synthesizer sounds. Three male singers
providing the backing vocals for the chorus, the words of which were
changed to: ‘Oh judge give me one more chance,/ No more armed robbery ever again.’ Each of the three verses that appeared was rapped by
a different rapper. The cheat-beating raps provided a stark and ill-fitting
contrast to the light-hearted choruses. Later during this same edition, an
inmate identified simply as Albert read a poem he had written, accompanied with didgeridoo and clapsticks. The man’s voice was drenched
in reverb. The poem was called ‘Hole Above Ground’ and followed a
very simple rhyme scheme. The story it told was one of struggle and
redemption, with Albert explaining that, despite being incarcerated, he
was ‘given a chance to live and to tell’. He had decided to fight against
the system in which he was locked up so that ‘people won’t forget
where those deaths occurred or the hatred, anger and sadness it stirred.’
On listening to these songs, it is clear than none of them would be
likely to gain airplay on its merits as a sound recording. They are poorly
recorded, the musicians don’t stay together particularly well, they miss
notes and some of the content is mawkish. But none of that matters
in the slightest. These performances are not validated by their technical characteristics. They are validated by the context in which they
are created and the means by which they are mediated. These songs
are by turns powerful, entertaining and moving, focusing and articulating the experiences and circumstances of the performers, taking on a
density and substance that make their seeming demerits into powerful
virtues.
Conclusion
Many of the sounds described in this chapter are marginal ones. If they
did not appear on these radio stations, they would not be broadcast at
all. These programs and their presenters focus and articulate the local in
ways distinct to the ways in which each station creates the ‘assemblage’,
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that particular combination of sonic, discursive, material, technological, social and historical mediations that defines each station (see Born,
2005:8). This assemblage is what the presenters, producers and listeners validate when local musicians use the ‘convivial tool’ of the radio
station to mutual advantage. ArtSound does so by constantly adding to
its store of unique archival recordings of local performances. They place
the local on the same footing as the national or the global, part of a
decades-long effort to show where they live is just as ‘mature’ as places
such as Sydney or Melbourne. 2XX embraces the local with its more
lengthy and less self-conscious tradition of talking to local musicians
and playing their music. FBi’s inventive approach to the local shows
us an important aspect of what the station is often very good at, managing much larger flows of music in ways that make immediate and
often intimate sense to its listeners. 2SER’s ‘Jailbreak’ reflects that station’s ability to establish social connections between those locals who
are so marginalized as to be very nearly invisible.
For all of these stations, the very idea of the local is a broad and
encompassing one. Each station’s understanding of local music transcends the merely geographical reach of radio signals and reflects the
means by which the open and transparent distribution of expressive
power is distributed through the social networks that define each station. Each radio station has its own way of focusing and articulating the
local, not as a tangible material entity but a constantly shifting process
of clarifying and articulating a locally recognizable and relevant expression of the larger discursive flows that surround all of us. They do so
by making local music scenes more comprehensible and tangible and
therefore more open and accessible. They do so through making meaning by creating open and potentially democratic relationships and social
aesthetics.
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6
The extent to which people are willing to listen to you is based on
how much they trust you.
FBi presenter
We’re not just a bunch of twitchers. A bird doesn’t have to be rare for
us to be interested in it.
2SER presenter
The act of assembling a playlist for a radio show is a complicated
communicative gesture. Whether the songs are arranged for a heavily
personal speciality music show or slotted into a less personal ‘mix’ show,
it is an act that matters to the people doing it. In some ways, it is one of
the central expressive acts I set out to explore in this book, concentrating
and uniting as it does the skills, knowledge and desires of the presenter,
the structures and frameworks of the organization and the attentions
and responses of the unknown cohort of listeners who must be out
there, somewhere, hearing everything. It is an act that, as I will show,
often seeks some imperceptible point of balance between the agenda of
the presenter and their presumptions about their listeners, between the
expression of the inner logic of the act of saying something through
music and an imagined way of hearing what is being said, and finally,
between a way of making sense and an imputed mode of understanding.
The presenter whittles down the whole world of music to a few hours
of sound and sends it out into the invisible air. Then they do it again
and again, hoping each time that what they are doing makes sense to
someone.
Each of the four radio stations examined in this book has a different set of rules and guidelines designed to help presenters put their
shows together. FBi (Free Broadcasting Incorporated) and ArtSound seem
165
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to have more formal and developed sets of guidelines and feedback
mechanisms, while 2XX and 2SER (Sydney Educational Radio) allow
their presenters a lot more latitude. Beyond the immediate station guidelines, all of the presenters I spoke to and observed had their own
ideas, rules and procedures to guide them, very much of the kinds
I described in Chapter 2. While the guidelines drawn up by the stations
are intended to shape the overall sound of the station, the rules individual presenters create for themselves are mostly about how to make sense
to other people, people they don’t know and will probably never meet.
They assemble their playlists to say something to strangers, something
they expect those strangers probably have not heard before but will still
recognize as meaningful because they imagine these strangers to be of
their public. They know they are willing to listen and listen good. These
presenters act from a position within that public and from within organizations constructed and maintained by members of that public. They
create focal points of articulation by speaking in the vernacular developed by members of that public to talk about music from their position
within their respective streams of local, regional and global discursive
flows. There are two kinds of programs I will examine here: generalist
mix programs and specialist programs. For the mix programs, presenters
try to provide listeners an almost kaleidoscopic rendering of the musical world of the radio station as a whole which, given the complexity
of these organizations, is an almost impossible task. The specialists try
to present sounds some listeners are expected to be unfamiliar with and
then gently educate those that are not by trying to expand their knowledge, experience and understanding of music. As I will show, despite
the obvious differences between these sorts of programs, presenters try
to create musical and radiophonic experiences they think are important,
are valuable and that say something.
Can’t I just play what I want? Decision-making,
ordering and playlists
FBi and ArtSound have very well-developed training and quality monitoring systems in place. Both strive to create an identifiable ‘sound’ for
the station as a whole and a distinct style for individual programs that
supports this overall sound. The style of each is made most directly audible in the knitting together of the songs from playlists, station IDs and
promos, interviews and the often extensive back-announcing by presenters. While both stations tell its presenters to ‘be themselves’, each also
has extensive rules for how presenters are supposed to do this. They have
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carefully implemented ways to enforce these rules through feedback and
‘airchecks’, or formal systems of recording and listening to programs in
order to assess a presenter’s performance. Beyond this, both stations are
very prescriptive in terms of establishing priorities for which music is
broadcast and how often, either through playlists, careful organization
of CD libraries, precise designation of weekly or monthly feature CDs or
‘albums of the week’ and the sometimes rigid execution of programming
regulations and criteria.
ArtSound’s guidelines offer a great deal of advice and counsel on how
to talk, how to aurally link different kinds of music, how to imagine the listener and how to make one’s presenting practices fit into a
well-defined template. The guidelines are clear on the high standard
of quality demanded of presenters and the kinds of sense all programs
should make. The people at FBi I spoke to routinely invoked standards
of ‘fit’ or ‘appropriateness’ or ‘what works and what doesn’t work’ for
the station, rather than some abstract notion of quality. A small group
of FBi staff explicitly act as ‘filters’ through which most of the music
presented by the station passes, or ‘distributors’ who subtly try to make
sure the right music ends up in the hands of those most likely to play it
on their shows. The staff and volunteers who run FBi’s various ‘intake’
valves were deceptively intense about the amount of discretion they had
to include or exclude new music and about their overall ability to shape
the sound of the station. FBi’s decisions about what gets on air, like
ArtSound’s, are not imposed on presenters, nor are any such decisions
made by one person. Decisions are made consultatively and very often
collectively. In some cases, only the ‘preferences’ or ‘recommendations’
of those organizing the various programming mechanisms filter down
to presenters; in others, requests or stipulations are made more explicit.
Both stations ground their comparatively eclectic offerings in the organizing schemas of musical traditions, styles or genres, each using these
often notional designations as ways to imply, rather than state, underlying connections between different pieces of music. The consequences
of the music management systems in use at FBi and ArtSound during
the years I was doing research about these stations appear clearly in the
juxtaposition of specific songs or pieces to the voices of the presenters
to the overall flow of the seamless streams of sounds that never seem to
stop, but only to continuously evolve.
FBi’s ‘Weekend Lunch’
In order to produce the kinds of sounds that have the requisite fit and
relevance, FBi presenters have to do a lot different things. The main
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thing they need to do is choose music that in some way accords with
FBi’s intentions. This means learning how to use the station’s playlists,
playboxes and music library. The playlists are prescriptive tools in that
the songs on them are carefully chosen songs that the station and volunteers who deal with the tide of music that constantly enters that station
have decided must be played. The playlists are tiered, with songs at the
top end slated for two plays per day, and the ones near the bottom perhaps receiving one play every other day. Playlisted songs tend to get
heavier airplay during the day and much less in the evenings. The playboxes used at the time I was doing research on FBi were more suggestive.
They are used to recommend, but not require, that songs be played. The
music library also had shelves for music played over the previous year
and another for bands on tour. One main goal for the station as a whole
was for presenters to continually try to catch the listener’s ear. This goal
was met through constant, small variations in how people talked, how
they addressed the listener and how they organized their music. There
seemed to be a delicate give and take between presenters and staff and
volunteers who managed FBi’s musical flows. The goal was to provide
guidance, but not at the expense of inhibiting the exploration and learning that are necessary for presenters to improve their abilities and have
some say in what gets played on air. The station relies on its presenters
to become part of the station’s broader musical culture. It needs them
to share ideas, songs, tastes and experiences, but it also needs to shape
their skills and abilities to provide interesting radio.
FBi’s ‘Weekend Lunch’ is a good example of this process. The program
ran for three hours on both Saturday and Sunday during the time I was
studying FBi. This is a lot of airtime to fill, and the presenter used the
guidance of the station staff to manage her programming. She also made
a series of decisions about how she would produce six hours of radio per
week that reveal important aspects of her relationship with the station
and her listeners. I will look at two editions of her program, one from
2005 and one from 2007, and show how the programs are constructed
and what the presenter means to say with them. Each edition of the
show is constructed out of three things: songs chosen from the standard
range of ‘FBi music’; station IDs, promos and sponsorship ads; and interviews with local musicians or promoters. These are then divided up into
segments of anywhere between 15 and 25 minutes. Each segment felt
like it had a distinct feel or mood to it, defined by the songs which acted
as the focal point of each segment. In terms of form, the two programs
were unusual for the weekend. They resembled the weekday mix programs more than the speciality programs that tended to dominate the
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weekend programming. In this respect, these programs acted as a huge
chunk of aural continuity, maintaining the distinct FBi sound in a very
prominent and substantial time slot.
The presenter consciously tried to create distinct moods for each segment based on the day in question: is it summer or autumn, raining
or fine? Is there a palpable mood in the city, such as a lazy Sunday or
a busy Saturday? And she would gauge her own mood as well. On one
Sunday a few months before our interviews, she told me she was feeling
melancholy and tried to pick herself up, but also go with the feeling, using musical sets that contrasted with each other. The musical
attributes that grow from her ideas are numerous, such as old or new,
local or not, upbeat or chill, ironic or earnest, vocal heavy or instrumental, frivolous or contemplative, sentimental or silly, and politically
engaged or escapist. She did not use these as simple reductive contrasts,
but as parameters which all compete for attention within the threehour show as whole, within individual sets, and even within individual
songs. These ideas are a kind of foundation layer to the way in which she
assembled her show. She also made imaginative connections to her presumed listeners, describing songs that make you smile, or help pass the
time when you have to work on the weekend or make you want to sit in
your car after you’ve arrived at your destination just to hear the whole
thing. She made use of the various divisions in the station’s music library
using the ‘recent music’ shelves to explore what she called ‘different
grades of older’. She would go through this part of the library looking for
things that had passed, but still deserved some attention beyond the initial flush of attention many artists get. She wanted to be able to go back
and catch something she might have missed the first time or something
that she could reinterpret. These various decision-making and ordering
mechanisms circled around presumptions of familiarity and a willingness to pay attention, based on the trust she has in her listeners and the
trust she hopes to earn through her knowledge of how to arrange music
on radio and ability to do so in a way that is not too overbearing or
exclusive.
The edition of ‘Weekend Lunch’ from 30 January 2005 demonstrates
many of these characteristics. One set from early in the show began
with a song called ‘The Unstoppable’ from the Sydney band Red Riders.
The song was a screechy indie rock tune marked by drowsy-sounding
male vocals, clear sections and a coda, in which the band sped up its
descending resolving chord progression until the song sounded like it
fell apart. This was followed by a station ID which entered as the ringing, distorted guitars bled away. The station ID was one of the longer
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ones, clocking in at about 35 seconds, in which a series of FBi-sponsored
events and supporters were aurally cited to solicit financial support.
As the voiceover ended and the promo ended with a splash of static,
an electronic piece called ‘Another Day’ by a Melbourne producer identified as DD Sott entered, precisely building on the sounds from the
promo. Sott’s piece was dominated by a smooth, undulating synthesizer
sound, twinned with a tightly compressed percussion track that filled in
the open space with sharp, interlaced rhythms. At the end of this piece
a voice-only station ID cleverly joined ‘Another Day’ to ‘Like a Duck’
by Sydney duo Pioneer Disposals, a piece that begins centered around
tape loops and gradually evolves into a more formal instrumental song
structure pushed forward by a strummed acoustic guitar and electronic
drums with taped sounds dropped in periodically. The segue was subtle
and continuous. This was followed by a 15-minute interview with Pioneer Disposals in which they played another of their own tracks as well
as an instrumental piece by The Durutti Column, a largely experimental improvisational group. Both pieces centered on repetitive loops of
material around which players improvised. These two segments flowed
on from one another creating two distinct, but smoothly interlinked
segments.
After a fairly long promo, a third contrasting segment gave a sense
of the program as a whole. The first song the presenter played was
called ‘Dexter and Sinistra’, by Australian band Karma County. The song
featured vocals by the Australian actor Bryan Brown, who presented a
spoken-word story about the rocky, complex love affair between Dexter
and Sinistra. The backing band played a low-key harmonically cyclical
vamp with occasional melodic interjections from a heavily reverberant
smooth guitar sound. After a quick station ID, with only voices saying ‘FBi 94.5’, Frank Black’s ‘Headache’ entered, thudding along with
acoustic guitar, piano, organ and an ever-increasing drama and raising
of the pitch in the vocals. The two songs contrasted in most things,
especially tempo and feel, but they were very similar in their structures
and both expressed a similar kind of grim humor that linked them well.
A sponsorship ad with heavy dance music as its background formed a
natural break between the first two songs of the segment and the final
song. Arcade Fire’s ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ followed, exhibiting a very similar
feel and structure as ‘Headache’, as both songs moved forward through
increasingly intense repetition of a small number of sections that always
seemed to be pushing just slightly too fast. To this point the show had
moved subtly from one piece to the next through seemingly tangential aural connections that, when the three segments had played out,
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suddenly felt remarkably coherent, a coherence that was simultaneously
aural, emotional, social and historical. The presenter managed to tie
together the local, national and international across several decades
creating a cogency without the need for explanation.
One segment from a program from 2007 provides similar insight into
this presenter’s practices. At just about 2 pm on 6 October 2007, the
song ‘Wintertime in Hollywood’, by The Lovetones, began almost 40
minutes of ceaseless musical invention with the wistful overtones of
mid-1960s’ pop. The song moves in a mid-tempo groove, anchored by
strong downbeats strummed on a rich 12-string guitar, a slide guitar
wailing subtly around the rest of the band and a refrain with three-part
vocals and a melodic interlude played on what sounds like a flute patch
on a keyboard. As the song wound down leaving only the flute sound
hanging, the electronic glitches of Tunng’s ‘Take’ slowly built. As the
first notes of someone playing the inside of a piano sounded, a reversegated voice announced ‘FBi’ in perfect time with the song, melding with
Tunng’s electronic rumblings. When the vocals and finger-picked guitar
of ‘Take’ entered, it brought to a conclusion a masterfully weighted transition from a superior, if somewhat customary, psychedelic rock tune, to
a ‘glitchy’ song that meshes a fairly straightforward song structure and
vocal melodies with noisy, rhythmically complicated electronics. ‘Take’
was followed by a sponsorship promo about a new play at the Wharf 2
Theatre. Under the voiceover providing a synopsis of the play on offer,
a funky web of electronic percussion and keyboards built to burbling,
expanding sci-fi sound that faded directly into the gradually rising and
sustained singing that opens Animal Collective’s ‘Chores’, a hyperactive,
noisy song that seems to try to meld Calypso and electronica with indie
rock. As the jumpy chaos of the first half of ‘Chores’ gradually eased off
into a trembling collection of slowly billowing sounds, an upbeat four
on the floor beat entered under the wash of percussive and electronic
effects and thumped along subtly for a little over a minute. As this beat
too eased off, we could hear the words ‘You’re listening to FBi 94.5’
almost buried by the maw as another four on the floor beat started in
almost identical tempo. This time it was Riot in Belgium’s ‘La Musique’,
widely acclaimed as the dance floor anthem of 2007 by those in the
know about such things.
While one might have expected the usually responsible presenter to
stop after four songs, this set showed no signs of stopping. As the messy,
static-ridden ending to ‘La Musique’ was ripping its way to its end, we
again heard the words ‘FBi 94.5 FM’, this time yelling a long way off
under the mess of noise still palpitating in the foreground. As the song
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finally closed with the words ‘Oh my god, there’s a Riot in Belgium’,
a new mass of noise emerged, this time from New Young Pony Club’s
‘Get Lucky’. The tempi from ‘La Musique’ and ‘Get Lucky’ were nearly
identical, but this time the urgency of the dance anthem was replaced
with a more relaxed endlessly recycling rhythm guitar riff, a bright, simple two-chord cycle mirrored by the bass and overlaid with flat, almost
spoken female vocals provided both an apt supplement to the female
vocalists of ‘La Musique’, but contrasting to their faux electro-dramatics.
The set was brought to what appeared to be its rousing peak with Blur’s
‘Song 2’, as Damon Albarn’s throwaway ‘Woo hoo’ preceded the thunder of a guitar riff that was surprisingly similar to that from ‘Get Lucky’.
Remarkably, at this point we were still in the thick of what turned out
to be an epic set that continued through the grinding slow rock of The
Mess Hall’s ‘Keep Walking’, the subtle rhythmic continuity of Aesop
Rock’s ‘None Shall Pass’ and Pivot’s ‘Montecore’, an instrumental piece
that winds its way improvisationally through various textural and sonic
permutations of a small set of harmonic materials which anchored the
often appealingly incongruous explorations. At the sudden end of the
piece, and the set, the presenter finally returned in a softly spoken but
enthusiastic back-announcement:
The super dreamy sounds of Pivot from their record ‘Make Me Love
You’, and how could you not be in love with Pivot? That was
‘Montecore’ and they are playing next Saturday night. FBi is taking over the Studio at the Opera House and they are part of the
line-up for the Sydney Underground extravaganza . . . Right, so that
was a pretty big bunch of tunes that we took there, so let’s back right
up to about two o’clock. We heard from The Lovetones, a four-piece
out of Sydney. They gave us ‘Wintertime in Hollywood’. We then
caught up with Tunng, a six-piece out of the UK who’ve got a new
record, a dreamy record called ‘Good Arrows’. That was ‘Take’ from
them. Animal Collective gave us ‘Chores.’ Riot in Belgium, a duo sort
of half from Sydney, half from Melbourne, gave us ‘La Musique’. The
New Young Pony Club gave us ‘Get Lucky’. We kind of tripped back
in time a little bit with Blur and heard ‘Song 2.’ Something brand new
from the Mess Hall, that was ‘Keep Walking’, and Aesop Rock gave us
the title track to his new record, ‘None Shall Pass’.
After this long, complex, engaging set of music, she proceeded to simply
and clearly note each artist, where they came from and what song we
heard. She offered no explanation of why these songs should have been
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played in this way at this time, displacing her own explicit judgments
and interpretations. She obviously knew a lot about this music, displaying a strong enough understanding of these songs to allow them to
resonate aurally with one another so persuasively. This presenter told
me she didn’t like to talk too much on her shows because she felt she
simply didn’t have a lot to say. She also seemed to realize it was not
always necessary to fill in every available space with prescriptive commentary. Instead, she provided clarity and a slight smile in her voice
throughout her shows and a calm, clean rhythm to her words. She did
not offer interpretations or extensive back-story on the artists or their
work. Yet her manner belied the enormous amount of work, care and
planning that went into her shows. This form of presenting, taking an
obvious pleasure from music and offering the same to others, defines
this presenter’s mode of public address, one that is welcoming and open,
creating a common space where the local and the global, the present and
the past, the known and the unknown, can mingle as equals.
ArtSound’s ‘Sounds Early’ and ‘Disc Drive’
ArtSound’s mix programs are similar in form and function to FBi’s. The
weekday mix programs, called ‘Sounds Early’ and ‘Disc Drive’, are placed
in the morning slot from 7 am to 9 am and the evening slot from 5 pm
to 7 pm. ArtSound tells its presenters that these are ‘premier’ programs,
requiring a good deal of skill, guidance and dedication from them. They
are presented by more experienced volunteers. ArtSound has extensive
training and feedback mechanisms to maintain the kinds of standards
they have set for themselves, standards defined by ample and expansive
presenter guidelines. ArtSound aspires to provide a ‘friendly, intelligent
and contemporary’ sound ‘without being loud, pretentious, crude or
“smart” ’ (ArtSound, 2004:11). The mix programs are designed to ‘showcase the music styles and genres that are presented across the various
specialist programs presented on ArtSound’ (ArtSound, 2003:1). The
guidelines counsel presenters to avoid ‘significant programming skews’
in their programming (ArtSound, 2003:1). The template laid out for the
presenters suggested that they should not leave the listener ‘in a stressed
state wondering whether they are going to be jumping out of their skin
one minute, seduced another, and expected to dance polkas around the
breakfast table the next’ (ArtSound, 2003:2).
The programs are impressively well organized, and each edition analyzed here stays comfortably within the boundaries set by the guidelines.
Each daily edition of ‘Sounds Early’ and ‘Disc Drive’ has two key structural features that mark divisions between the sections of each show: the
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sometimes lengthy ‘sponsorship notifications’, which are really just
advertisements for institutional supporters of the station, and the station’s ‘Arts Diary’, a listing of local events in the arts. All of these are
produced by the station and feature a well-spoken announcer reading
carefully scripted announcements over a musical background. These
two features act as high-profile aural markers of the associations and
connections ArtSound creates and maintains in order to survive. Moreover, the form these programs take and the kinds of social networks
they represent grow from ArtSound’s most persistent and long-standing
practices. They grow from the radio magazine style programs produced from ArtSound’s earliest days and continue to produce and
reproduce the connections with sponsors, arts organizations and performing arts ensembles they have linked themselves with from the early
1980s.
The programming guidelines describe what ‘the listener’ might be
expected to be doing during each of the mix programs. Programs are
expected to conform to these presumed listening needs. Presenters are
encouraged to think of the microphone as the ‘listener’s ear’ and to do
their best to keep everything within some very clear bounds. The volume of the many different sounds should be kept level; they should
enunciate clearly, use ‘voice projection techniques’ to speak strongly
without speaking loudly and speak in the lower register of their voice.
They should smile while on air as it makes their voice sound friendly.
They should modulate their vocal tones to maintain aural interest. They
should try to control their speaking pace, sound positive and provide
information on the programming, but keep their interpretive comments
to themselves. They should be prepared, reliable and pleasant, but they
should also ‘be natural’, be themselves and relax and enjoy themselves
(ArtSound, 2003).
‘Sounds Early’ is designed to be of medium pace, not too loud or
overbearing, and feature ‘a predominance of jazz with some folk and
appropriate short classical’ (ArtSound, 2003:3). One edition from June
2004 demonstrates this. A little before eight o’clock, after a sponsorship ad for a financial planning service, the presenter played a version
of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Girl from Ipanema’ sung by Al Jarreau and
Oleta Adams. The version is dominated by a vocal duet which tells the
girl’s story, supplemented by several changes of perspective, in fairly
breathy, emotional and dramatic tones. This was followed by another
song written by Jobim, ‘Wave’. This version was performed by flautist
Jane Rutter and classical guitarist Slava Grigoryan, two recognized virtuosi performing with skill, invention and precision, in a subdued and
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quiet arrangement. The final song in this set was ‘It’s Alright with Me’,
performed with a similarly drilled and exacting skill set by the Canadian
vocal group The Idea of North.
After the news, the presenter read the weather and then announced
that she was taking listeners ‘into our classical mode’, while the very
familiar horn motif from the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano
Concerto No. 1 in B minor sounded. The movement was part of a compilation CD called Classical Heartbreakers, a collection of short extracts
from larger works sourced from operas such as Don Giovanni and Tosca
as well as films such as Schindler’s List and The Deer Hunter. This simple
connection led on to another piece drawn from the same CD, the aria
‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca, performed by Maria Callas, and a guitar piece
entitled ‘Cavatina’ once used as the theme music for the film The Deer
Hunter. This was followed by the aria ‘Deh, vienni alla finestra’ from Don
Giovanni, performed by Teddy Tahu Rhodes accompanied by a mandolin, the plucked strings and languid emotive melodies linking the two
pieces.
Several years later, we can see many of the same characteristics in
another edition of ‘Sounds Early’ from 7 November 2007. At the start of
the program, the presenter played a song from an incongruous source,
Hayley Jensen, a Canberran who had appeared as one of the 12 finalists
in Australian Idol a few years earlier, singing a sentimental, mid-tempo
pop ballad called ‘Alive’. This was followed by an unnamed piece by
the Joona Toivanen trio, a Finnish jazz group. The set was rounded
out by Australian folk singer and songwriter Kate Fagan, performing
‘Dollar Bills and Diamond Towns’. This was followed by a sponsorship
announcement and an abrupt change of pace with the Australian pop
and jazz vocalist Deni Hines performing a melodramatic version of ‘Lady
Sings the Blues’, backed up by the gaudy stylings of Australian trumpeter
James Morrison. This led into the 1960s’ R&B ballad song ‘I Just Don’t
Know What to Do with Myself’, performed by Hines’ mother, Marcia, a
judge on Australian Idol, leading into the natural break in all mix programs, the ‘Arts Diary’. The songs in this set were only loosely allied,
with the links noticeable and plain. The Idol connection was clearly
intended to lead in and close out this half-hour of programming, while
the mother–daughter connection was obvious. Beyond this, all of the
vocal pieces here were sung by women born in Australia, with the exception of Hines the elder, who arrived for a production of Hair in the
1970s and never left. Beyond this, there were numerous seemingly incidental overlaps in instrumentation as well, with the trumpet making a
spotlighted appearance in all but one song.
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‘Disc Drive’ works on the same principles, and again we can sample
two editions of the program to hear the same principles at work. ‘Disc
Drive’ is distinguished from ‘Sounds Early’ only by the fact that the
first hour should be ‘relatively medium to fast paced and could include
some slightly more assertive music styles’, while still maintaining the
‘predominance of jazz with some folk and short classical/early classical
music’ (ArtSound, 2003:3). The edition from 24 November 2004 was a
particularly interesting edition of the show. The program was presented
by a host who was much younger than the average presenter for a mix
program. The first 20 minutes of the show suggested a slightly different
approach from the ArtSound style. The show began right on the heels of
the hourly news with an excerpt from an unidentified chamber orchestra piece from the early classical period performed by the Australian
Chamber Orchestra (ACO). The presenter then entered, introduced the
program and read the weather. He continued his program with a song
by Jimmy Styles and the Easy Company called ‘Russian Girls and Their
Cottontails’. The song provided a strong contrast to the ACO, consisting
of spoken male and female vocals in English and Russian, and a guitar
played in a loose swing style with horns to match. The drums held down
a straight half-time pulse that created a strong tension with the doubletime horns and guitar. However, dropped into the song were samples
of a balalaika orchestra. After a far more sedate sponsorship ad for a
local art gallery, with a minor-key string quartet playing underneath,
the presenter then chose a more traditional jazz piece from the James
Sked Quartet from Adelaide called ‘My Little Cello’. The piece featured
a fairly straightforward structure and arrangement and was segregated
from the live recording of a country-rock song that was followed by
another promo. The next song was by Chris While and Julie Matthews,
a folk duo from the UK. It was called ‘The Weight of Loving You’ and featured a strongly strummed acoustic guitar, female vocal duet and strong
electric guitar interjections. After another sponsorship promo the set
was rounded off with ‘Undecided’ by Dizzy Gillespie, recorded in Paris
in 1953, which preceded the ‘Arts Diary’. There were few explicit connections made by the presenter, nor were there any obvious implicit
ones either. Instead, the presenter seemed to take seriously the admonitions of the guidelines cautioning presenters that the mix programs
are intended to ‘showcase’ the music found elsewhere across ArtSound’s
programming.
The edition from 5 November 2007 demonstrates the same forces at
work. The presenter for this edition of the program clearly approached
the program with similar priorities, but with a different set of musical
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inclinations. Following on from the first installment of the ‘Arts Diary’
was folk singer Priscilla Herdman’s performance of Slim Dusty’s setting
of the Henry Lawson poem ‘Do You Think That I Do Not Know’. The
song is a spare and mournful evocation of Lawson’s desolate poem. After
some explanation of the provenance of the tune and the words, the
presenter then played Doc and Merle Watson’s ‘Guitar Polka’, followed
quickly by a South African isicathamiya piece, a French pop song from
Serge Gainsbourg and concluded the set with Charlie Byrd’s version of
Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘So Danço Samba’ with Maucha Adnet on vocals.
Again, we find each set of music fitted into a template defined by a few
key things. First, the time set aside for music is constrained and must fit
between the end of the news on the hour and the ‘Arts Diary’ on the
half-hour. Second, the presenters use sponsorship ads and station IDs
and promos to set off parts of their sets from the other. Finally, each
tries to link the pieces they play to other pieces from within the set or
to other programs spread out across the ArtSound program grid. The
demands on the presenters of the mix programs are significant. They
have to choose the music for their playlists somewhat carefully to fit
into the limited slots time available to them, to fit their choices into the
pre-arranged types of music they allowed to choose from and to fit the
music into the larger ArtSound style.
The identity of the station is shaped and continuously reproduced
through their actions and adherence to what presenters learn in training and what they’re told through the guidelines. These mark one of
the core ethical relationships that define the station. But the presenters of the mix programs I spoke to all had distinct experiences of the
organization and therefore had a fairly broad range of working methods
to express this organizational identity. The ways in which ArtSound’s
presenters confrontation with the particular worlds of music held in
their music library is structured in distinct ways. One I met simply
shows up and just grabs CDs off the shelf and goes to it, often earning the quiet approbation of other presenters. Others plan their shows
beforehand, while others have carefully worded scripts for their backannouncements and have already set their playlists up before they arrive
to broadcast. One had a set of color-coded folders, a different one for
each of the different types of programs she hosted, each folder being
a repository for any ideas she might have about how to organize her
programs. Another told me that radio is too valuable a resource for him
to be disorganized. He feared his shows might devolve into a morass
of meaningless eclecticism. Many mix presenters create sets of topical music around current events, so if a performer or composer has a
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birthday or has recently died or experiences a sudden resurgence of
interest due to a film or a new book, a presenter will play their music
and place it within this context, continually recontextualizing and reinterpreting the music they play. One related an anecdote from his early
life as a young musician. He was asked to perform at a well-known venue
and had been quite anxious about it. He told me it was memorable to
him because, as he was playing, his instrument disappeared. He didn’t
have to adjust anything or even think about the instrument. He used
this story to explain that those editions of the mix programs he regards
as his best flow through the equipment. The themes he uses to organize his shows, like ‘horses’ or ‘clichés’ become simple contrivances on
which to hang a listener’s attention.
The overriding force that shapes all the work and creativity that goes
into ArtSound’s mix programs is time. The studio is hooked up to the
internet, via broadband, all the time. When the internet is not up on
the screen, there is a visually arresting ‘radio clock’ image that endlessly
ticks away around a big circle, a symbol of the invisible, functional and
permanent electronic infrastructure that is constantly humming away,
keeping tabs, passively organizing the slots into which everything must
fit. In watching a presenter go about their work, one gets a very clear
sense of the focus, constant thought and awareness involved. Each set
of music has to be slotted into the space between the news and weather
on the hour and the ‘Arts Diary’ on the half-hour. Further, the sponsorship ads and promos are slotted in at specific times as well. The presenter
has to note where these fall on the station’s traffic sheet and put each
in the right slot on the station’s programming computer for presentation at the right time, and make the correct notations on the traffic
sheets to account for everything they do. Also, the presenters have to
do giveaways, mention the feature CD of the week, answer the phone
and continuously plan and organize the show so that the last piece
ends more or less on the hour. Given that there are no producers for
these flagship mix programs, the presenter is working alone to order
and organize thematically or notionally linked sets of music into tightly
prescribed windows of time. They have to plan their patter, but keep it
short. Written notes have to be translated into spoken words. Presenters have to identify the specific tracks they play, but do so quickly and
also in a reasonable amount of detail while adding a bit of color to their
commentary.
I have watched presenters climb around the music library asking others for help in finding things, looking very carefully, making notes and
lining things up. Experienced presenters use the library like an archivist
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would. They gather a stack of CDs from which they work to extract
enough tracks to build a show, going through each CD, carefully delimiting the range of music they will offer, often grudgingly accepting
they’ll have to play music they might not like very much. One presenter
I observed picked a short piece by Haydn, a short piece by Brahms and
one by Rachmaninoff. He told me he wasn’t ‘a classical music guy’, but
after listening to one of these pieces, he said, ‘Wow that was really nice.
I’ll have to play that one again.’ It was this sense of surprise, this joy of
discovering, that he was trying to replicate in his show. He told me that
when you are tucked away in the studio you can forget that there’s an
audience out there. He said he had to remind himself of what people
are actually doing while they are listening and tried to imagine people
driving home or listening while making dinner. He said you shouldn’t
get caught up in your own thoughts. So he is constantly checking his
levels and adjusting them, then glancing at the clock and ticking off the
minutes in his head. He does a quick level check before every track he
plays. He knows every CD has its own level of sound and that you can
really jar people if something comes on too quietly or too loudly. He
acts like he is constantly looking over his shoulder.
Challenging and changing each other
There are a series of programs on 2XX and ArtSound through which
the presenters seek to challenge and occasionally confound the listener.
The issue of ‘educating’ the listener is a tricky one to manage at community radio stations. The distance between offering information and
committing an act of condescension can be breathtakingly short. The
presenters of the programs examined here have learned how to walk
this line very carefully. Most do so by taking great care as to the kinds of
information they provide about the music they present and the tone in
which they offer it. These presenters base their programs on what they
view as a hard-earned knowledge of the music they present. Importantly,
most have other roles elsewhere in the local music scene, either through
recording, performance, promotions or music criticism. For each, this
creates an air of credibility. Despite this, none of the presenters whose
work I discuss throughout the rest of this chapter relies on their outside
work to display any particular credentials or explicit claims to authority.
Instead, they use their knowledge and ability to construct idiosyncratic,
coherent, well-structured programs that flow easily while presenting
what is in many cases, marginal and often very difficult music. Each
wants to play with the ability to surprise and unsettle the more common
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experience of radio and expand the world of music for their listeners just
that little bit.
‘Innerspace’ was a program that ran for several years on 2XX. It aired on
Tuesdays nights from 11 pm to 12 am, but often ran quite long. One of
the presenters was a long-time 2XX volunteer and often played many
important roles in the survival of the station. His beliefs and motivations in dedicating so much time and energy to the station and this
show were strongly linked. This presenter told me he came to 2XX not
long after leaving high school in the early 1980s. He was already a 2XX
listener, mostly for the station’s groundbreaking punk shows. He said he
just showed up one day and discovered people who ‘were motivated by
different things than the rest of the world’. More than this:
I had a friend and he and I had done some music together and we
have taken in to 2XX. We thought, ‘Gee this is a joke. We’ll take
this in to 2XX and see if they play it.’ And they did. And it was
a really poor recording, but the music was interesting and it was
impressive that 2XX was that open to somebody coming in off the
street and playing some homemade music. After those two events
I was sold. I mean, the rest of the world was wanting me to become
this and that and become professional and civilized and that, and
2XX was like the wild thing, It was something else. It was the great
unknown.
This presenter was able to use 2XX to explore music in ways that were
not possible anywhere else and to make music that would not have been
possible elsewhere. It informed his development as a sound recordist,
sound artist and music listener. He would often use the airwaves to produce and broadcast sound collages using analogue sound equipment.
Partly informed by his experiences, he views 2XX as an incubator for a
wide array of talent. For him, 2XX focuses people’s energy and projects
it outwardly. What he drew from this experience was an understanding
of music as a manipulator of people’s emotions. Music presents possibilities for him that the other arts do not, offering what he called a ‘deep
education’ by allowing those making music to catch people off guard.
In his experience, 2XX has always allowed people to produce programs
that allow people to ignore or contest stylistic boundaries enough to
‘suck the power out of them’. In this sense, this presenter wanted to
allow listeners to hear differently.
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Two editions of ‘Innerspace’ from 2007 show how he pursued his
goals. The first featured a set of three very long pieces that constituted the entire program. The first was an unidentified piece by Holger
Czukay, a founding member of the German group Can, whose work outside that group as early as 1969 is considered by many to be aesthetically
influential and technologically pioneering for his approach to the incorporation of a wide range of styles, traditions and types of sound into
his work. This piece began with a dynamically undulating drone with
voices echoing behind it. Shortly, percussion entered, consisting of what
sounded like congas, detuned bells, pieces of metal and shakers. Then,
as a firm pulse began, the drone began teetering between the respective
parts of a major third as samples of spoken vocals from other sources
entered as well. The drone persisted throughout the very long piece as
guitars, keyboards and other improvised sounds moved around it. This
piece was aurally overtaken by another performed by David Hykes and
the Harmonic Choir entitled ‘Earth to the Unknown Power’. The music
consists of euphonious overtone singing drawn from the contemplative
singing techniques of a polyglot mix of religious traditions. The piece
featured long passages of overlapping, cyclic, reverberant singing cascading across parts of the overtone series, often stopping to generate a new
section and gradually forming melodies drawn from these tones and
notes. The singing seemed to echo throughout an extraordinarily open
space. The final piece in what turned out to be a very long set of only
three tracks, was from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports album called ‘Ambient 1’. This piece is well known for its often sonic austerity and echoing
keyboard sounds, with small clusters of single notes ringing quietly
around more central figures. None of the three pieces had a clear sense of
forward propulsion toward any goal or any immediately clear structure.
The program from the following week featured three more very long
pieces. The first was by Andrew Cronshaw and consisted of excerpts
of a longer concept album called On the Shoulders of the Great Bear.
This piece consisted of varied kinds instruments, including zithers, saxophone, whistles, bass clarinet, double bass and voices, occasionally
joined by a shawm, concertina and other sounds. It was constructed
from a range of musical influences, from Estonian folk songs to Finnish
polka to Gaelic laments and vocal passages that sound reminiscent of
various traditions of throat singing. Then the presenter played a series
of tracks of Tuvan music from the CD Tuva: Voices from the Center of
Asia. The pieces are drawn from the Smithsonian’s sound archives and
feature a series of pieces in which the performers imitate reindeer, the
owl and the wolf’s howl. The last piece of this edition of the program
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was ‘Five Stone Wood’, by John Cage. This performance was taken from
a CD called Music for Merce Cunningham, featuring amplified violin, live
electronics, bamboo flute, nine clay pots and tapes. The piece moved in
and out of clear pulses and rhythms that cohered into strong beats and
then expanded into different rhythmic centers with electronic and tape
sound clashing and then meshing with the other sound sources. The
piece lasted 55 minutes, and this show, as with the previous edition,
had no interruptions of any kind. The presenter opened the program
with a brief description of the first piece and closed with a brief review
of the whole show. Few have this kind of expressive freedom on radio.
A second show, with a similar desire to bring listeners music that the
presenters assume they probably haven’t heard, was 2XX’s first show
dedicated to the European art music tradition, ‘Classic Matters’. The
program was broadcast for a few years from 2007. The goal was to preserve and propagate music the show’s various presenters regarded as
valuable. The effort grew out of a long-standing Canberra institution,
the Canberra Recorded Music Society (CRMS), currently taking the form
of a non-profit association and lending library of several thousand CD
of classical music. The CRMS started in 1941 as a series of informal
recorded music recitals. While the tradition of recitals faded, the collection persisted. Consistent with the goals of the CRMS, ‘Classic Matters’ is
populated by music that the presenter I spoke to feels ‘references something deeper’. The show references the long-held ideal that music can
have a civilizing and positive political effect if experienced in what he
referred to as a rich listening context. He told me about a similar listening context that he experienced when he was growing up in rural
Australia and had only the public broadcasting network on which he
could hear new music. He focuses on trying to introduce the listener to
music that had what he regards as novel aesthetics for their time. What
the show and the CRMS has done for him, and he believes for others
as well, is to show that the received wisdom about music is not set in
stone. As he noted to me, ‘you get into routines and you need to get out
of them’, and with community radio, ‘at least you’re teaching yourself
something, you’re extending yourself.’
One episode of ‘Classic Matters’ from 13 November 2007 shows us
what he means. The episode focused on the music of Ferruccio Busoni.
The presenter’s introduction to this edition of the show was interesting,
noting that Busoni was
caught between the Wagner, um, I suppose, hang-up, and on the
other the sort of Puccini hang-up, so he’s got both of them tugging
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The program consisted of extensive biographical information, interpretive and explanatory notes describing extended excerpts of pieces
chosen as illustrative examples. In this edition of the show, he played
extended excerpts of Busoni’s Doktor Faust, written during World War I,
describing it as a story about ‘a man who made a pact with the devil
after having a devil of a time on Earth’. After playing about ten minutes
of the histrionic opening, marked by intense chromaticism and heavy
orchestration, the presenter returned:
That’s a long one. It hasn’t been revived very often, and more’s the
shame. It’s a opera that does have quite a bit of food for thought . . . on
all sorts of issues we have around us in the world today: modernism,
postmodernism, war, peace. The whole shebang is there, and Busoni’s
worth listening to for listening to what’s between the spaces, between
the notes, if you know what I mean, and of course it’s worth listening
to this music once in a while and you can listen to it a lot of it from
the Classic Music Society [sic]. Classical music has got a bit of a bad
reputation. People don’t like it. They think it’s boring, long-winded –
It isn’t! It’s fascinating and if you are sort of provoked by it to learn
a little bit about music theory, which I haven’t done . . . it’ll be worth
it, put it that way. I think it’s the sort of thing that Busoni himself
would be sort of pleased, wherever he is, that his music is still being
played.
The presenter spoke in what are, for him, characteristically long blocks
of awkwardly connected phrases and asides without any clear sense
of scripting or strategy. His phrases curled around one another and
broke off into fragments of varying intensity and effort. He consistently
tied his various endeavors together, the claims and offers tumbling out
over one another in controlled but successive streams of ideas, claims,
explanatory, exhortation and recommendations.
ArtSound’s ‘Dress Circle’ and ‘Classical Moods’
ArtSound has long made some aspects of the European art tradition
a significant part of its primary programming, especially early music,
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at him . . . The whole thing about Busoni was that his melodiousness
was there, but it didn’t go too far. He didn’t get into serialism like
the German [sic] Schoenberg did, but he nevertheless has a growing,
growing following of people . . . He’s not what you’d call one of the
great composers, but he’s pretty good.
Making Radio, Making Meaning
vocal music and the lighter end of ‘classical’ music, tacitly defined on
ArtSound as stretching from the late Baroque to the early 20th century.
As noted in the previous chapter, ArtSound has long been a champion of
local performers, documenting and broadcasting their work. ArtSound
has shaped their classical programming into an iteration of a longstanding Australian public broadcasting tradition, the broadcasting of
so-called ‘fine’ music in a context of appreciation and education. They
have also expanded this tradition of broadcasting to include the cabaret
and musical theater traditions. Two programs show us the character of
ArtSound’s contribution to this tradition of broadcasting, ‘Dress Circle’,
a two-hour, weekly show about the music of the stage and the screen,
and ‘Classical Moods’, a weekday program dedicated to presenting classical music in an informative and educational context. ‘Dress Circle’ and
‘Classical Moods’, like many ArtSound programs, are organized by a program coordinator and presented by a small group of presenters formed
into a subcommittee. The programs adhere to a pre-arranged template
allowing for a certain continuity in the programs, regardless of who the
presenter might be. Many of the presenters of these two programs have
long and distinguished associations with the musical cultures of which
these shows are a part.
During the period I was conducting research at ArtSound, ‘Dress
Circle’ was organized around a general three-part structure. The first
half-hour was dedicated to excerpts of a feature musical, the second to
local and national content and reviews, and the third to theater reviews,
feature interviews, the ‘Arts Diary’ and miscellaneous songs of more
immediate relevance, drawn from recent or active tours or presented
as reminders of important dates or comings and goings in the world of
musical theater and cabaret. The feature musical segment provides very
detailed examinations of important and influential musicals. Presenters
provide extensive summaries of the plot and characters and play key
songs from each that propel the narrative along. The feature musicals
examined in 2004 and 2007 included Fiddler on the Roof, Company, High
School Musical as well as MGM film musicals such as Gigi and Fame. The
local and national content featured informed and comprehensive coverage of the cabaret scene in Canberra and the very healthy and active
cabaret scene in Australia more generally.
‘Dress Circle’ was started by a well-known cabaret and musical theater
producer who, like so many community radio presenters, began his life
in radio as the subject of an interview. He described his work at ArtSound
as an extension of his work in the theater. The style of radio presenting at ArtSound reminded him of an older style of public broadcasting,
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in which listeners were given a good deal of contextualizing information on the music they heard; as he noted, ‘You always know why
you were hearing what you were hearing.’ He cited as inspiration two
long-running radio programs on Australia’s state-run broadcaster, the
ABC, called ‘The Showman’ and ‘Sentimental Journey’, both of which
provided similar kinds of interviews and recordings of shows and light
music. The main goals of his program were to introduce people to new
material, to reinterpret older shows and songs, give new information
on upcoming productions and to highlight new productions of musical theater and cabaret in Australia. He wanted to both entice and keep
his listeners by providing a judicious mix of the familiar and the new,
but also, as he put it, ‘to help them discover what I’ve discovered’. He
told me there were two things he wanted his listeners to take away from
his program: a practical exhortation to ‘get out there and get to these
shows’, and a deeper value in what he called ‘the civic virtue of theater’.
‘Every so often’, he continued, ‘you see something that really gets you
and it is such a surprise.’ He was always trying to get his listeners to
move from inspiration to action.
Those who present ‘Classical Moods’ share some of these ideals. The
program is intended to be ‘complementary’ to existing services, such as
the ABC, which runs its own national ‘fine’ music network. This means
that ArtSound tends to focus less on the heavier, longer, classics and
more on shorter and lighter pieces. The same coordinator suggested to
me that his goal is for the 90-minute program to be as smooth and flowing as possible, with few, if any, jarring contrasts or difficult transitions.
He imagines his listenership to be an informed one that is already interested in the music he presents. He sees his job as providing a distinct
slant and context for this music and to expand his listeners’ knowledge
from what he presumes to be an already strong base. He makes what
is for him a crucial distinction in presenting classical music as opposed
to the other kinds of music ArtSound presents. He told me ‘you can’t
improvise your way through’ a classical music show such as his. If you
run out of time, ‘you can’t just fade a piece out’. His imagined his listeners wouldn’t stand for it. They have certain expectations about how
this music is presented that require a certain formality and preparation.
He has been involved with the classical music scene in Canberra for a
long time. He told me he just knows that the people who listen to his
show may be small in number but are exacting and determined in their
response to it. This is evident in the scripts he develops for his shows.
These are striking in their clarity and their almost modest use of stories probably well known to aficionados but entertaining nonetheless.
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work resulted from the enjoyment the composer gained from his
travels in Italy in 1803–31 and he said of it: ‘This is the happiest
piece I have ever written.’ Happiest it may be, but Mendelssohn was
never really happy with it and continued to revise it until his death,
in Leipzig, on this day in 1847.
Another ‘Classical Moods’ presenter began working at ArtSound as an
adjunct to his work as a reviewer for local newspapers and several
national classical music periodicals. This presenter departs somewhat
from the light and shorter ethos of the program by presenter longer
works, often with detailed descriptions and insightful interpretations of
the particularities of the performances he airs. He incorporates a good
deal of specific content in his descriptions, including descriptions of
variations in the performance style of the piece, the stories of the creation of the works he presents and the context in which they were first
presented. While he told me the music can speak for itself, he likes to
‘help it out’ a little bit. He had been an avid record collector since the age
of ten and has amassed a substantial collection, including one set I saw
of about eight 45s on green vinyl covering only one of Mozart’s symphonies and another of Albert Schweitzer playing Bach’s organ works;
they sound better, he told me simply. The range of music he plays on
his program implies a certain encyclopedic knowledge, including a show
devoted to contemporary lieder singers, a month-long series on Brahms,
a show devoted to American vocal music from the interwar period and
shows devoted to individual composers, performers, conductors and
orchestras that span great swathes of time, practice and expression.
The expertise, knowledge and experience brought to bear to these programs is testament to ArtSound’s uncanny ability to create and maintain
extremely productive working relationships with people whose skills
and abilities far exceed even those of many professional broadcasters.
A certain logic, trust and faith
While doing research for this book, I asked a presenter what held his
relationships with his listeners together. He replied, perhaps with too
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Before playing Mozart’s Symphony No. 6 in C major, he noted ‘[i]t is
said that he wrote the symphony in a great hurry when, arriving in
Linz for a concert, he found he had not brought a symphony with him.
Ah, the abilities of genius.’ Similarly, when presenting Mendelssohn’s
so-called ‘Italian Symphony’, he noted that the
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much concision, ‘a certain logic, trust and faith’. By this I think he
meant that the relationship had a particular logic to it, established by
the way he organized the music for his program. He relied on his ability to engage his listeners enough to make them trust him and to keep
trusting the logic that shaped the social relationship between them. For
this presenter, putting his show together often required him to accept
on faith that the underlying logic of his show would make sense. This
requires the implicit trust that he will rely on to take chances and experiment with new forms and sounds. For the listener they must learn to
be patient and follow along with the connections and suggestions the
presenter wants to make and accept that the presenter’s logic is worthy
of attention. It is this trust and faith that allows for some part of the
potential for a civil and possibly democratic aesthetics I have been writing about to be realized. The potential for this realization is based on the
willingness of all involved to move a little bit, in relation to the others.
The presenters of the four programs I will discuss to close this chapter
all have a slightly different ‘problem of the public’ from those described
above. They have only the most broad and amorphous collection of
musical traditions and practices to use to connect what might be, for
the listener at least, only vaguely related sounds and musical practices.
The first two programs, ArtSound’s ‘World Vibe’ and FBi’s ‘Fat Planet’,
are both so-called ‘world music’ programs, but they create two very
different ‘worlds’ for us to listen to. The second two programs, 2SER’s
‘Methodology’ and FBi’s ‘Utility Fog’, are both ‘experimental’ popular
music programs, and again, despite dealing with many of the same kinds
of musical practices, they create very different worlds of music for listeners. Establishing and communicating the underlying logic is difficult for
these presenters. For the former two, any playlist has the entire world of
music to choose from. For the latter two, only a dimly visible creative
attitude is available as an organizational tool. They can’t simply confront the worlds of music in which they live with a reasonably clear set
of guidelines at hand, as with the mix program presenters. Nor do they
have a clearly delineated musical tradition to rely on, as with ‘Dress Circle’ and ‘Classical Moods’. They can only solve their problems through
the logic of their programs, the faith required to communicate it and the
trust that these engender. They must establish the connections between
the many different kinds of music they play through the immediate and
material social connections the music displays as a specific kind of organized sound, not simply as part of an imposed historical narrative or
carefully conjured tradition of aesthetic expression. In doing so, they
give us a hint of the civil and democratic potential that rests in every
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ArtSound’s ‘World Vibe’ and FBi’s ‘Fat Planet’
‘World Vibe’ is a fairly traditional and straightforward ‘world music’
show in that all of the music played on it is music outside the dominant traditions of Anglo-American popular music and European classical
music. The show has appeared each weeknight for one hour for at least
eight years. During the time I conducted my research, the show was
managed in much the same way as ‘Classical Mood’, with a coordinator
and several hosts who presented different editions of the show. There
were only broad guidelines to govern the show, with individual presenters having some significant leeway to shape their own editions of
the program. Importantly, one of the more influential and long-serving
presenters successfully oriented the program to listeners who are not
expected to immediately embrace the music played on the show or the
way in which it is presented. Given this, the presenters of this program
take an explanatory approach to what is was assumed to be unfamiliar
music. As one of the more influential presenters told me, this is actually
accomplished not through explanation as such but through the careful
arrangement of the music. Many at ArtSound found ‘World Vibe’ hard
to present, simply due to the nebulous nature of the category ‘world
music’. Therefore, a few important distinctions were made to help presenters across all editions of the show make decisions about how to
create playlists. The most important was the distinction made between
three broad categories of music: what they called ‘the folk music of
other cultures’, the ‘popular music of other cultures’ and fusions that
land somewhere between the two. These distinctions were applied not
as categories but as ways to organize the music they would play into
groupings that had both some implicit explanatory quality, and some
significant relevance to the actual music. Presenters were always allowed
to make decisions about what ‘fitted’ and what didn’t depending on
their own habits, understandings and practices.
One presenter liked to think that he was entertaining, engaging and
educating his listeners. To do this, he constructed his one-hour program
out of two or three song sets. Two editions of the program show how
these work. One edition of the show, from 14 December 2007, began
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communicative gesture made through music described in this book.
These are the most potentially open and least demanding invitations to
enter into a ‘community of sense’ I have found in my research. They
require no special skills or knowledge, no privileged background or
exalted pedigree, only a willingness to speak and be understood or to
listen and understand.
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with the title track of Ibrahim Ferrer’s 2003 album Buenos Hermanos. The
piece is propelled forward by a solid mid-tempo rhumba beat and features a few hints of the 1970s’ stylings of groups such as Los Van Van,
with a sharply distorted electric guitar slotting itself into the rhumba,
backing up an organ solo whose trills and slides are reminiscent of
the innovative Cuban groups of that era. This was followed by Astrid
Hadad’s ‘Que Puntada’, one of the Mexican singer’s more well-known
ranchera canciones, dominated by a double-time pulse held between
the acoustic bass and strummed guitar and Hadad’s aggressively expressive vocals. The set was rounded out by ‘Oye el consejo’, by Ferrer from
Buenos Hermanos. This tune, however, was more in the son tradition than
a big band salsa, with a slightly faster tempo than the previous tune by
Ferrer, but also marked by electric guitar passages edging into the strong
and unified rhythms of the rest of the ensemble. The set was cleverly
arranged to play the popularity and high profile of Ferrer, whose association with the Buena Vista Social Club was still strong in 2007, against the
contrast of Hadad’s sharply cut vocals and sterling melodic expression.
This set was able to provide an immediate impression of a broad range of
Spanish-language music from Central America and the Caribbean with
notable concision.
Another three-piece set simply described as being ‘African’ shows the
kinds of connections and distinctions this presenter tries implicitly to
draw between regional music that might otherwise be classified as more
or less the same. The set began with the tune ‘Jokoloni’, from the album
Segu Blue by Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba, which was the ‘World
Vibe’ feature CD that week. Kouyate is a well-known Malian ngoni virtuoso, playing a plucked string instrument the sharp attack of which
comes from the skin-covered gourd resonator against which the strings
often snap. This tune featured a group of vocalists, both male and
female, performing subtly altered iterations of melodies that rode on
top of several low and mid-range ngoni plucked in cyclical rhythmic
patterns. The tune which followed immediately was Gabriela Mendes’
‘Tradição’. This lament from the Cape Verdean singer was dominated
by two crisply performed rhythmically and harmonically cyclical acoustic guitar lines, with a third guitar adding in improvised melodic lines
between passages of singing. The lead vocalist was complemented by a
small chorus for the refrains. The final song was the title track from ‘Segu
Blue’, a slower instrumental piece dominated by Kouyate’s ngoni playing, underpinned by a spare bass line and percussive interjections on a
calabash. What is important here is the extent to which the seemingly
simple identifications of the music in each set belie the complexity of
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the kinds of links the presenter was making between them. The similarities and differences rest comfortably with one another here, as with the
previous set I described, as the varied plucked strings, cyclical rhythms
and harmonies as well as the subtly evolving melodies in both the lead
and accompanying vocals both recalled one another and set each other
apart.
FBi’s ‘Fat Planet’ presents a very different world to us, making few if
any claims to authority or special knowledge, instead seeming to revel
in the bewildering diversity it presents. The show’s promo captures the
mood of the program. A voice intoned the following over a typically
cascading set of different styles of backing music in multiple languages:
When you think about great music, do you think Australian or
British? Maybe American. The truth is there’s great music being made
in garages and bedrooms all over the world and every Sunday on FBi
we make it our mission to unearth the best. From Japanese lo-fi to
Icelandic electro, throw your walkman in the backpack and expand
your musical horizons.
The promo tried to translate the mind-bendingly complex into the
immediately recognizable. The presenter did the same, unwittingly or
sarcastically summing up his programming philosophy by saying ‘Hey,
I just give you the information, you deal with it.’ He told me he constantly trawled websites and blogs from as many places as he could find
to locate and contact record labels and musicians, putting them into a
database to manage the immense flows of music he discovered or had
given to him from a range of formal and informal sources.
The program is relentlessly contemporary. Each edition of ‘Fat Planet’
I have listened to constantly moved through the most recent songs
from place after place. There was an interesting kind of exotic lure to
hearing terms such as ‘Mexican Techno’, ‘French Dream Pop’, ‘Brazilian
Acid House’ or ‘electronica from the snowy wastes of Russia’ in immediate proximity to one another. It was not a brand of exoticism tinged
with nostalgia for faraway places that conform to imagined colonial
pasts. It is an exoticism of the present producing imagined connections
to an immediate circumstance. ‘Fat Planet’ is the product of musical
worlds populated by a globally interconnected latticework of blogs,
zines, websites, clubs, music festivals and the local, regional and international independent and corporate record labels constantly producing
the songs, tracks, downloads, albums, remix compilations, reissues collections and music videos we consume. ‘Fat Planet’ encourages us to
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hear the mass, international cross-fertilization of styles and sounds that
might otherwise pass unheard. Despite the fact that FBi presenters are
often enthusiastically opinionated, this presenter offered much information, but little commentary. He seemed to treat his show as a display
of the tangible evidence of a range of creative work, but did so outside
of any explicit critical frameworks or aesthetic priorities.
Unlike most of the programs I’ve looked at, ‘Fat Planet’ displayed
almost no interest in linking songs through the kinds of surface details
such as texture, timbre or instrumentation. The goal seemed to be
to specialize in jarring contrasts. These contrasts acted as the central
aural marker of the self-conscious diversity that the program did so
much to display. The opening set from the 11 April 2004 edition of
the show is a good example of this. The program began with a remix
of a song called ‘Run into Flowers’ by the French band M83. The
song is a thick jumble of electronic sounds, sharp, sonorous electric
guitars and strangely quiet vocals intoning the title line. An underlying pulse held by sharp, trebly electronic drums throbbed throughout
with only short dramatic interruptions. This was followed by ‘Karicom’,
by Julien Jacob, described simply as ‘from Benin’. The song is spare,
its verses centered on an acoustic guitar that sounds a cyclical harmonic pattern on every other beat over a busy drum machine. Jacob’s
vocals are closely recorded and splinter off into multiple looped lines
as the song moves on, moving through series of imaginary words
that are the invention of Jacob which act more as rhythmically reiterated sounds than lyrics. This was followed by ‘Drink to Me’. by
A. C. Newman of The New Pornographers. The fleeting aural connection between the songs rested in Newman’s strummed acoustic guitar
and the song’s similarly spare texture. The song is a bright, mid-tempo
indie pop song with slide guitar, harmonium and thumping drums, a
jittery sustained electric guitar wash and a light, enticing, three-part
vocal line later reiterated by multiple whistlers. The set was closed
out by ‘Highlights’, a drum and bass tune by the Brazilian producer
DJ Marky. This song hums along with a sharp, trebly double-time
beat that moves in and out of clarity and constancy. The piece is
dominated by a mid-range keyboard sound that slightly resembles a
lounge room organ. Samples are dropped in and manipulated with some
abandon.
One feature of ‘Fat Planet’ was the ‘Stopover’, or a three-song set
from one artist in one country, or a focus on one style in some depth.
These can be instructive. On 6 June 2004, the presenter interviewed the
promoter of a French music night at a Sydney venue. The interview
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Host: OK, now for those of us who have never heard of what we’re
talking about here . . . I thought I’d just sort of run through some of
the genres and you can explain what they are. Now the first one is
dead easy, ’60s French cool. I think we can kind of get the picture
with that. The next one is ‘Yee Yee Sounds.’
Guest: Ah, ‘Yeah Yeah Sounds,’ It’s a very distinctive style of French
music from the ’60s. It’s predominately female-based, although it
did occur not just in France, but was pretty much all across Europe.
It was made popular recently by a series of discs put out in the
US called ‘Ultrachicks’, and it’s similar to the girl group sounds of
England and America, but just done in a distinctively sexy French
style.
Host: OK, now after that we have Euro Freak Beat. That sounds great.
Guest: Yeah, Euro Freak Beat is sort of the garage sounds of the ’60s.
There’s a distinctive English Freak Beat scene, but the European
Freak Beat Scene was mainly in Italy and there’s a hell of a lot from
Eastern Europe as well . . . even the former Yugoslavia has amazing,
really dirty, grungy, garagey ’60s punk . . .
Host: OK, the last one I’ve got here is Mondo Italia.
Guest: Ah, Mondo Italia is a very odd little genre. It sort of occurred
when the Beat movement hit Italy, and out of that came a whole
lot of Italian Beat groups. A lot of the Beat groups in places like
Belgium and France sang in English, but in Italy they decided to
sing in Italian and out of that came Mondo Italia.
Organizing the jumbled mass of sounds the show presents into ‘genres’
like these holds ‘Fat Planet’ together. It makes the strange more familiar,
but still knowingly renders this music exotic because of the conjunction between the immediate sense these descriptive terms make and the
anomalous character of their aural embodiment. These catch-all descriptors, which are rarely explained, act as moments of focus and articulate
the assumptions and assurances the show seeks to provide about the
enormous range of music that is now more immediately available to
more people than ever before.
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suggested a good deal about the organizing power of the term ‘genre’
in this world of complex interrelationships between musical practices
and cultures strewn chaotically across the planet. After a song by Michel
Polnareff, referred to by the guest as ‘the French David Bowie’, the two
went through a kind of rough guide to French pop:
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The final two programs I will look at explore less a style of music or even
a tradition, but what I can only call an attitude. 2SER’s ‘Methodology’
and FBi’s ‘Utility Fog’ set out to give us music from around the world,
the makers of which seek to experiment with sound. They seek less to
explore a musical culture than a slew of techniques or processes that
have aural results. The promo for ‘Utility Fog’ is an adequate summation
not of these programs but of how the sometimes difficult and unnerving
music on them is presented. Over a maelstrom of electronically manipulated sound, we were told to expect music that was ‘teetering on the
cusp between acoustic and electronic, organic and digital, constantly
changing and rearranging, shifting, juxtaposing’. We would be taken
‘from deep within the world of post-rock and into the outer reaches of
plunderphonics, IDM [Intelligent Dance Music], breakcore, folktronic
and into genres that don’t even have names yet’. Despite the somewhat
affected come-on, both program presenters do in fact deliberately slide
around and between common descriptors and categories. However, neither presenter experiments much with their actual radio practice. The
experience of each show is familiar in form. They proceed from piece to
piece and set to set, with the odd interview or live performance included.
One presenter told me that he was less interested in experimentation
for the sake of it than in exploring the areas between the familiarity and
safety of pop songs and ambient or noise-based music or compositional
processes. He said he once played a piece which was based on an extensive and fairly abstract procedural reworking of a loop of music taken
from a Western. He played it because it was ‘familiar in essence’, but not
in form.
The presenters of these programs are both aware of the specialist
‘trainspotting’ character of programs such as theirs; both take measures
to blunt it. One notes that he works hard to extract key information
from his many sources, such as liner notes, label websites, blogs and
the musicians themselves, to say things that are relevant to the specialist and casual listener alike, noting that he too was a casual listener
once. He does this in specific relation to the links he tries to draw across
an often ungainly field of experimentation by focusing on connections the musical materials themselves might have. Both presenters are
involved in various musical and sonic experiments outside their respective radio stations, either as performers, MCs, writers, commentators
or producers and distributors of other people’s music. These networks,
like those established by the presenters of ‘World Vibe’ and ‘Fat Planet’,
are comprised of a series of nodes around the world. Both center their
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shows on a kind of push–pull relationship with their listeners, trying to
pull them along through jarring contrasts and difficult sounds and push
them along with related but more gentle and familiar artists or sounds.
To some extent both are more formal and practiced in their presenting
skills than the average, as neither wishes to add another challenge to
those who might be listening to their shows.
The opening set from the 23 March 2004 edition of ‘Methodology’
can help clarify what the show sounds like. The show began with a piece
called ‘Ganagmanag’ by Ghost, an experimental group from Tokyo. The
ten-minute piece features long improvisational passages that change
abruptly into new sections often with substantially different textures
and tempi. The harmony stays mostly static, held strongly by the bass,
guitar and piano. A flute flittered around at the top end, improvising soft
melodies and sharp interjections while harsh metallic drones lurked in
the background. The first section built gradually to an abrupt change of
texture halfway through, opening up for the bass, drums and a harp to
churn away with an electric slide guitar echoing deep in the background.
The piece gradually moved at the same mid-tempo groove until about
the eight-minute mark, when, after a brief pause, a low, aggressive rhythmic figure in the bass and piano entered at a much faster tempo, drawing
the piece to a strong finish of pounding percussion and piano. The presenter then entered describing the band as ‘the incomparable rock beast
that is Ghost, tellers of spooky stories for psychedelic speed freaks and
others, of course, like you and me perhaps’.
The 90-minute program continued with ‘Get Your Hand Off
My Shoulder Pig’ by El-P, an open-ended instrumental piece that had
some broad similarities with ‘Ganagmanag’. These included complex,
improvised instrumental lines, deliberately limited harmonic development and a thoroughgoing beat that held together sprawling improvisations of horns and piano until it all eventually and gradually started to
disintegrate, suddenly reintegrate and then collapse all together. As the
last spasms of life stopped in the piece as it faded out, what sound like
sampled loops of a multitude of gamelan instruments and xylophones
started tinkling rapidly and sharply in the foreground, accompanied by
repeated vocal exhortations, chants and interjections by what sounded
like women and children in some kind of rhythmically structured conversation. This was the introduction to ‘Sizuku Ring Neng’, by OOIOO,
from their 2004 album Kila Kila Kila. As the piece progressed, the sounds
got increasing discordant and layered, with new sounds dropping in
sharply. First, a terse, static guitar line entered high in register, and then
a full rhythm section began to enter, featuring a cyclically wandering
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bass line, low thumping drums, a fuzzbox rhythm guitar with a wahwah sound to it and the odd interjections from vocalists and keyboards
and the piece gradually cohered around a central pulse and eventually
performed a kind of musical controlled explosion into a powerful closing section. The set was rounded off with ‘Wear You Out’ by TV on
the Radio, a song dominated by the band’s characteristic vocal lines
performed by multiple singers singing distinct inflections of the same
lines, underpinned by a descending harmonic line in the bass and
keyboards, all held tight by a groove that seemed to both remain constant and increase in intensity. This set comprised the first third of
the program and was marked by certain specific commonalities, such
as harmonic stasis or simple cycles of only two or three chords, extensive improvisation and a concomitant structural openness, and a slowly
building intensity and urgency to each piece that, as a group, ebbed and
then expanded repeatedly almost as an overarching form. The presenter enthusiastically described the set as ‘keeping the groove indulgence
thing alive and kicking’.
‘Utility Fog’ is a slightly different project from ‘Methodology’.
Whereas one might hear music such as that made by Iron & Wine or
Sufjan Stevens on ‘Methodology’, ‘Utility Fog’ plays far more toward the
edges of the musical cultures it surveys. The second and third sets from
the 8 August 2004 edition of the program show us both the demanding
sounds the presenter plays and the obvious pleasure with which he plays
them. After an introductory set, which began with a piece by Icarus and
closed with one by DJ Daedelus, the second set began with the following
from the presenter:
Now we were talking about the Scape label, and in just a minute
I am going to play a track released by what I suppose is kind of their
side or sub label that they’re calling Popscape. And this is the first
release I’ve seen on that which is credited to August Engkilde Presents
‘EPO: Electronic Panorama Orchestra’, and it’s quite an interesting
blend of your pop elements and your electronic elements. It doesn’t
go too way out anywhere, but is still a lovely listen. I thought I’d play
track 4, ‘Continental Traveling’.
This was a characteristically genealogical explanation of the label and
the music it produced, representative of a musical culture in which
the identification of a record label often has as much explanatory
power as the name of the artist. What followed was a six-and-a-halfminute improvisational instrumental piece performed by an ensemble
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consisting of a fairly straightforward collection of instrumentalists as
well as samples and other electronics. The piece had several clear
sections. The first opened with electronic and acoustic percussion churning away at a mid-tempo groove with various sampled and synthesizer
sound sources adding rhythmic and textural lines and layers to a clear
and cyclical harmonic pattern. The flute took the lead first, with a low
statement of a clear theme. As the percussive texture shifted and harmonic pattern evolved to hint at two-chord dub pattern, the soprano
sax took the foreground. The acoustic and electronic instruments were
blended carefully into one broad soundscape that moved between
improvisation and pre-arranged structure.
The next piece entered without a break and was performed by an
ensemble called the International Peoples Gang. The track was called
‘ac harmonics’ and began with a backward masked harmonic pattern,
from which emerged the same pattern forward. These patterns would
return in various forms to structure the piece while occasionally being
displaced by sections dominated by samples of voices speaking in what
sounded like Russian as well as sliced-up parts of the original theme. This
set was closed out by a more conventional track by a Perth-based band
called Halogen. The piece was called ‘You Get To Me’ and was marked
by a clear song structure, consistent pulse, clear vocal line and lyrics and
a familiar, regular, descending chord progression. This track was anomalous within the context of the more experimental pieces that took these
more common attributes of popular music and stretched and disfigured
them. However, the texture and ambient sound of ‘You Get To Me’
worked to clarify the nature and character of those experiments. This
presenter had told me he liked to provide exactly these kinds of contrasts within his sets to set out a space for examination. In the same way
as the presenter of ‘Methodology’, he tried to explore what he thought
of as the areas between formal songs and abstract experimentation. Both
presenters provided an implicit explanation of the paths they were taking through music by showing several clear points along a trajectory of
increasing or decreasing abstraction in rhythm, pulse, texture, harmony
and the cohesion or dissolution of the familiar markers of musical sense.
In between his two sets the presenter made some revealing remarks
that suggested a deeper dimension to his practice. He started with his
explanation of the previous set:
You’ve been listening to a new Australian release which is put out on
the Karmic Hit label which is based in Bondi, Sydney. Actually these
guys are from Perth, an indie band called Halogen . . . and for their
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second album it seems they decided instead of putting out basically
a band album they turned over 15 completely new tracks to a whole
lot of electronic producers from Perth and this is the result . . . I played
a track from it last week as well and I’m going to try to get through
a whole lot of these tracks over the next few weeks . . . The album is
Building on the Edge of the Sky so go and look it up . . . Before that we
heard from International Peoples Gang. A wonderfully catchy ambient kind of track called ‘ac harmonics’ which was released on the Em:t
label, that fantastic ambient label from the UK that folded back in the
late ’90s and has very happily started up again at the end of last year.
So this is going to be on their second release since reforming which is
called Em:t 0004 . . . We started with the Electronic Panorama Orchestra or the EPO as they like to be called, headed up by August Engkilde,
and they’re kind of a jazz, electronica collective reminding me there
quite a bit sort of the groups that float Notwist people . . . yeah, that
kind of slightly dubby, slightly processed electronic kind of stuff
definitely with a real jazz background to it.
He then moved to an extended introduction of his next piece:
So from the sublime to the very, very noisy, but I think still sublime.
I decided to pull out this old album on the Mego label by Pita. Peter
Rehberg who actually co-formed the Mego label, a Viennese label,
back in I’d say about 1996 or 1997. This is from his second album,
Get Out, which came out in 1999. And there was a lot of discussion
on email lists at the time about this track. Everyone was saying ‘Aw,
its like My Bloody Valentine on laptops’, or something. And well, it
starts off deceptively, but this is a very, very noisy track. I hope that
you can see the beauty in it as well, but I just wanted to warn you
so sit back and relax and let it take you somewhere instead of getting
too disturbed by all the distortion that’s coming up.
Almost as an afterthought he added, after a station ID and a slight pause,
‘And you can call in on 8332 2999 if you want to have a conversation.’
The track that followed was over 11 minutes long, beginning with a
low, stately and subtly evolving set of harmonic materials that almost
recalled a chunk of a dramatic film score. Then it cycled through dozens
of iterations of these materials. Some of the variations were raucous
and almost viciously distorted, while others seemed to slowly transform
into disintegrating versions of themselves. The pace of the piece never
wavered, grinding subtly against the sometimes dramatic manipulations
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Making Radio, Making Meaning
that sometimes almost obscured the fact that materials that were so
disfigured could still retain defining aspects of their original character.
Despite the status of the work, this presenter made no case for it other
than a largely unadorned appeal to listen.1
During my research, one presenter told me that ‘the more you understand something, the more you can appreciate it. It’s hard to know
what effect you have, but you have to believe it’s there.’ It is this faith
and trust that, at its most sensitive, can help form a disparate group
of unknown listeners into a public. When the social connections that
people create between themselves are enabled by an organization constituted by those very relationships, then the negotiated kinds of power
which define these publics make the civil or possibly democratic aesthetics I have been writing about possible. In all of the cases examined in
this chapter, the presenters of these varied programs all wanted to solve a
problem of the public. Most wanted to introduce listeners to new music
that would be unfamiliar, challenging or even alienating. Each solved
their problems in distinct but related ways. While some explicitly acted
as ‘educators’ others simply acted as guides. Some decided to say little
more about the music they presented than who made it, who distributed
it and who performed it. They relied on what they saw as the innate
connections between various pieces to carry forward their case that this
music was worth listening to. Each presenter, guided by rules of varying
levels of robustness and prescription, developed their own ideals, habits
and procedures to guide them and their listeners to, as so many of them
said, some place they had never been before. Importantly, even those
presenters who regarded themselves as experts and authorities on the
music they presented made sure to let the listeners know that they too
had once gone on that same trip and it was worth it.
All of these presenters were trying to say something through other
people’s music. To do this, they all knew they had to gain the trust and
faith of their listeners. Also, they all knew that to be understood, they
had speak in a way that an indeterminate group of unknown strangers
would be able to understand and recognize as valid and credible. They
could only do so by assembling a playlist of music – some known, some
not, some renowned, much obscure – the ordering of which would do
a great deal of the talking for them. To be articulate in this way takes a
great deal of skill, knowledge and trust. The mix programs I examined
were supposed to encapsulate the musical whole of the organization,
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a task that carries with it strictures within which presenters must work
for the good of the whole, while still subtly infusing their shows with
some aspect of their own experience and understanding, without which
their shows wouldn’t make sense. The specialists, however, have a
different problem. They presented sounds that they assumed most listeners would not recognize. They guided their audience by making an
argument that they should listen and in doing so allowed themselves
to gently educate them as to what their knowledge, experience and
understanding of it might be.
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Let’s face it; no one is listening that closely.
FBi presenter
You want to say something, not just play music.
2XX presenter
Radio broadcasting arrived after the introduction of a series of
momentous new communications technologies, including sound
recording, sound reproduction, telephony and telegraphy. New imaging technologies and advanced printing techniques had made possible
new kinds of increasingly realistic imagery in newspapers and magazines, forever altering the visual and imaginary cultures of advertising,
consumerism and celebrity. The cinema, of course, went much further. Its progenitors built on existing visual entertainments such as
vaudeville, light opera and theatrical panoramas to create an experiential environment in which sound and light conspired together to
transform even the simplest actions into something else entirely. This
rash of new ways to connect with one another was, arguably, symptomatic of the loud, often disorienting transformations of the wider
cultures of late 19th-century popular culture, setting the stage for the
dramatic transformations of the 20th century. The emergence of industrial production and consumer culture gradually shifted most of society
into the purview of new sets of values which sanctioned periods of
regular leisure, compulsive spending, apolitical passivity and a permissive but subtly coercive morality of individual fulfillment (Lears, 1983).
Industrialization and urbanization produced a new range of connections with and dependencies on newly interlinked global markets in
goods and imagery, significantly transforming just about every major
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and the Unknown
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type of social relationship for most people in the Western world between
about 1880 and 1920. The foundations of our own consumer culture
began to form when people could regularly connect through those
evanescent aural forms brought into our homes on the radio. They
solidified when corporations were able to mold these forms into reproducible commodities that they imagined to have vaguely predictable
consequences.
The enervating mingling of sound and sentiment thrown across vast
distances in paradoxically intimate ways has yet to lose its power to
move music through the world. The terms on which music moves
through the world have been the subject of occasional and occasionally intense contests. The continual and relentless expansion of private
corporate power into all areas of social life has increasingly set the
terms and default conditions for these contests. The commercial radio
industry has gradually been able to insert the logic of its power deep
enough into the state, the ostensible protector of the public, to blunt
the state’s power not only to defend the public interest but even to
define it. The music industry has systematically expanded its ways of
expressing authority over music to govern the act of creation, own the
results and lease out those pieces they presume will make them the most
money in ever more novel configurations. These pieces are then circulated through a range of channels over which it can exert an impressive
range of contractually enforceable conditions. Far from the romantic
image of artistry and struggle so often fed to us in films, on television, in
museums and in biographies, music is often assembled by teams of technicians acting as contracted laborers, the draught horses of the industry,
whose efforts are then snapped up and laid out before the contractor
for approval. The lyrics might be sold to any brand willing to pay for
them, the sentiment for rent to sell cars, beer, computers and phones,
and all associated imagery, still or moving, is for hire many times over,
if all goes well (Van Buskirk, 2008; Chace, 2011; Mahdawi, 2011).
But these familiar facets of our collective musical inheritance, practices that began in the early 20th century, were only harbingers of many
contemporary phenomena. Those ceaseless toilers of the digital world
are trying, with some measure of anxious exuberance, to take the logic
of the market to places their forebears could never dream of reaching.
We are witnessing the creation of a ‘participatory culture’ in which our
agency is merely a measure of the data that can be mined through
the automatic tracking of the many forms of our unrecompensed labor
(see Van Dijck, 2009). ‘User-generated content’ does not merely consist of posting the occasional video. Instead, every click, every decision,
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however it might be expressed, is transformed into ‘non-exclusive’
intellectual property with every ‘seemingly private act of media consumption being registered, aggregated and traded as the property of
YouTube’. Our ‘increasingly surveillant media’ even deny us the right
to watch in silence as our silence is ‘precisely that form of agency which
the viewing subject is most aggressively denied’ (Briggs, 2010). Facebook
marketizes our friendships. Google monetizes our intentions and interests. Twitter sells our odd random thoughts. Hunch, and thousands
of others digital strategy firms, analyze our sharing patterns, aggregate
our habits and trade on our recommendations in an effort to link us
inexorably to what we might buy next.
These furtive, strategic and invisible forms of knowledge are not neutral. They push nonconforming kinds of agency to the side. As I showed
in Chapter 2, marginal and dominant expressive forms exist in an
awkwardly interdependent relationship, but it is the market’s invasive
nature that means that consumerist public culture is always marked by
conditions hostile to and often destructive of marginal forms of expression. The keys to all of it, however, are the seemingly unpickable locks
of human desire, interest and attention. The carefully machined song
might not sell, our habits might still defy the algorithm and we might
not be so vain as to reveal everything we possibly can on our virtual
‘walls’. Consumerist public culture is sharply cut through with contradictions because all media are dependent on their ability to excite
continuous expressions of agency without really knowing where these
might lead. The sounds and images we experience as the central forms
of our common aesthetic experience of the world are designed to elicit
a response and then direct that response into an act, an act that has
to serve two divergent necessities. It must be beneficial to the institutions that prompted it, and it must somehow fall within an acceptably
predictable range of such responses.
By contrast, I have shown in this book how people use music within
organizations under popular control, community radio stations, to create civil and potentially democratic social relationships with each other.
They have created for themselves contrary and idiosyncratic modes of
public address, distinct forms of mutual recognition and egalitarian processes of validation that are open, transparent and accountable. These
radio stations must allow anyone to participate. They must help those
people who do choose to participate to master the expressive tools they
provide. And they must accept that the consequences of any practice
that is part of a civil and potentially democratic aesthetics cannot be
set out in advance. They must allow that the meaning of music is not
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necessarily something they can fix, own or enforce and that a civil and
potentially democratic aesthetics cannot survive such rationalizations.
I have tried to demonstrate that the music presenters whose work is
examined in this book explicitly and implicitly express the inherent
potential of their organizations to create what I call a civil and potentially democratic aesthetics by creating some measure of mutual social
connection with those thought to be a part of their public. Given the
rapid evolution of multiple forms of musical mediation at present, especially in the digital world, the kinds of musical practices I am analyzing
have an immediate relevance to our understanding of how people construct everyday social relationships through music. I have tried to offer a
corrective to the general lack of studies of music on radio in the form of
an innovative, critical study of the inherent connections between music,
radio broadcasting and the public sphere.
The history of radio is studded with episodes of remarkably energetic
grassroots organization. In the 1920s and ’30s in the USA, labor unions,
civil society groups and others fought to free the airwaves from corporate domination. The movement failed, but it was not in vain. By the
late 1940s and ’50s, the Pacifica Foundation successfully provided a limited but real alternative to the dominance of commercial broadcasters in
the USA, providing inspiration for groups in many countries to fight to
open the media to more democratic control. In the late 1960s and ’70s,
both radical movements and more mainstream civil society groups in
Canada, the USA and Australia successfully managed to create new types
of broadcast regulatory regimes to govern a new kind of organization, a
community radio station. By the end of the 1980s there were thousands
of community radio stations broadcasting in hundreds of countries all
around the world, many in places where doing so could be a dangerous,
if not deadly, pursuit.
In the 1990s and 2000s, as community radio genuinely blossomed
around the world, it had begun to atrophy in the USA. The public
radio system had gradually excluded most consequential forms of community participation, and a vital line of support for the community
media movement in that country was snuffed out. The reaction was
as unexpected as it was effective. A civil disobedience movement took
to the airwaves. People began squatting in the ether, taking up space
no one else had claimed and speaking to anyone who would listen.
Despite many violent police raids, the loosely allied movement was defiant. More mainstream groups took their lead from the so-called pirate
radio stations and organized a movement whose success still seems
unreal to me today. They took on the FCC, the broadcasting lobby, the
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public broadcasting system and the entertainment industry, and they
won. In one of the most restricted radio broadcasting environments
in the world, the community radio movement managed to make their
claims to the public airwaves stick (Sakolsky and Dunifer, 1997; Hogan,
2011). Given the exponentially increasing corporate dominance of what
I think we should perhaps call ‘newer’ media, the lessons from the global
community media movement need relearning.
Community radio stations simply do not work like other radio stations. They are not defined by some collection of categorical structural
and economic imperatives. They are not designed to consummate the
dictates of specific sets of rule-bound practices organized and expressed
by the encompassing entity of the station itself. They are not just
formally or informally constituted groupings of individuals linked by
discrete sets of textual or stylistic expression. These organizations are
materially constituted by the constantly evolving range of social relationships and affiliations created by their participants’ expressive and
social practices. They are constituted by the very practices they facilitate and the publics they serve. This is the key difference between
these organizations and their consumerist counterparts. Those who
work at community radio stations do not simply contest the hegemony exerted by those with greater social capital or fight the power
of those with the ability to dominate the continuously contested terrain of symbolic power by crafting their own autonomously functioning
affective alliances. These radio stations are civil organizations constantly
being formed and reformed by the lived experiences of those who
populate and participate in them. Community radio stations exist as
places through which the agency, will and experience of participants
and constituents are funneled, produced and embodied in the wide
range of creative cultural practices from which they are built. All media
institutions have at least some scrap of this potential; very few realize it.
The people I spoke to and watched working in order to write this
book never really knew who might be listening. Most took it on faith
that someone was listening closely enough to care about what they were
saying. This was enough for them to want to speak to be heard, to speak
to make sense and to speak to be understood. In the process, they began
to hear the unheard and understand the unknown.
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Introduction: The Unknown and the Unheard
1. Support for this claim is found in many, many sources. To start, see Chang
(2002), Hertz (2003), Mayer (2008), Cole (2010) and Dworkin (2010).
2. As I argue in chapters 1, 2 and 4, this depends on what I mean by ‘democracy’.
3. As I show throughout this book, this depends on what I mean by ‘public’ and
‘access’.
4. This research was made possible by the Sesquicentennial Research Fund at
the University of Sydney as well as an R&D Grant from the same institution.
I conducted research at four radio stations: 2SER and FBi in Sydney, 2XX, and
ArtSound FM in Canberra in January 2004, September 2005 and from August
to November 2007. I am very grateful for the support and participation of the
staff and volunteers of each radio station.
1 Social Solidarity in the Luminiferous Ether
1. It is important to note that Low was ‘a freelance radio engineer, inventor
and author’ whose primary work was to popularize scientific research, not
engage in it (Bowler, 2006:171).
2. This elegant distinction comes from Joselit (2007:60).
3. I pinched this metaphor from Salter (1980) and have used and reused it
shamelessly for years.
4. Burgess and Green (2009) provide a few good examples of this form of
rhetoric.
5. Gaylor (2009) offers a strident and entertaining critique of these issues.
6. As Cockburn (2010) incisively notes, ‘we have a public “commons”—the
Internet—subject to arbitrary onslaught by the state and powerful commercial interests, and not even the shadow of constitutional protections. The
situation is getting worse. The Internet itself is going private. As I write,
Google and Facebook are locked in a struggle over which company will control the bulk of the world’s Internet traffic. Millions could find that the e-mail
addresses they try to communicate with, the sites they want to visit, the ads
they may want to run are all under Google’s or Facebook’s supervision and
can be closed off without explanation or redress at any time.’
7. See Lehmann (2011) and Harkin (2010) for sharp critiques of cyber
utopianism.
8. Briggs (2010) and Van Dijck (2009) provide penetrating critiques of these
issues.
9. Elsewhere I have examined the ‘Idol’ phenomenon as a representative system
of the laborious excitation of such demand (Fairchild, 2008).
205
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Notes
2 Corporate Rationality, Communicative Reason
and Aesthetic Experience
1. As Foege (2008) shows, even the most powerful of corporations can fall prey
to this form of institutional myopia.
2. It is important to note that this idea has a long and substantial history in critical cultural studies of media. A particularly concise and effective presentation
of it appears in Carah (2010:14–19).
3. For example, the most common response by the music industry to illegal file
sharing was to accuse consumers variously of mendacity, ignorance or sloth.
Consumers were either too stupid to realize the consequences of their actions,
too selfish to take those consequences seriously and change their behavior or
too lazy and selfish to engage in legitimate commerce (see Fairchild, 2008).
4. The claim that DJs or Music Directors have some consequential form of
autonomy in the workplace is contested by Stark (1999).
3 Of Communities and Constituencies: Radio,
the Market and the State
1. Calhoun (2002) more or less argues that ‘civil society’ is in large part comprised of commercial entities (Calhoun, 2002:169–70). Obviously, I disagree.
2. Much of this chapter is based on a large cache of documents held by 2XX,
ArtSound, the ACT Heritage Library and the National Library of Australia.
This collection contains a record of the struggles over the establishment,
programming, financing and licensing of ArtSound, 2XX and 2SER.
3. For example, two industries which have recently benefited handsomely from
deregulation and regulatory ‘capture’, the oil industry and the financial services industry, both had unprecedented catastrophes in consecutive years, the
BP Deepwater-Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and the global
financial crisis of 2008–9 (Prins, 2006; Ferguson, 2010; Gaviria and Smith,
2010; Taibbi, 2011).
4. Foege (2008) and Fisher (2007) provide the strong descriptions of these
processes in the USA.
5. It was enough for Macquarie executives to make a series of ‘frantic’ communications to the Australian government during the worst days of the 2008
global financial crisis to convince the government to stave off the damning
verdict of the very market which had supposedly made the company so rich,
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10. There are many introductory volumes that can serve as excellent summations and explorations of these topics, including Goode (2005), Warner
(2002), McGuigan (1996) and Calhoun (1992). The oft-cited McKee (2005)
is deeply marred by simplistic argumentation (see pp. 17–18, 77–80, 89, 98,
116) and tendentious reasoning (see pp. 13, 14, 63, 206). Hartley’s influential
writings on the public sphere display similar shortcomings (Hartley, 1999).
A testy and revealing essay provides insight into its origins in a bland form
of market populism (Hartley, 1998).
Notes
207
but which forced its share price into a precipitous slide as the crisis hit (Evans
and Verrender, 2010:1, 6).
6. While it is very difficult to gauge the influence of this one case, community
broadcasting policy in Australia did change a great deal in the late 1980s and
CSPR did play an important role in that process (see Tappere, 1986:19–21).
1. From early guidelines on how to announce for radio produced by 2XX,
Canberra. Spelling and punctuation as in the original.
5 Local Music for Local People
1. Talamere is not a band, but a Melbourne-based female singer–songwriter.
6 Mixing: The Rational, the Reasoned, the Resourceful
1. The liner notes to ‘Get Out’ suggest that this work ‘stands as the first major
musical laptop statement in the same way that Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced [sic] album spoke for the most extended instrument-specific modes
of the electric guitar three decades earlier’ (http://editionsmego.com/release/
eMEGO+029).
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4 What Does a Civil Society Sound Like?
2SER. (1986) ‘2SER-FM Aims and Objectives.’ Sydney: 2SER FM.
2SER. (1984) ‘Listening Post.’ No. 53. Sydney: 2SER FM.
2SER. (1981) ‘Listening Post.’ No. 19. Sydney: 2SER FM.
2SER. (1980) ‘Listening Post.’ No. 4. Sydney: 2SER FM.
2SER. (1979a) ‘Radio News.’ Sydney: 2SER FM.
2SER. (1979b) ‘Listening Post.’ No. 3. Sydney: 2SER FM.
2XX. (1989) ‘XX Communique.’ February.
2XX. (1987) ‘XX Communique.’ November.
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ACTTAB, 96–7
advertising, 3, 13, 82–3, 157
commercial radio and, 58
influence on public culture,
27, 39
community radio and, 90
aesthetics, 6–8, 45–7, 46, 51–2, 54–6,
75, 109, 140–1, 143
civil and potentially democratic,
6–8, 22, 24–5, 31–2, 61, 63–4,
68–9, 71–4, 108–11, 143, 164,
187, 198, 202
communication and, 47, 53, 70, 107
ArtSound FM, 11–12, 87, 105, 137,
141, 165–7, 186
‘Arts Diary,’ 100, 137, 174–8
Canberra local music scene, 95,
93–4, 98–9, 143–4, 148–9, 164
‘Concert Hall,’ 144–5
‘Classical Moods,’ 183–8
‘Disc Drive,’ 173–9
‘Dress Circle,’ 183–5, 187
Fine Tuning, 99, 126
licensing struggle, 93–100
music presenters, 105–6, 144–5,
173–9, 183–6, 188–90
music programming, 94, 100, 120,
124–7, 139, 166, 173–9, 178–9,
183–6
playlists, 165–8, 176–7, 188–9
programming guidelines, 165–7,
173–4, 176–7, 187–8
radio festivals, 100, 126, 127, 139
‘Sounds Early,’ 173–9
‘The Soundspace,’ 137–9
‘World Vibe,’ 188–90
see also Canberra Stereo Public
Radio (CSPR)
Attali, Jacques, 23, 28–31
audiences, 2, 4, 12–13, 31–2, 44–5,
68–70, 72–3, 79, 82–3, 101, 115,
118, 123, 127, 131, 138, 145, 150,
174, 179, 199
Augé, Marc, 108–9
BBC World Service, 41–2
Born, Georgina, 17, 21, 106, 140, 164
Calhoun, Craig, 31
Canberra (ACT), 11, 62, 64, 122, 125,
142, 145–6, 157–8, 184–5
community radio in, 11, 62, 97,
100, 120–1, 124–6, 143–4, 149
Canberra Stereo Public Radio (CSPR),
93–9, 124–6
citizenship, 35–8, 40, 48, 50, 78, 87
cultural citizenship, 82–3, 151
civil institutions, 1, 8, 9, 20, 24, 31,
40, 79, 82–3, 121
civil society, 5, 6, 10, 22, 24, 25, 28,
31, 33, 40, 50, 82–3, 110, 143
Comaroff, John and Jean, 110
communication models
strategic and economic, 8–9, 27, 36,
39–40, 46–8, 55, 138
procedural and discursive, 8, 23, 40,
46, 51–2, 109–11
commercial radio, 2–5, 51, 54, 75, 78,
112–13
concentration of ownership, 3–4
the market and, 3, 42, 44, 55–6
music and, 26, 55–6, 58, 60
the state and, 4, 50–1, 79, 85–6, 90,
96, 98–9
community radio, 11–14, 23, 31, 72,
142–3, 182
civil society and, 1, 6, 9, 33, 40,
81–3, 112
consumerism and, 31–2, 28, 83,
101, 119
cultural democracy and, 25, 33, 54,
69, 134–5, 109–12
the market and, 26, 32, 116, 119
223
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Index
Index
community radio – continued
music and, 7–8, 67, 134–6, 139, 146,
155–6, 165–7, 180, 182–6,
188–92
music presenters, 24, 27, 61–6,
107–11, 127–30, 134–7, 167–73,
178–80, 181–2, 186–8, 193–8
the state and, 91, 98–9
constituency relationships, 9, 78–81,
83, 93, 100–1
consumerism, 3, 4, 8, 28, 31, 35–6, 38,
48, 53, 56, 76, 83, 113
corporate rationality, 1, 3, 8, 9, 28, 32,
34, 39, 42–8, 50–1, 55, 77, 84, 87
cultural democracy, 7, 24, 27–8, 31,
77, 82–3, 143, 164
Federal Communications
Commission, 84–5
Fugazi, 77
democracy, 4–7, 13, 22, 25, 32, 37,
33–40, 48, 72, 82, 100
demographics, 3, 45, 56, 82, 95, 117,
131
digital culture, 25–7, 201–2
and consumerism, 26
Docherty, Thomas, 71–2
Illich, Ivan, 79–80
Eagleton, Terry, 52, 70–1, 75
FBi (Free Broadcasting Incorporated),
11, 67, 112–13, 116, 132, 137
advertising campaigns, 116–18, 120,
131, 134
‘Fat Planet,’ 187–8, 190–3
licensing struggle, 87, 90–3, 98
‘Music Lessons,’ 153–8
music programming, 147–51,
153–61, 165–8, 188, 190–3,
195–8
music presenters, 61–4, 66, 67–75,
167–73, 186–7, 192–3, 195–8
Open Day, 133, 149, 155–8
‘Out of the Box,’ 158–61
playlists, 165–8, 176–7, 188–9
podcasts, 153–5
Sydney local music scene, 117–19,
132, 143, 149–51, 164
‘The Bridge,’ 147–51
‘Utility Fog,’ 187, 193, 195–8
‘Weekend Lunch,’ 167–73
Wild FM challenge, 90–1
Goodman, Ellen, 39, 47, 56, 60, 81
Global Financial Crisis, 119
globalization, 41–3, 47, 51, 55, 84,
110, 136, 144–5, 164, 166, 173,
190
Gracyk, Theodore, 30
Gramsci, Antonio, 77
Habermas, Jürgen
communicative action, 69–71, 80–1
public sphere, 34–5, 72, 83
Hartley, John, 37, 39, 83, 206
Jenkins, Henry, 27, 37
Joselit, David, 24–5
Kahn, Douglas, 18, 20
Leys, Colin, 39, 50
Loehwing, Melanie, 34–6, 83
Low, A.M., 17–18, 205
Lumby, Catherine, 37, 39
luminiferous ether, 17, 19–20, 26
Macquarie Group, 87–9
marketing, 39, 47, 56, 116–17, 131,
157
McKee, Alan, 37, 39, 206
media regulation, 2, 3, 5, 8, 38–9, 82,
84–5, 86
United States, 55, 58–60, 85
Australia, 79, 89–91
Motter, Jeff, 34–6, 83
music industry, 2–6, 29, 53–60, 149,
151–8
music presenters, 7–11, 23–5, 31, 45,
61–4, 66, 67–75, 107, 111–12,
126–7, 134, 145–9, 163–4, 167–73,
179–80, 186–7, 192–3, 195–8
music promotion, 55, 59–60, 117,
119, 143, 150–1, 154
neo-liberalism, 1–5, 37, 83–4, 87, 93
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payola, 3, 6, 33
legal, 58
illegal, 54–60
piracy, 2, 52
popular music, 2, 114, 124, 148–9,
158–60, 168–70, 187–92, 196
payola, 54–60
economic value, 49, 54–6, 60–1
privatization, 5, 9
community radio and, 84–8
problem of the public, 32–3, 46–7,
143, 187
public culture, 4, 5, 8, 9, 26–8, 33–40,
46–53, 69–70, 101
public relations, 39, 157
public sphere, 5, 8, 30, 32, 33–40,
45–6, 70–2, 80, 83, 110
Rancèire, Jacques, 109–10, 188
radio deregulation, 2, 3, 5, 55, 58–60,
84–6
radio programming, 3, 4, 11–12, 94,
104–5, 106, 113
commercial, 24, 32, 43–5, 56, 58–60
community, 97, 99, 100, 114–15,
120–8, 134, 136–40, 142, 145–9,
151, 157–9, 161–3, 165–7,
179–80, 186–8, 198–9
regulatory capture, 39, 85, 206
Ritzer, George, 43
‘Room to Move,’ 62
Saul, John Ralston, 48–9, 51
state power, 31, 34, 50–1, 76–8, 81–2,
84–7, 91, 100, 121
stealth marketing, 36, 39, 47, 56–7
225
Triple J, (2JJ, 2JJJ), 112–17
2SER (Sydney Educational Radio), 11,
112–14, 119–21, 140, 143, 166
‘Jailbreak,’ 158, 161–4
‘Methodology,’ 187, 193–5
music presenters, 128–30, 193–8
music programming, 114–15, 123,
128, 193–5
‘The Attic,’ 128–30
Sydney local music scene, 114–15,
123, 143
2XX, 11–12, 61–2, 93, 96–7, 105,
120–2, 136–7, 139, 141, 143, 164,
166
Canberra local music scene, 122–4,
148–9, 157–8
Canberra Recorded Music Society,
182–3
‘Classic Matters,’ 180, 182–3
Doubleextra News, 121–3, 149
‘Innerspace,’ 180–2
‘Lunch Box,’ 134–6
Micfest, 151–3
music presenters, 61–4, 66, 67–75,
134–7, 179–83
music programming, 120–4, 136–7,
179–3
struggles to stay on-air, 86, 88–9, 92,
120
‘Sunset,’ 146–7
‘Wot’s On,’ 134–5
XX Communique, 123
virtual live radio, 3, 44, 59, 139
voice tracking, 3, 44, 59
Warner, Michael, 38
10.1057/9780230390515 - Music, Radio and the Public Sphere, Charles Fairchild
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of Sydney - PalgraveConnect - 2013-02-05
Index