POP ROOTS

Radio Killed The Radio Star
DJs and the changing face of radio

There was a time when the entire family gathered around the radio to listen to a story or laugh at a comic diatribe or tune in for the news. Radio was a cultural event much like that of the television. Except radio was and is different and not just in the audio sense.
There's a difference between a story fed to you in aural and visual form and a story told to you wherein you must provide the imagination that creates the visual. The voices are there, but the characters are still in your head.
Radio personalities such as Orson Welles and Milton Berle, and programs like "Grand Ole Opry" and the "Adventures of Superman," have been pushed to margins of society, reserved in bins labeled NPR and AM Radio. These types of radio broadcasts have also been eclipsed by the much more convenient podcasts (at least convenient for those with iPods).
One thing in particular though, has taken a considerable backseat: radio DJs.

As a new medium at the beginning of the twentieth century, radio quickly searched for and found voices to be the foundation that solidified the new technology for listeners. Actors from the silver screen were prime picks to be voices as well as popular bandleaders and singers. A kaleidoscope of individuals echoed through a nation's ears, but with the proliferation of television in the 1950s the medium quickly reverted to music and information. The role of announcer, formerly a marginal role in a radio program, became essential for the structure of radio. Story lines evolved into extended monologues wherein namedropping was the key to information. To compete with the obvious advantages of television, radio DJs needed to have not just heavy musical ammunition but also a personality that wrapped about listeners' ears and pulled them back again and again. Personalities such as Wolfman Jack and Alan Freed were not just noise on the squawk-box; they were change. During the civil rights African-American DJs played an important role in spreading African-American culture through music and DJs playing top singles with anti-war messages were strong propagators of the movement against the Vietnam War.

Not to mention the fact that radios remained the most intimate form of communication. Despite the brilliance of television, people listened to radios as they fell asleep and radio DJs were the whispers in their midnight ears.

Movies such as Airheads, Good Morning, Vietnam and Jakob The Liar showcased the power of a DJ's voice in making or breaking a band, as well as how a simple voice can change everything, even the darkest of worlds.

With the washout that was the 1970s, society seemed less accepting of titans of social consciousness and more in the mood for audio schwag: shock artists such as Howard Stern, political blowhards such as Rush Limbaugh and countless new age DJs who operated on the sole mantra of "the more marginal the program, the better", which usually ended up being an excuse to be snobby. Radio DJs were pop art, more utilitarian than anything. By the 1990s, they were breakfast muzak; voices with snazzy nick names that played hit singles commanded by powerful record companies until the CD burst into flames.

Currently,the DJ, as Nietzsche might say, was dead. People wanted no more social leaders, but rather social kitsch to splash against their ear drums and forget once they walked out the door. Attempted revivals of old-time radio such as Prairie Home Companion seem so quaint because they are remnants of a slower time when the focus was on storylines with music not as a separate entity pounded down the canals of listeners with the periodic thunder of ads but itself seamlessly woven into the fabric of the show. The ads, music and DJ were all part of the experience.

These days people don't seem to want that, at least the majority of them don't. DJs are unnecessary in today's society; a tired vestigal organ of nostalgia and habit. The popularity Yahoo! Music, Pandora Radio and the ilk are proof of that: DJ-less internet radio stations play to the whim of the listener. The internet has made a single voice unimportant in a word where everyone can be an expert, where anyone can be a music divinity with their own playlists and stations.

Is this a bad thing?

It really depends upon which generation you are or which generation you'd like to be. Society seems bent on obliterating group consciousness even as the ultimate consciousness of the world wide web takes its seat of control and media outlets are catching on with like-wise oriented speech. Of course, the jargon they often throw around such as "post-racial" and "post-gender" are about as substantial as a Lehman Brothers stock share in a society where the majority assumes with each new era that much of its major problems have been solved there is no desire for single voices, leaders. It's a paradox of sorts: as society becomes ultra-individualistic it is developing a collective consciousness using technology as the common tool which links all individuals together and which every person on earth can agree with: we all think the internet is a great means of communication no matter how slow our connection is. The current trend radio is going through is just another representation of that.

Although a few radio voices remain, they are background fuzz for the ride to work or the breakfast Pop-Tart, but they have no substance and can't wrap about the ears of a culture that refuses to sit still for a moment.

Despite the continuous existence of war, poverty, hatred and inequality in the world, it seems there's just nothing to talk about anymore.

In that sense, maybe the only thing radio DJs can do is flip the switch over the listener, who will listen to what they want to listen to and hear what they want to hear. Everything has its place in time and maybe radio DJs can pray that this particular movement is playing on a loop.