Writing Out Loud

Whatever Happened to Great Radio?

Radio is a wasteland these days.  I remember my sadness when I heard that the last holdout of freeform radio in the Chicago area – WCBR – was folding.  Back then, I had a 45 minute commute to work, and the morning show on WCBR, hosted by DJ Tommy Lee, was some of the best radio I’d ever heard.  I was constantly exposed to music I didn’t know existed, as this station seemed to casually champion many little-known artists.  Many of these recording acts never gained nationwide success but, thanks to a radio station that was actually dedicated to music, I was aware of their recordings and therefore able to buy their cds.  This dedication to music was, I believe, what brought about the station’s demise.  Their waves were bought out by a corporate radio behemoth, and that frequency became just another place to hear the same stuff one could find practically anywhere on the radio dial.  [I should mention that WCBR's old frequency was recently turned over to an all-request station that boasts it will play ANYTHING, which makes for an strange mix of music.  I've heard Ella Fitzgerald followed by Guns & Roses.  No, I'm not kidding!  Interestingly, 80s music seems to dominate the playlist.] 

It’s not that I hate the music that big corporate radio plays.  There is plenty on those stations that is of good and sometimes great quality.  I just wish there was more content.  Radio stations do not take risks anymore, and the losers are the artists who are struggling to be heard and the listeners who will never know about them.  And the rub is that most radio listeners don’t even know they are missing out on anything.  Radio listeners in America willingly listen only to what is spoon-fed to them by the monsters of the airwaves and have become apathetic and lazy in their appreciation of music.  At times, I wish I would have come of age when FM radio was the ethereal frontier, when nobody quite knew how to harness the waves for big profit and the proliferation of music was at least somewhere near the top of the list of goals for station managers; when being the first to break a new tune – a new sound – was what the station prided itself upon.  Or maybe it would have been better to have grown up when AM radio was being saturated with the strange but compelling new sounds of the rock scene – back when rock & roll had as loose a definition as jazz.  But even back then, the record label and radio station leadership had the green-stained hands of the payola culture.  Hmmm…maybe radio was doomed early on.

I keep resisting the call of satellite radio.  On one hand, I love the idea.  I can choose a satellite station that will play the genre I like.  On the other hand, at any given time, I’d just be listening to a small segment of music, to genre-specific programming that is a tempting, but limiting experience.  We can’t escape genre and categorization, but we can seek to avoid it.  So I’m a big fan of national public radio.  I see NPR as the new frontier, tho’ there is nothing really new about it.  The more I listen to NPR, the more I find programs that expose me to music I’ve not yet heard.  Classical, jazz, bluegrass, folk, rock, ethnic…these can all be found in syndicated programming on NPR.  I recommend shows like AMERICAN ROUTES , WORLD CAFÉ (highly recommended!), and MOUNTAIN STAGE.  Together, these three radio programs will offer jazz, Americana & roots, traditional, rock, and world & ethnic music that will shake up your concepts of music and its possibilities, and that’s barely tapping into what NPR offers.  For a way cool change of pace, listen to some intriguing spoken word programming.  My favorite NPR program is This American Life. 

I can’t comment about radio without directing you to my favorite radio station – KCUV, Denver.  Being from the Chicago area, I can’t listen to this station unless I’m on the computer.  You can stream their programming HERE, and I recommend you do just that if you are a fan of rock, gritty country, bluegrass, blues, and all those recording artists that have blurred the boundaries between these genres.  Listening for just a couple hours, I can hear music from artists like Dave Edmunds, Little Feat, Kasey Chambers, Johnny Cash, Leo Kottke, Danny Gatton, John Hiatt, Bob Dylan, Neko Case, John Prine, Richard Thompson, the Jayhawks, Lyle Lovett, Tom Waits…  Don’t know who some of these artists are?  Maybe it’s time to get acquainted.

As music fans, we do ourselves a great disservice by ignoring what is under the radar.  Take risks when you listen to music.  It’s like food, if you haven’t tried it you can’t know for sure whether or not you like it.  I can guarantee that digging deeper into music, taking a journey into the unfamiliar, will reveal great treasures and your love of music will deepen.     

    

"Overwhelmed," (or "Tangents")

Sometimes I get overwhelmed.  This is only my 3^rd entry in this blog (well, 2^nd really) and I’m already about to write about writing a blog.  This is not good.  One of my favorite songwriters, Joe Henry, once said in an interview that when he caught himself writing songs about writing songs it was time to shelve what he was doing and start from a different place.  I’m totally paraphrasing this, because I read the article several years back.  Anyhow, this was a point in Joe Henry’s recording career when he changed his musical direction so completely that he really doesn’t play any of those old tunes anymore.  We’re talkin’ like 4 albums’ worth of material!  He seems to have disowned that part of his career, which is a shame.  It’s some of the best music I’ve heard and it saved me from despairing over the whole alt-rock thing that was so rampant at the time.  Joe Henry actually wrote something worth listening to, and had a great band (the Jayhawks) backing him up, to boot!  My whole sense of music and guitar playing was evolving back in those days and one of the biggest catalysts was Joe Henry’s music (with Gary Louris’s guitar playing).  But that’s not at all what I was writing about.  I was writing about writing, wasn’t I?  Where was I?  Oh yeah, overwhelmed.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed.  There’s a whole big bunch going thru my head these days – God is teaching me about many aspects of Christian living at once (being sacrificial, discipline, relying on Him to overcome sin, being a part of community, idolatry), and my brain feels full, saturated.  It’s hard to explore these ideas deeply, as they are huge and there are so many of them, and it’s difficult to prioritize my study and meditation.  This blog is a place for me to write about my exploration of these issues, but they are so deep and intertwined that I could write volumes and still not get to the core of any one of them...if there IS a core.  Well, there IS a core:  The core is Christ, which reminds of me of something comedian T.P. Mulrooney said about being an Irish Catholic kid and being sent to a Christian school.  There was a sign outside that said “Christ Is the Answer!”  His first thought? “Boy, these tests are gonna be easy!”  Add to that my obvious habit of running off on tangents (see?  two paragraphs, two tangents!) and you can see how focused I am.  Oh sure, I could edit myself here on the blog to stay on track, but hey, edit-schmedit!  I’ll save my editing for research articles.

Maybe it’s all just a distraction, this feeling we get of being swamped by God’s lessons.  Maybe there’s a design there to pull us away from our dedication to Christ.  I think our worldly attitudes tend to make things look impossible, or at least so difficult to undertake that we defensively slip back into a place of apathy, or worse yet, blind contentment.  I’m inclined to set up camp in that place, and I often do.  I remember a friend telling me about his struggles with Christian living, shaking his head in frustration and saying, “it’s just so hard.”  My reply was that of course it’s hard.  If it was easy, we’d all be disciples.  Well, maybe no all of us, but I think the point stands.  I mean, if it was easy, there’d be no point in dedicating our very lives to discipleship, setting aside our worldly aspirations to serve God first, and measuring ourselves against a standard we’ll never actually meet.  In our heads it’s easy for us to just say, “Well then, it’s futile!”  But in our hearts, if our hearts belong to Christ, we can understand the value of that struggle.  And when the struggle has such great value, the goal becomes secondary to the struggle.  The pastor at my church frequently poses the question to us, are we disciples simply so that we can get into heaven after we die, or are we disciples so that we can show a light in our community while we are alive?  ...So, on top of studying and meditating, there’s also stuff to do.  Overwhelming?  Maybe, but not compared to the staggering accomplishment of our Savior.  And here I was thinking I really had my work cut out for me.  The real battle, it seems, is to shake off the apathy and take joy in the work the Lord sets before us.  God has provided us His law, He has given us an example in His son, and He will provide the means to work in His name.  So how will I prioritize?  I guess I’ll start with the first step: prayer.   

…Ah wait, I thought I was writing about writing.  Forgot about that.  Well now I wonder: which part of this entry was the tangent?   

 

Behold, a Vision of the Virgin

Ok, it’s been in the news; an image of the Virgin Mary  appeared on the salt-stained concrete of a south Chicago viaduct.  And they came, with candles & flowers, paying tribute in front of this image which, to me, simply looks like a stain on a concrete wall.  Yes, yes, I see where it looks like hands pressed against each other; and yeah, I see the reverently tilted “head,” but please read on.   

We all know that this isn’t the first time the Virgin’s image appeared.  Pick a search engine and type in “image of virgin mary” and you’ll find entire sites devoted to collecting and displaying pictures, articles, and testimony like it is the Gospel itself.  Now, I don’t mean to be flip, but why is every strange image that looks like a hooded figure immediately thought to be a representation of Mary, mother of Jesus?  Was she a fashion renegade, perhaps the only woman to be clothed the way we’ve come to recognize from centuries of paintings?  Why do we directly compare these images to the romantic representations of the Virgin painted centuries after her death?  Would the Virgin really reveal herself in an image that mimics one of these paintings?  Truth is our idea of how Mary dressed is based on how all women of that era and locale dressed.  So just who is that on the wall?

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Mary for what she did – I’m inspired by her selflessness.  Mary was a humble and blessed servant of God.  She surrendered herself to serve the Lord. She risked (and likely suffered) societal and familial ridicule and disgrace by carrying a baby conceived out of wedlock.  She endured the pains of labor and gave birth in a stable surrounded by animals and their filth.  She watched her child become a controversial figure, the target of much hatred and murderous plots.  She saw her son tortured and executed for crimes he did not commit. She did these things as the bond servant of God Himself, showing great humility and obedience, proving that she knew her role was to put God and His offer of a Savior to the world before her personal goals and expectations.  She placed God first and herself last.  When I think of this, I wonder if she would have herself exalted; if she would have vague images of herself worshipped; if she would really appear to the world on the surface of a grilled cheese sandwich.   

We live in an era when many people feel lost, helpless.  And when we feel this way, our tendency is to claw thru the air until we grasp something that looks like hope.  But what looks like hope can be hollow and temporal; earthly, even though it bears the likeness of something more, something divine.  To those who flock to the underpass or the stand in the parking lot of that glass building in Florida, I have to ask, why are you running to these fuzzy images to have your hope & faith rekindled when Christ is the eternal hope that you carry in your heart?  Christ never goes away.  He is never vandalized or shattered, never auctioned on Ebay.  If something you see reminds you of the glory of God, give Him praise.  If a strange image makes you ponder the godly sacrifice of the mother of Jesus, sing “hallelujah.”  But keep your candles at home; the only fire that must burn is the fire of faith in your heart.      

Is this thing on?  Hello?  Hel-LO-ohhh... 

Umm....I just flew in from L.A., and boy do my arms hurt.  Hoo-hah!!  Thank you very much.   Try the veal.