It's Only Rock And Roll

A commenter in yesterday's thread about MPR's new Alt-pop station left me a link to this piece from yesterday's Strib about the new station, saying "It's quite sophmoric, sounding like someone who never listened to MPR's classical station before. All of the cliches are thrown out, and we really are quite stupid for listening to radio before MPR saved us all."

Sophomoric and ignorant? Let me at it!

The writer, Paul Scott, is listed as a writer from Rochester.

We'll get to that in a minute. First, some history.

I moved to the Twin Cities in 1985, right after I graduated from college. The reason I stated was that I wanted a job that didn't involve diesel mechanics or teaching high school English in North Dakota. Not that there's anything wrong with either of those things, but it just wasn't me. The unstated reason? I wanted to be a rock and roller. 1985 was the apex of a great decade in Twin Cities music, and I wanted in on it worse than anything in the world. I had my mission; to be the next Paul Westerberg. Or Joe Grushecky. Or Joe Strummer. Well, really all of them, rolled together. I played a mean guitar, a solid harmonica, basic bass, and feeble but enthusiastic keyboards, owned a little four-track cassette deck and a drum machine, and over the course of 1986 probably wrote 120 songs and recorded at least as many demo tapes. I played in bands - "Tenants Union", "Joe Public", and my favorite, the short-lived but glorious "Supreme Soviet of Love".

Upside: I met everyone. I shot pool at the CC Club with the guys that became Soul Asylum. I met Pete Jesperson, the guy who put the Replacements on the map. I interviewed Husker Freaking Du. I had Larry Sahagian and Skip Waslaski on my old show, on KSTP (you either know who they are, or you don't). I had Bob Stinson hit me up for cocaine. And my bands actually got a little bit of transient buzz going, for a few months back in '87. Downside: It was very transient. We were dreadfully unhip and proud of it - but that was no way to get written up in the Twin Cities Reader. We were either ten years after our time, or six years before it. We made no money, got sick of dealing with each other, got depressed, drank too much, and eventually became subjects for "Behind the Music", if BTM covered really unsuccessful bands.

I mention this to establish bona fides; I love music. All music - or, to be more accurate, the best 5% of all music. Hip music, unhip music, hip-hop (I was a rap DJ for a while), classical, bluegrass, punk, disco, whatever. And I get around on enough musical instruments to make the Waterboys blanche [1], so I move my mind, and my ass doth indeed follow.

Summation: Mitch loves music. Lots of it, of all kinds.

Onward to Mr. Scott's article. Later in the piece, Mr. Scott says:

You do not need to be a music snob to have felt in the last 10 years a claustrophobic, quiet despair over this collapsing of your choices for new songs to lift your mood.

And then, Mr. Scott goes on to state his bona fides as...a music snob:

As the media companies kept trying to winnow the pickings in favor of more money, it seemed as if the radio has become a strange either/or choice between sanctimonious country music for suburban parents and hypersexed party music for their kids...To listeners who spent the 1980s having to listen to Huey Lewis instead of the Clash, the 1990s having to hear No Doubt instead of the Cocteau Twins, and the start of this decade listening to whichever hip hop or American Idol or corporate country act had wormed its way through the gatekeepers of media consolidation, the feeling that I might be able to discover unexpected beauty by turning on the radio was a strange wonder, a spark of hope after years of alienation.

Perhaps I'm spoiled for purposes of this subject by having worked in radio for too long in my earlier life - but I think it's interesting that so many people who refer to KCMP as something to "cheer them up", to bring "spark" and "hope" and "unexpected beauty" from their listening, as if turning on MPR is like going to a museum.

Not that I haven't found beauty and spark on the radio - there's a post of its own in that subject - but the idea of hanging so much of your psychic well-being seems a tad rash. And the idea of expecting taxpayers to pay for it is a tad presumptuous. More on that later.

Oh - and the Cocteau Twins sucked chunks through a straw; easily among the most overrated music of the '80s and '90s.

Mr. Scott flits past the subject of the economics of radio, without actually addressing, or seemingly knowing anything about, it:

I realize that alternative music stations have come and gone before, but this time something feels different. As a listener you always had the feeling that previous efforts at alternative music in Minnesota were but an accountant's calculation away from an overnight format-switch to Enrique Iglesias. Of those few alternative music stations that do exist today, most are limited to the Twin Cities -- as if all the out state needs is Toby Keith and the hog report last week -- or see Bruce Hornsby as some sort of ambitious offering, or come squawking out of college stations or community programming outlets with a four-block radius.

Goodness, why would people in a rural area want to listen to hog reports, for heaven's sake? It's not like farm commodity prices are their income or anything.

But, like I said: Scott brushes up against a small truth, without quite hitting it (or realizing he's done it, I suspect): MPR's decision is about economics, no less than any decision made by the boogyman Halliburton Clear Channel would be. KCMP is also "an accountant's calculation away from format switch", too. The format change only happened, I'm going to posit, because the same generation of people who were too swamped with student loans and working at entry-level jobs to be an economically-viable enough demographic to support "Rev105" ten years ago, are now in stable jobs, probably thinking about buying houses and having kids - but still young enough to feel that blazingly dramatic, adolescent tie between music and love, sex, fun, the opposite sex, all the dramatic little details of life that seem so searingly vital when you're 19...

...all the things that go into calculating what a business does with a radio station. MPR sees an audience with disposable income and (important for a public station) political clout that exists at age 29, but not age 19. And they, with no less cynical, bottom-line focused calculation than Clear Channel, are moving to get their piece of that money - and, as that generation graduates from Chino Latino and Wilco to Volvos and free-range alpaca, usher them into the "life member" fold at MPR, listening to the next generations of Terry Grosses and Garrison Keillors.

KCMP's not about music. It's about Bill Kling's retirement plan.

No big surprise, right? But I get the feeling that to some people in KCMP's audience, it is.

Speaking of big surprises; I'm amazed at the ludicrous quality of writing and maddening ignorance that seems to get people in the door on the Strib's op-ed page these days. Mr. Scott is a depressing example:

But you can't really even call a station like the new KCMP "alternative." That's because, in an Orwellian act of appropriation, even the very phrase "alternative music" has long since became just another commodity. [Note to Mr. Scott - it was never anything BUT an identifier for a commodity] Some time ago the music industry took a generic descriptive referencing anything not big-budget music, and decided it meant one simple thing: sour and affected 20-something guitar rock. [Yes. From the very beginning of the use the phrase - back when I was a sour, disaffected twentysomething guitar rocker.]

I will spare you my amateur music criticism [Yes!] other than to say that once in the early 1990s there was an actual alternative musician named Liz Phair, a Chicago novice who recorded her bad guitar playing and good songs on home equipment, producing a volatile, minorly revolutionary and still engaging underground sensation called "Exile in Guyville." You had to turn on a college station to learn about her, but in a way she has never duplicated since, she sang about a previously impervious category of men as cartoons, and quite effectively so.["Minorly revolutionary?" MINORLY? And I heard Phair on 93.7 "The Edge", constantly.]

[And weren't you going to spare us the amateur music criticism?]

[For that matter, wasn't this article supposed to be about KCMP, not Mr. Scott's dubious recollections of '90's pseudo-underground music? Do any actual editors work at the Strib anymore?]

Today there are surely artists just as arresting as Liz Phair used to be (Wilco, the now-defunct Hang-Ups and the Jayhawks are all that come to my parenthood-compromised mind), but instead of playing these bands, the music industry offers only facsimile versions of Liz Phair, corporate Girl Rockers like Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson who seem only to whine. When I hear their stuff I pity our daughters.

Which is fine, but then as the father of a teenage daughter, I'm here to tell ya, they pretty much listen to whatever crap they want. Just like we did when we were 13.

And for the rest of us? How are we to expose ourselves (and our poor benighted daughters) to better music? By bellying up to that great musical trough, radio, and gobbling up whatever they (be "they" Clear Channel or MPR or Radio K or Radio Rey) in their infinite wisdom, deign to feed us?

Or using that nifty new thang, the Internet, and jumping outside the boundaries Clear Channel or Bill Kling put on our listening? By doing to music radio what we do to newspapers - ignore them and turn to blogs and the real alternatives for news, music, entertainment, enlightenment...

Speaking of which:

The idea that Public Radio would venture beyond "All Things Considered" and the lesser-known works of Dvorak to offer an alternative to popular music is so sensible, both as a business and cultural decision, it is remarkable it took so long. It is also a concession to the changing climate for original music in this country.

Dvorak's work isn't an alternative to Good Charlotte?

And make no mistake - KCMP is a concession to nothing. For all the caterwauling about MPR being a public good, Bill Kling is a consummate businessman. It's a recognition that there's a class of thirtysomethings out there plenty of money; in business terms, a market. In cynical terms, a flock to be sheared. In music terms, a paying audience.

Nothing more.

There presumably was a time when the music industry was some sort of meritocracy, and the only music in need of preservation through publicly funded airwaves was that of classical composers who have been dead for centuries, thus making them unavailable for photo shoots.

Today however, you have to begin looking at any music that has not been sanctioned by media giants such as Clear Channel as you would the Brazilian rain forest...Once you leave your 20s, tire of the smoke in your clothes and have to get up in the morning, you can't hear local bands in the bars anymore, nor can you then buy their goods, lacking a radio station with the courage to introduce them.

I am listening to KCMP as I write this sentence. Monday, on its first day of operation, I heard Radiohead and Chet Baker, Bob Dylan and the Owls. No focus-grouped music-biz genres, just pretty good music unacceptable to the forces that would have us hear only Clay Aiken and Alicia Keys.

Oh, make no mistake; KCMP will be programmed. The focus group will be one that's more like you, Mr. Scott - a group that likes lots of different music. That's a good thing - they're like me, too, most likely. But rest assured, while they will play a broad cross section of music (acceptable to thirty-something white middle class people with money), it will never, ever be programmed to turn off anyone (who is thirty-something, white, and middle class with money).

Oh, yeah - Radiohead sucks, too.

[1] In descending order of competence: Guitar, cello, bass, harmonica, mandolin, bagpipes, drums, keyboards, pennywhistle and curan.

Posted by Mitch at January 28, 2005 08:21 AM | TrackBack