RADAR 8 - Stealth Media Publication Date: November 1, 2003 Alternative Radio And Its Alternative A quick run through the local radio dial can cause a sort of food court delirium, a slight narcotic sensation of familiarity. The sonorous baritone voice booming out call letters, the eternally recurrent play-list, even the promotional bits and signature cues—all have a certain McRadio taste of good carbohydrates gone stale. The uniform menu is not a mirage. The effluent eighties songs you hear on Mix 106, the same R&B infused hip hop on 92Q, and the rage packed emo on 99.1 are delivered from hard drives and consultants, not DJs, and are played at almost the same time, in the same sequence in cities across the country. It's a contiguous sort of monolithic playlist, a sign of a trend that WYPR's Marc Steiner calls "troubling." The idea that radio is simply a conduit for accumulation of wealth is, of course, standard capitalist orthodoxy: wealth must serve wealth to the bitter end, and unrelenting utility must result in manageable boredom. The unwieldy balance of healthy democratic discourse and aesthetic competition are cleansed away, like independent station owners that must either sell to the highest bidder or expire. While giants like Clear Channel, Affinity Broadcasting, and Radio One have gobbled up the spectrum like a bulimic Pac-man, even the colleges are imitating commercial formats. Towson University's homogenous triple AAA (Adult Alternative Album-oriented) station, WTMD, while effectively promoting the singer/songwriter crowd, lacks the wide open format that mixed industrial, hip hop, thrash, and punk in its former incarnation, WCVT. Steiner, at least, tries to tackle this problem pragmatically. He considers radio to be a sort of "public space," a shared landscape, with all the obvious political exigencies of finding room for everyone. The distinction between good and bad radio for him is a matter of access. WEAA, the Morgan state owned and operated station also does an admirable job of walking the line between public programming and diverse play list. A mix of Jazz, Hip-hop, reggae and gospel interspersed with a smattering of the NPR programming and local talk, the station presents a good balance between open mic and open source. Other alternatives also exist: on the sly, totally illegal, and unrepentant. Get in your car, turn up the stereo, and take a driving tour of Baltimore's own version of subterranean broadcasting, a small band of pirate radio stations that offers homegrown programming beamed erratically throughout the city without prejudice or construct. The hot spot on the dial is 95.7. In Sedonia or thereabouts, you'll hear twenty-four hours straight of Pat Boone singing "I'm proud to be an American" replayed without comment or commercial interruption. Drive west, and that same spot on the dial becomes Christian Broadcast on the down low, old time gospel interspersed with corn bread proselytizing. Move to the east side, and 106.1 provides a sampling of local hip hop and R&B you won't hear on 92Q, a real mix of genuine home cooking. It ain't much but at least it's quirky, and unlike the current mix on the "official" airwaves, it's full of unchoreographed moments and spontaneous interruptions. But to the radio conglomerates, this sort of narrow-casting is, like web radio, a perfect issue for baiting consolidation opponents: a weak, diffused alternative to commercial broadcasting, trotted out as a regulatory stalking-horse for the corporate welfare class. We can at least then, be thankful that YPRs exist, and that despite the rumblings of aspirant republicans, have not been banished forever to the world of synthetic opiate popping meatheads. But NPR alone is not enough to fuel the fire of change. Perhaps we need a dose of what philosopher Alfonso Lingus termed our "dangerous emotions," the "excess energies" or reserve fuel that drives mammals to evolve. For Lingus, this energy is the catalyst for disruptive creativity and cultural mayhem, like the political antecedents of punk, the restless capacity to re-invent the wheel. If Lingus is right, then we need to unscrew the unhealthy bottleneck at the head of a precious commodity, radio frequencies, level the playing field, and make room for "dangerous" voices. Otherwise, we'll find ourselves in continual negotiations with sterility, a backward slide into the crystallized spectrum of an oddly soggy and uncaptivating spectacle. Stephen Janis

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