Music radio shows - what's the point?

Hi,

The Ghost wrote: Interesting article published by Pitchfork about this a few weeks ago: http://pitchfork.com/features/article/10018-does-college-radio-even-matter-anymore/ Luckily I live in an area where there's a surprising amount of independently run stations (SOU, FUV, WPSC, WFMU, WMSC).

Kinda strange to see this article, in a time when the appreciation for this kind of thing seems almost gone. Well, it is in Portland/Vancouver area, anyway, but might not be in a really big metropolitan area.

Around here you can drive around a bit, or take a walk in downtown Portland, and you will hear two things ... someone blasting some metal ... or someone else with a heavy bass drum blasting some rap ... and I know that I have gone through a couple of times and blasted Tangerine Dream just to tell them where to stick it!

I was not "in" radio, but I was around it until 1982 when I came away from Santa Barbara for good. Over tehre radio had become really sad, with the exception of one show on one station, that was massive, and STILL, the most progressive and experimental of all. Space Pirate Radio. And no one, has ever done anything as artistic and creative, and the guy's blog is actually really sad when you know the amount of crap he put up with simply to be "free" and ... off the wall on occasion.

But, it told us, right away, the difference. YOU KNEW that this was not everything else.

The main difference, for me, between today and yesterday, and we're talking 40 to 45 years now, is that the younger kids do not show enthusiasm and appreciation for something different like we did, and the main reason is that for the last 20 years, arts have been taken out of all schools, and those courses have a tendency to spread your mind and appreciation of things ... and to satisfy a commercially minded and corporatization of America since Reagan's days, the arts can not be there. And a lot of the folks today, display this really loud, with some sad questions, quite visible in Prog Archives.

It's not really their fault, I would say ... it's what they were born into, and forcing changes is what killed the 60's, even including the arts, that exploded all over the world. By comparison, today's arts are nowhere to be found (justabout), and in a spot like this one ... no one even knows how to talk about it, and can only compare a rock song to another rock song, and decide if it is a 4/4 or a 3/4 or a 2/4, and not even know what the whole piece is about ... who's Beethoven, and what's he done for music? Or Mozart? ... sometimes, reading and listening to many things, including the couple mentioned in this thread, is like ... is that all there is? Even those folks are limited by their likes and dislikes.

Radio had a chance to do something, and college radio helped, and so did micro radio, but it was killed by the corporate environment, and we continue to put people in government to make the corporations even bigger and richer ... and your chance of hearing something that is not a part of their "show" or "sale", is not going to happen.

I just think that this generation has given up on the arts ... they don't even know what it is, and as far as they are concerned, it is just a song that did not "hit", and as such, it's trash.

Someday, we will wake up ... Childhood's End ... the overlords were ... not good for you! Did you grok all that yet?