The gated community of FM radio

For some years, I had car radio Button 1 set to NPR and Button 2 to the local oldies station. For those who have somehow missed the definition, “oldies” are those songs that range from 50’s music such as “Rock Around the Clock” to late-60’s offerings á la “Green Tambourine,” with a heavy side order of the Beatles. Happy music. Often a little silly. Often a lot silly, really. I’d listen to the oldies in the morning, partly because the station offered frequent traffic reports and partly because radio stations have become so specialized and compartmentalized that there was no station that met my slightly eclectic, Britney-free taste. So I defaulted to the music of my childhood.

For years, maybe a decade, I’d flitted between these two stations in the morning, one good for my mind and the other good for my mood.

Then the day after Christmas last year, Button 2 changed format, name, and call letters.

Now it plays “classic hits” (their term, not mine) – Eagles, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, one James Taylor song (“You’ve Got a Friend”), but also Supertramp, Queen, The Doors, Dire Straits, Jackson Browne, late Beatles and Paul McC sans Beatles, and for reasons that defy logic, Manfred Mann’s version of “Blinded by the Light” repeatedly. You get the general idea. Or not.

It took me a while.

Most of us experience music from our past as an aural time machine. Play Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4” and I am in another place, on another plane, having a physical reaction that would, in part, be indelicate to discuss here. I hadn’t heard a lot of the music on the “new” station for quite some time and was both enjoying it enormously and feeling guilty because my morning DJs of more than a decade had suddenly gone unemployed.

One evening driving home, listening to my new Button 2, I indulged in a little mental programming of music I hadn’t heard in quite some time that would fit nicely with the new format. Yeah, they should also play “Jack & Diane” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” and…

The moment right after the Stevie Wonder moment came the revelation that Button 2 is a segregated radio station.

No blacks allowed.

Back in the day when I first heard the songs of the aforementioned 70’s/80’s artists, they were played on stations alongside the music of Mr. Wonder, the Commodores. The Temptations. Smokey Robinson. Prince. 'Retha Franklin.

Surely I was wrong. Would someone really program a classic 70’s/80’s station – but whites only?

As I finished the ride home that night, I mulled over the songs I’d heard over the past weeks, searching for even the slightest evidence of a little soul. Nothing. The songs that continued to play as I traveled continued the theme: John Mellencamp, Jim Croce, Electric Light Orchestra. (Maybe somewhere within some of the groups getting airtime was a black member or two, but I guarantee you these are not artists known to be black.) Once home, I found the station’s website and “last played songs” list. More of the same: mostly male and all very, very white.

Might I mention here that I, too, am very, very white? But I’ve also been very, very enriched over the years by the work of black artists in many mediums – music, movies, literature. Life without Stevie Wonder would have been colorless indeed, pun respectfully intended.

I still push that Button 2 occasionally, but not as often as I did when the station and I first met. It makes me feel a little slimy to do so. Radio stations in the 21st century are owned by corporations with huge marketing research resources. They (allegedly) know what people want. (And my station is owned by a conglomerate, so I’m guessing that it has clones all over the country.) Someone must want Whites Only music. A lot of someones must want this.

Or do they?

It took me two months to notice that my music was bleached clean. I wonder if the station’s other listeners have noticed?

Yes, I know that other stations play primarily black music or white music. In those cases, however, genre drives the programming decisions. Some stations play hip-hop; some old school. And country’s white all day long and so be it.

In the case of “my” station, however, that just doesn’t fly. Tell me why the Commodores’ “Brickhouse” and Billy Joel’s “Big Shot” don’t belong on the same playlist? Why Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” and not Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”?

One chilling effect of this programming is economic: there are royalties to be had when a radio station plays a song. And when stations play only white music, only white artists make money.

I hope that wasn’t the plan.