Spice Up Your Musical Life

KJAM sticks a thermometer in the collective culture to determine the state of our local musical tastes. "What kind of music do you listen to?" they ask in their latest online fun poll, and then provide these choices:

50's Rock & Roll
60's & 70's Pop
Disco
80's Pop
90's Pop
Country

What? Not even an "other"? Is this all the richer our culture is?

Pshaw! Music did not start in 1950, and it certainly consists of more than these pale commercial genres... not that you'd know it listening to the radio in South Dakota. South Dakota Public Radio does what it can to bust the genres, with classical and jazz through the week and then the weekend potpourri of blues, folk, Big Band, Celtic, and space music. In Sioux Falls you can get some eclectic blasts from those whacky college radio kids at Augie and USF. But that's about it.

Here in Madison, Jay Pifer at Skippers betrays the local media but enriches our dining experience by tuning his satellite radio to jazz. Here at the Madville Times world headquarters, we frequently crank up the Internet, which brings us the joyful sounds of CKUA, the Alberta public radio powerhouse that broadcasts almost everything but the meager list of options KJAM lists in its poll (and even some of that sneaks in the mix).

So what do I listen to? I like my 80s pop. I like country -- good, real, old-school Johnny Cash country. (Motongator Joe, what can you bring? My heart swells to my CD of Vladimir Horowitz's return-to-Moscow concert in 1986 and Franz Biebl's "Ave Maria" as much as it does to U2 and Peter Gabriel. We put Madville Times Jr. to bed with everything from Phil Keaggy and Norah Jones to Ladysmith Black Mumbazo.

I don't like to tout diversity as a value in itself, but when it comes to music, we love to hear songs we've never heard before. And diversity is exactly what corporate media mitigate against, seeking the lowest common denominator of bland cultural products to maximize listenership. Corporate media rarely if ever dare to give us the best and boldest our culture has to offer. Instead, corporate media offer the songs and shows that are sufficiently tolerable to keep us from changing channels before the next commercial. (Read Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks for an example of how this works in TV land.)

KJAM does all sorts of good service for our community. Maybe they could do us just one more and convert one of their signals, AM or FM, to a broader music format that would break the corporate radio mold and enrich Madison's musical culture. Now that would be Unexpected™.