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radio is a medium that creates demand by exposing (very) particular kinds of music.
if you think the medium reacts to demand, you forget that the demand was shaped by the medium itself--so formats adopted by bullshit commercial radio stations have the effect of streaming demand toward product slotted into their formats.
this dynamic results from and refers back to choices made by radio outlets.
these choices encourage tame mediocre music tailored to fit the requirements of a particular corporate genre, which then becomes a priori compromised.
this process screws over musicians in first in that by reducing music within a given form to repetition with slight variations, it works to eliminate the space for experimentation--and by doing that, radio formatting kills forms, reducing them to bland copies of themselves.
you have versions of the same smothering tendencies in the world of tv videos...its all about the cash, only incidentally about the music--and if you play the stuff and burn out as a function of the strict requirements of basically tedious forms, it does not matter---there is and will be a legion of other chumps who will step into the same box, play the same stuff, go the same route.
you have to find other ways to hear or learn about music before you can be blase about what this means.
unless you are playing the same stuff you heard on the radio 20 years ago or something, in which case you can opt out out of new versions of the old problem--but that does not mean that you are really outside of anything. it does not mean that you do not submit--you just submit to a version that you act like you assembled through your own choice, as if that choice was not already shaped by the medium that exposed you to it in the first place.
there are bands and whole regions of music that work outside this, or that work with contact shaped to their own terms--i admire radiohead on this count for example because they are still going, still changing and they move lots of units. but most of the most interesting music out there today gets no airplay in the states to speak of--and that cheats the musicians and the audiences.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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