The world of radio has become a strange place to hang out these days. I know because I used to hang out there and I really enjoyed it for a while. I discovered the world back in college when the university I was attending decided to create an on-campus radio station. I had ambitions of getting into radio and someone who was involved with creating that radio station told me I had a decent voice and that I should think of getting on the campus radio station. Back in those days the station I worked for was a tiny campus radio station that only broadcast at a radius of about two blocks and focused most of its energy toward the dorms. This is where I get all misty-eyed about the good old days.

I learned how to cut and edit actual reel-to-reel tape with a grease pencil and a razor blade. Yes, we had access to actual razor blades back then. In fact teachers would hand them to you and tell you to start hacking away at things. It was fun to sit there and twist those reels back and forth over the play head on the tape player and then mark the spot you wanted to cut out and then chop it out and tape it back together.

No sooner had I graduated with all of this knowledge of how to operate cart machines and queue up a record than I was set loose upon a radio world that was going through some changes. Even back then computers were starting to move into radio stations. Of course they had been there for a while but now they were moving into the on-air studios. Suddenly you needed only to touch a spot on a computer screen to play music and commercials and editing commercials involved looking at digital readouts and cutting and splicing digital bits.

It was a lot easier and that wasn’t so bad. It was only a matter of time before the on-air talent became a thing of the past. Once the computers come in and can run things by themselves well, why pay all of those recent college graduates and have to have all of those people on the payroll? You don’t need to pay a computer.

These days you can listen to radio from Brazil on the radio. A friend and I did that about six years ago and listened to the band Toto playing the song “Africa” to throngs of people in Rio. In case you have been wondering what Toto was up to you may want to check out South America. It was an amazing thing to be in St. Louis and yet I was able to go online and listen to radio stations from my hometown in Chicago.

Soon radio stations that only existed online came up. At first they sounded a lot like the radio stations you could pick up in your car, of course. Then someone got the idea through their head that maybe people would just like to listen to music and not the DJs and soon you had radio stations that you could “program yourself.”
IPods came pretty soon after that. Gone where the days when you had to load a CD into the machines in a radio studio. Now songs were just files on a computer. People didn’t go to music stores anymore to buy CDs and they could sit in their underwear and buy as much or as little of an album as they wanted right online.

Now comes the radio stations that have the first names of people and no longer need DJs at all. In fact what essentially happens is that the station just buys the name and the huge music files and then they download those files into their memory banks and you can start playing as Bob or Jack or even Alice. I am sure there are others out there but those are the ones I see the most of.

The big selling point for most of these is that they play anything anytime they want. More than likely this isn’t entirely the case. Little of what the public sees in radio is really what happens in a radio station. You know those requests you make when you call in? At most stations the conversations are recorded and played later when the song requested just happens to come up in the natural rotation. That DJ you heard broadcasting on Christmas and felt sorry for? More than likely the voice portions were voice-tracked and there was no one within five miles of the radio station when you heard it.

That’s what radio is. Radio and the broadcast media is a big shell game. You are watching the shells move back and forth really fast and you have completely missed the fact that someone is stealing your wallet.

I have listened to Jack. He came into town and moved out the oldies station. Oldies is a strange format where you play about twelve songs over and over and over again and all of them are by the Beach Boys. Still, the fans of this music are intense and people complained. This caused another station in town to switch to and oldies format. Jack still plays on and on doing what it wants to and pretending like there is actually a person named “Jack” somewhere when in fact Jack is about as real as The WHOPR computer from that movie “War Games” from back in the early 80s.

I have also listened to Bob. Bob is interesting because the station I used to work for in Rockford Illinois is now Bob. I can listen to it online. They never broadcast me when I was there online but now they can afford to do that with Bob. They play a lot of music and none of it relates to the song you just heard and it is a giant mish-mosh. I think it is supposed to sound like an iPod or something but no one should ever play “Ice Ice Baby” again for any reason regardless of what your name is.

Bob is unique in that it does have a live DJ that comes on in the afternoon. What is strange to listen to, however, is the strange schizophrenia that this DJ seems to have when speaking. You see he needs to keep the illusion alive that some guy named Bob actually runs the radio station and is playing the music. So the DJ comes on and talks a lot about Bob doing this or that and it all sounds like he is having some kind of psychotic breakdown live on the air.

Of course you can find whatever you want to hear, complete with cursing, if you subscribe to satellite radio. Or you can listen to FM that sounds like a CD or AM that sounds like FM if you get HD radio. There are far too many initials in that last sentence for me to fully endorse it.

The land of radio is very confusing these days. I am waiting for the retro movement. Then we can to back to buying crystal sets and listening to Morse Code.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is now available in print and eBook format on his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.