Anybody out there who lingers under the impression that America speaks with one voice in the world has not crossed the country in an aging Subaru listening to local radio stations. A few hours cruising the AM and FM bands in a moving car reveals the unique preferences, concerns, and tastes of each one of the cities, towns and rural communities of the Republic. And no two are alike.

To be sure, the voices are less unique now than they once were. In the early 80s, when I would drive fairly frequently between Massachusetts and Ohio, I would listen in as the radio powerhouses in Philadelphia and Scranton (westbound), or Pittsburgh and Wheeling (eastbound), faded into the static, leaving a no-station’s-land in the center of Pennsylvania. There, high among the Appalachian ridges and villages with names like DuBois and Clearview, the airwaves were filled by a single down-home speaker, nattering away at his listeners as if he were propped up on a chair near the pot-bellied stove at the general store, his feet on the counter.

Nowadays, the local announcers and their regional accents are mostly gone, replaced by nationally-syndicated programs and by music packages run by robots. Even so, each community signs its name in the selection of the syndicated programs and the music playlists. And especially in the advertising. After all, you’d hardly expect to hear an ad for a gay bar in Salt Lake City, or for John Deere tractors in the heart of San Francisco. There are few more efficient capsule summaries of the principal features of a community than a list of the loan services provided by the friendly neighborhood bank. Delivered by the only speaker on the station not pre-recorded at a studio in New York or Los Angeles or Branson, the only one to speak with some approximation of the local lingo.

Sometimes, as the radio of Hotel Subaru scanned the frequencies, I would hear things that I expected to hear. Merle Haggard in the Humboldt Valley of Nevada. Mormon proselytizing in Utah. Class A baseball in central Nebraska. And then there were others …

Like the gardening show that opened on a station in Reno just as I was passing out of its range. Perhaps they meant “rock gardening". The presenter was grousing on air that, due to a technical problem, she and her producer could not communicate – thus declaring, inadvertently, that both she and her station are second class. “Count your blessings, milady", I said to the speakers on the left side of the car (the only ones that function). On the stations for which I had worked, a producer was an unaffordable luxury; the announcer had better be able to run the board without help. Like the night I was alone in an empty studio trying to do a music show, with both turntables, and one of the two tape decks (this was way before CDs), falling apart in my hands. I knew that most of the stations I would be hearing on this trip were all staffed with announcers in the same boat as I was then. I hoped that at least their equipment was working.

I got another surprise as I approached Cheyenne, Wyoming, and midnight simultaneously. I had learned some years ago that hard rock music, which I had otherwise stopped listening to, would buy me another hour’s driving time if I needed it. Now I needed it, and I went looking for some – or the left half of some. And I succeeded. That was surprise enough, though I suppose it was naïve of me to expect that the cowboy capital of these United States would broadcast nothing but cowboy music.

But there was something odd about this stuff. I listened more closely to the left half of what seemed like fairly ordinary alternative rock. And as I listened, I slowly figured out what was so odd. The riffs and rhythms and chord structures were Nirvana, all right, but the lyrics were straight out of John and Charles Wesley. Then the station ID came on, and the program identified itself as “Positive Radio".

I had stumbled onto Christian grunge. I wished they had stuck with gospel.

The biggest surprise came on the approach to Lincoln, Nebraska. At last the grasses of the western part of the state were beginning to give way to the endless panoramas of corn and soybeans that I have come to associate with the Midwest. I expected to hear ads for herbicides and fertilizers and combines, interspersed among snippets of country music and the upcoming Cornhuskers football season. What I got instead was a nationally-syndicated talk show based on science and medicine.

The show was hosted by someone who called himself a doctor, and seemed to have the qualifications of a physician. Not a sensational Dr. Phil type, but one who could mix some fairly profound scientific knowledge with a sense of humor. It was most refreshing. I never could work out the man’s name. It was the only time his diction failed him. I couldn’t figure this out. It’s not like he had anything to be ashamed of. Unlike some other self-important media pundits I could name.

And one of the things this doctor wished to talk about – after a half hour of teasers and ads for John Deere tractors; the man knew his radio marketing rules as well as his science, dammit – was monkey porn.

The doctor had come across an article in Nature magazine, one of the two most prominent English-language journals of serious science in the world. (The article appeared in February 2005 – the show was a re-run.) In it, the researchers describe a series of experiments on rhesus macaques, in which they demonstrated that the males will pay to look at pictures of female posteriors, and of monkeys in positions of power.

Cue Penthouse. Madonna. Tom Cruise. George Bush …

The moral is obvious. Our fascination with sex and power, and our willingness to shell out major dinero for pictures of naked people and celebrities – to say nothing of naked celebrities – is hardly unique to humans, and it cannot be blamed on some banned apple in a fantasy garden somewhere in the Middle East.

It is even adaptive. I mean, when the male of the species has to learn practically everything about sex, it materially assists the process of reproduction if the dude has a vestige of a clue what a matured woman looks like. And, when said male has to learn practically everything about being a member of a society, it materially assists the process of survival if he is able to identify a leader and work out, in real time, what it is that leader is calling on the community to do. Like, for instance, “Incoming! Take shelter!!" Dude can’t be standing there thinking “Who is this guy and why am I taking orders from him?" Not when the panther, or the cruise missile, is springing on you. You want to live? Baby, you gotta move.

It’s a message that would have been right at home in Berkeley and San Francisco. But I hardly expected to hear any such thing on the western edge of the Corn and Bible Belts. To hear any such blue message in the heart of a red state. It was heartening.

And perhaps, also a bit disconcerting. Maybe we are at some risk of losing the regional voices. After all, satellite radio is on the scene now. Maybe in a few years, all surviving radio stations will broadcast nationwide, nay worldwide, bouncing their signals off orbiting rocks to $20/month subscribers in their cars. And their messages will be as homogeneous as those now beamed to $50/month cable and satellite TV subscribers. The spectre of satellite radio is frightening enough to somebody that I heard the same radio ad in several different places, apparently as part of a national campaign, calling on listeners to support their local stations, because “some things in life should be free".

Well, it’s not. All those ads … But I take the point. Will we lose forever the ability to turn on a radio that is attached to no more than a wire and hear that local from Pennsylvania chatting to his neighbors?

Perhaps. But not yet. For as Hotel Subaru passed through the Alleghenies, I scanned the dial and got a signal. And lo and behold, there he was, my down-home Pennsylvania announcer, holding forth at the general store, his feet propped on the counter.

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

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