In the Hands of Such a Lot of Fools...

Moving back into a larger metro area means, among other things, more radio stations to choose from. This gives me the problem of just which ones do I want to program in my truck: Only six buttons, so six FM and six AM are what I've got. Before, I might settle for a preset on a station I might listen to for 30 seconds in order to avoid a really obnoxious auto dealership commercial (I know -- that doesn't narrow the list much) just so I could avoid blank buttons. Now I'm wondering just which stations I want instantly available and which ones I'll have to wait two or three whole seconds for while the search button finds them.

Among the offerings is KOJK-FM, a station that calls itself "Jack-FM." The Jack format is used by about three or four dozen stations around the US, Canada and the UK and describes itself with the tagline, "Playing what we want." The story at the format originator station, in Canada, was that a longtine radio guy named "Cadillac Jack" Garrett finally bought his own station and would now play what he wanted to play instead of what a corporation or station told him to play.

"What we want" is a mix of big and maybe not-so-big hits from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with a sprinkling of more recent stuff thrown in from the adult contemporary lists. The songs are mixed randomly, so Billy Joel might lead into U2, who might themselves lead into KC and the Sunshine Band. The Jack FM station in Kansas City once followed The Captain and Tennille's "Do That To Me One More Time" with AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long," and my sister claimed it gave her whiplash.

Jack-FM stations don't have on-air personalities. Sometimes you miss them, but I have to say that every time some radio inflicts Jack and Ron on me I consider the no-DJ policy to rival Hammurabi's Code for regulatory wisdom.

The Jack-FM format takes longer to get tired than most radio formats, since the playlist usually has more songs in it. But it does get tired eventually. There's never anything new, and rarely anything old. It's my age group's version of the classic rock format the Big Chill-dren imposed on us when we were in our teens and twenties and wanted to hear something on the radio other than "Satisfaction," "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" or "Knights in White Satin" again (True story: Once, when listening to an OKC classic rock station, I heard a man call in an request a Led Zeppelin song. "Which one?" the DJ asked. "Oh, waitaminute, man, I'll go look at the album and tell you.")

It'd be easy to say that OKC radio stinks -- but most radio today stinks in most places. The only different things you hear are over on the left end of the dial when the local NPR stations do some of their various shows featuring some blues, jazz or world music that will never ever ever ever ever get played on a commercial station. Other than that, they're all stuck in format ruts. For example, I know that if I hear a female singing on KATT-FM, it'll be Amy Lee, since the hard rock musical format's girl division apparently has room only for Evanescence. Maybe Lita Ford will get a temporary visa to KATT-land when she plays Pryor next month.

Music radio's homogenized sterility comes as companies buy more stations and re-tool them to save costs, pre-programming formats across the country and piping in morning shows from somewhere else. A station in Oklahoma City sounds no different than a station of the same format in St. Louis or Tuscon or Schenectady, and pretty soon you're listening to Radio Nowhere. Usually the claim is that reduced quality is an unfortunate and really, very minor side-effect of the changes needed to maintain profitability. Maybe. But then I look at the amazing variety of music people listen to, download and chat about online and I have to wonder if the homogenization isn't the cause of the reduced revenue, instead of its solution.