My first television was radio: When my hard-of-hearing parents upped the volume on their new set, I would creep out of bed and sit, out of sight, on the stair landing and listen to whatever they were watching. It wasn?t so different from the radio soaps my mother had done her housework to when I was smaller, the ones that disappeared from the airwaves when television sets began to occupy American living rooms.
Radio was supposed to disappear then too, but it didn?t. Like a shapeshifter, radio just changed to fit the situation.
I have to admit that reading “Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and The Revolution That Shaped a Generation,” by Washington Post columnist and blogger Marc Fisher made me wonder if the generation it shaped was largely male and if this might have something to do with the ever loosening ties that currently bind me to radio. Women do not appear regularly in this book, and that?s not Fisher?s fault: when they had a role to play in the stories he tells, he includes them, but they are pretty much peripheral characters.
Some stories are lucky enough to find the right person to tell them, and Fisher is the perfect person to tell this one. He believes that “listening well is the path to one?s own voice,” and it?s clear that listening to radio helped him develop his. He writes of “the voices that carried me through adolescence and beyond” and about the men who helped radio evolve ? the developers of the Top 40, the deejays, the talkers, the shockers, the innovators ? all of whom have shifted the shape of radio.
Fisher doesn?t think National Public Radio is perfect and he takes a brave position on payola: it got a greater variety of music played than would have been otherwise. He?s also clear-headed about the losses change has created and the tricky path ahead when local radio is likely to become even more endangered. It?s a continuing journey and one Fisher takes the reader on with intelligence, enthusiasm and a necessary touch of nostalgia.
? Joanne Collings
