"Hand-picked music" (?)
If you're in LA, or if you're a "taste maker" elsewhere, our own local college radio behemoth, NPR's KCRW, is a must-listen. Music supervisors cull it's play list for the next hot movie/commercial/video/iptv tunes. In fact, several ex- and current KCRW programmers have become music supervisors in recent years. Nothing wrong with any of this, BTW; the station's taste is impeccable if narrow.
The flagship music show is called "Morning Becomes Eclectic." This listener of thirty years' standing remembers when the title truly fit: Under original host Tom Schnabel, Tchaikovsky segued into Miles into Muddy Waters into tribal chants and back, with no seeming theme or purpose. It was internet radio before the net - if you don't like what's playing now, wait a minute. (Schnabel still spins in this style on the weekend shift.) Schnabel eventually gave way to Chris Douridas, who was succeeded by current host Nic Harcourt. Harcourt, especially, has great radio chops - he's your hip uncle sharing that new batch o' wax that just arrived with his friend; y'know - the slightly seedy guy who is always working his way over the Atlantic on a tramp steamship but always has the best new records before anyone else. Harcourt has genuine enthusiasm for all things pop and poppy and groovy. Trouble is - no more Miles or Muddy, let alone tribal guys. If it ain't precious, or marketable to the media, it ain't on KCRW. "Eclectic" be damned. This show is built to showcase pure pop and, to some extent, dance and trance. "Groovy" is the keyword here and if you don't get that, just listen for a few days and you will. It's not something you can tell by the chord progressions or the instruments, but it's an attitude. Like porn, you'll know it when you see (hear) it.
I just don't know anyone my age that likes this stuff or responds to it in any visceral way. I agree that public radio should be about the new and adventurous, and not necessarily a reflection of listeners/donors tastes in all things. (Full disclosure here: been there; done that; read the donation promo; answered the donation lines.) I do wonder, though, how many of the paying audience for KCRW really listen to the music programming in more than a cursory way. I can hear the sound of radio dials heading right every morning at nine as "All Things Considered " yields to Harcourt's fifth-Beatle britpop. (Again, I really dig Nic's presentation and musical knowledge; just wish he'd take out his old pal's blues records for a spin once in a while...)
True this: I discovered Coldplay, Death Cab and Imogen Heap via Harcourt. But why no space in a self-proclaimed "eclectic" programming block for Miles, or Muddy, or Merle, or Johann, or Buddy Miller? Could it be that all these artists are more gritty than groovy; a little less accessible, a little less well-suited to being played as aural wallpaper for the cubicles at CAA and NBC-Universal?
