I wish I could take it for granted that you read Lileks before breakfast, but since some of you probably don’t, allow me to draw the attention of the benighted to yesterday’s “Bleat,” in which (among various other things) the indispensable James Lileks confesses to having developed a midlife taste for the country music he hated as a boy:
On the odd chance I shoot a home video that needs a song about an impotent Vietnam war vet imploring his wife not to go to town and do some hooking, I also ripped “Ruby” by Kenny Rogers. “If I could move I’d get my gun and put her in the ground.” Cheery! Socially relevant! Once you realize that they usually followed this song with “Candy Man” by Sammy Davis Jr., you’ll know what a strange stew AM radio used to be.
That’s so quintessentially Lileksian (an adjective waiting to happen). I love his sharp turns–all of a sudden he swerves from Seventies country to the long-lost world of unformatted AM radio, where you really could hear a little bit of everything in the course of a day’s listening, from Paul Harvey to Top Forty to “Desafinado” and “Take Five.”
Excuse me for a momentary lapse into being an intellectual, but the drying-up of unformatted radio is yet another sign of the fast-growing fragmentation of American culture. Time was when there were mass-media “meeting places” where you could get a quick taste of life outside your cultural niche, no matter which niche you happened to inhabit. Time and Life used to fulfill that function. So did TV variety programs like The Ed Sulllivan Show. So, to a surprising extent, did commercial radio.
And now? Well, I’m trying to do something similar, in my Web-based, eggheady way, but I suspect that to the marketers, who see the world through category-colored glasses, we “About Last Night” types are our own little niche–the niche of people who like to peer into other people’s niches. Call us The Eclectics. The Unpredictables. Slap a label on us and sell us our very own brand of designer beer.
Sigh.