When people say, 'Stay in your lane, you're a musician, so you should only talk about music,' what do you think songs are written about? | | | | Ezra Collective's Femi Koleoso at the Jazz Re:freshed showcase at SXSW, March 14, 2018.
(Jason Bollenbacher/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “When people say, 'Stay in your lane, you're a musician, so you should only talk about music,' what do you think songs are written about?”
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| | rantnrave:// I love, and have always loved, that I can turn on a pop station like LA's 97.1 AMP RADIO and hear KENDRICK LAMAR, ZEDD, MAREN MORRIS, SHAWN MENDES, CAMILA CABELLO and KHALID back to back to back as if this mashed-up mix of white, black, Latino, male, female, etc., all belonged on the same frequency on the same speaker in the same room, as if life was a rainbow connected by dance rhythms. Which they do, and which it is. Those artists and plenty of others, who have less in common with one another than you might think, can share a playlist on pop or top-40 radio—or whatever you want to call it—because unlike most commercial formats, pop is guided less by a corporation's notion of what it thinks its ideal demographic wants to listen to and more by what's actually popular. It's the closest thing we have to democracy on the commercial dial. And it's beautiful. I'm thinking about this because over the weekend I watched ELLEN GOLDFARB's WLIR documentary DARE TO BE DIFFERENT on SHOWTIME. It's a dry, run-of-the-mill hagiography of a pioneering new-wave/new-music radio station that meant a lot to a lot of people, including fans, bizzers and artists from DURAN DURAN to U2 and beyond. It was an important, exciting and deeply flawed station. If you didn't know WLIR in NEW YORK, maybe you knew WHFS in DC or KROQ in LA or WHTG in NJ or any one of a number of imitators. They all had the same thrilling sense of punk possibility and new-wave adventure, along with the limited field of vision that's de rigueur in conventional radio programming. It's a snow-white documentary. Save for a tangent on WLIR's Punky Reggae Party show—which itself was relegated to the tangent of Sunday night specialty programing back in the day—there's hardly a black face to be seen anywhere in it. Which is probably fitting because WLIR and the stations it influenced tended to play artists like TALKING HEADS, the CLASH and DURAN DURAN, all heavily influenced by black art, but not their black contemporaries (or forebears). A station that played new wave and hip-hop and rock and funk and disco would have been revolutionary in the 1980s, and wouldn't have been hard to imagine if someone at one of those stations had allowed themselves the imagination. Pop stations today routinely play all or most of that within any given hour. (It's argued, plausibly, in the doc that WLIR's playlist played a crucial role in shaping MTV—another outlet that famously had a difficult time making space for black voices at first.) Black voices weren't completely ignored at WLIR. When someone from the station claims, "We played PRINCE before anybody else," your credulousness is stretched to the point of breaking (Prince had R&B hits before the "Dare to be Different" version of WLIR existed) until you realize that what's meant is "before any other white commercial station." There's literally no other way to understand the comment, which is dismissive of Prince's earliest fans and boosters and of the very idea that black and white art could share shelf space on the airwaves. At another point, ERIC BLOOM of LONG ISLAND's BLUE ÖYSTER CULT, a WLIR staple before the station switched formats from "rock" to "different," laments, "They played our kind of music, and then they didn't." But why not? Why couldn't Blue Öyster Cult share a frequency with the REPLACEMENTS (who were probably BÖC fans)? Besides that same lack of cross-cultural imagination, there's no reason at all... Where MARCH MADNESS theme songs come from... RIP ANTICON's BRENDON WHITNEY (aka ALIAS), CAVE IN's CALEB SCOFIELD and country songwriting great KENNY O'DELL. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | From the "My Dear Melancholy" EP. |
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