The Jack You Know, And The Jack You Don’t

Election Day may nearly always dawn overcast and cold, and yet no slough of damp leaves or tincture of grey in the sky ever manages to kill the buzz that many Americans feel on November 2nd. And, boy, am I ever cussedly American. So, despite the fact that I had voted (and on an equally crappy day) two weeks ago, I still felt the inspiration to exercise some personal choice yesterday morning.

I'd noticed Jack FM's billboard as far back as August at least, white and pseudo-bland and rising modestly high above a liquor store just across the street from the White Rock Lake spillway. I had even had some friends who have to contend with much more arduous Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex commutes than myself comment to me how much they had instantly fallen in love this station where you could here The Beatles "Can't Buy Me Love" followed by Green Day's "Longview". The reports continued to come in: playlists that were indeed both wide and deep; few and well-spaced commercials; no DJ's foisting their big, generic personalities on you.

I wondered how this could truly be possible. Though I am by no means an industry observer, it seems clear to me that radio, like most commercial media, is not so much in a business cycle as it is on an assembly line. ClearChannel play-lists might as well be technical specifications drafted by engineers and efficiency experts. Formats might as well be standard flavors -- vanilla, chocolate, strawberry -- laminated in a drive-thru menu. AM talk offers "separate but equal" facilities in which any American can satisfy his or her hunger for hatred. Even NPR, for many listeners FM radio's one saving grace, is the dreariest kind of alternative: an elite one. This is most apparent in the NPR interview style, especially if the subject is some ninety year-old salt-of-the-earth type toiling away in one of this country's countless hamlets. The on-air personalities are so bemused, just so damn audibly charmed and to the extent that I can easily imagine them suppressing patrician smiles as they trot out their "you don't say?" questions to these individuals they obviously think of as complete relics. And yet, for all its recent ratings success, both NPR's tone and pace are far out of sync with prevailing American lifestyles. As much as we, citizens all, need to be challenged in our basic assumptions about current events by balanced reporting, we also hardly have the time to spend being condescended to by puzzle-master Will Shortz. The additive-free wholesomeness of NPR's "discerning" discourse is just an old norm that has come to be a new exception.

As I turned off Garland onto scenic, back-roads Winstead (it makes its way around White Rock Lake and through several changes of name before it empties out onto Mockingbird Lane, one of Dallas' major east-west thoroughfares) I was actually, momentarily glad to twiddle off of NPR onto KJKK, 100.3. Time, you see, to take a risk. To change direction. To cast a ballot for a better tomorrow. To express my people's will as honestly as I can. If it didn't work out, I could just call it an experiment, right? I could change my interior regime and the next soonest opportunity. From 7:50 AM to 8:04 AM, representing roughly ten miles of stop-start city driving and 500 feet of taxing into my parking spot at work, I heard the following on the station whose slogan is "playing what we want".

1. Billy Idol, "Dancing[-uh] With My[seh-h]elf."
2. Tone-Loc, "Wild Thing" [and thus, by extension, Van Halen's "Jamie's Cryin'"]
3. Journey, "Any Way You Want It"
4. The Buggles, "Video (Killed The Radio Star)"

It all seems too perfect, I know. The blatant pandering to 80's nostalgia, employing a freak chart-topper whose refrain is "We can't rewind / We've gone too far". And the phony populism of simply mixing and matching several decades worth of Top 40 toonz. I mean, it is not as if I was expecting to tune in and hear a semi-mash-up of DJ Shadow, Mats Gustafsson, The Flatlanders, Death From Above 1979, and Abbey Lincoln, but the absence of anything remotely contemporary (literally or figuratively… that is, prescient) was mighty disheartening. I was also acutely aware of how interminable these pop hits I had not heard in so long seemed. It felt to me as if "Wild Thing" -- another chorus?!?!! -- lasted 10 rather than 4 and a half minutes. To recreate rather than recapture the magically frenetic diversity of old AM radio, simply guaranteeing, as program director Alex Valentine has, that "you won't hear the same song on the station if you listened for a month" is not enough when the songs are themselves, at a fundamental structural level, so groaningly repetitive.

Although Jack seems to want inhabit the personality popularly associated with nickname, a personality that is ill-defined yet anything but staid, Jack seems squarely middlebrow to me. But there's no bird of altruism caged in Jack's soul. However much Jack asseverates that he cares about making you feel safer, really, he doesn't. Yet Jack is no gleeful plunderer of our (American) cultural heritage either. Nor is Jack some rogue Minister of (Dis)Information maneuvering the various segments of our population, no longer identified by demographics but by Arbitron classifications such as "Urban", "Hot AC", "Classic Rock", "Spanish Hits", and "Country", onto collision courses that march forward as slow as entropy itself, so that there is no explosion of violence, only a gradual seeping out of all energy and potential. Jack does not really want to co-opt your sovereignty, and the peculiar doggedness that accompanies it. Like Nurse Ratchet, He can’t stomach the smell of so many individuals, and he knows the work is too back-breaking. Jack just wants you to exhaust your anti-corporate fury. He wants to give you a moving target. Jack is just another partner in the silent majority, a soft cell in the mass of the excluded middle.

Yes, I made myself heard on Election Day 2004. I raised my voice. And I sounded just like Phil Collins.

~ Joe Milazzo