Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 140

April 28, 2021: Classic FilmStudying: Casablanca

[May 1st marks the 80th anniversary of Citizen Kane’s release. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for Kaneand other classic films, and I’d love your thoughts on them all and other films you’d AmericanStudy!]

On two ways the iconic film resonates in the age of Trump.

While of course any 80-year old movie is going to feel dated in various ways, I would argue that Casablanca also feels about as contemporary as any 1940s film could. There are numerous reasons why (including the whip-smart dialogue and very telling human moments), but I would say that the film’s iconic romance is a particularly relatable element. Casablancais at one and the same time a deeply sentimental love story and a realistic examination of the limits of such romantic love in a world where those kinds of personal relationships don’t necessarily amount to, well, much more than a hill of beans. And, as that hyperlinked final exchange illustrates (SPOILERS here and throughout, duh), the movie combines those two seemingly contradictory tropes into a final vision of romantic love as something that we can carry with us and be inspired and motivated by even if the world and its realities take us in other directions. That’s a lesson well worth playing again and again, I’d say.

It’s also a timeless one, of course. But there are likewise elements of Casablanca that have more specific lessons to offers us in this Age of Trump. For one thing, the arc of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick directly and powerfully refutes the “America First” rhetoric of Trump and company (rhetoric that of course had made its debut during the 1930s). Rick may be far away from the United States, but the insular concern for only his own café and needs with which he opens the film nonetheless clearly reflects American isolationism and self-interest (in but not limited to World War II). Part of what pushes him toward engagement with the world instead is still a personal interest, if one centered on another person’s needs: his love for and desire to help Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa. But through her, Rick also connects to the resistance efforts of her husband, Paul Heinreid’s Victor Laszlo; and while in their love triangle Rick and Victor are rivals, in the course of Rick and the film’s arc the men become allies as well. Rick’s concluding decision to join the resistance even convinces Claude Rains’s corrupt police officer Renault to do the same, a potent representation of the broader potential effects when Americans step outside their insulated bubbles and join the cause of freedom and social justice worldwide.

Of course, in the age of Trump many of the most prominent international news stories have involved not the U.S. entering the world, but the world coming to the U.S., most especially in the form of refugee communities. Nearly all of the characters in Casablanca are refugees and exiles from the war in Europe; and, for that matter, so were many of the film’s actors, especially those who played supporting roles. As film historian Aljean Harmetz puts it, these refugee actors brought to their roles “an understanding and a desperation that could never have come from Central Casting.” What truly motivates Rick’s evolution in the film, starting as early as his famous nod in the iconic “duel of the anthems” sequence, is his recognition that these refugee and exile communities deserve respect and support, and indeed his sense that he is in solidarity with them. It would seem to be a truism that America is in solidarity with refugee communities—with the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, to coin a phrase—but in fact that has always been a contested concept, and never more so than in late 2018. So we could all still stand to learn the romantic, realistic, and timeless lessons of Rick and company’s journey in Casablanca.

Next FilmStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on this or other classic films?

April 27, 2021: Classic FilmStudying: The Wizard of Oz

[May 1st marks the 80th anniversary of Citizen Kane’s release. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for Kaneand other classic films, and I’d love your thoughts on them all and other films you’d AmericanStudy!]

On a couple ways to read the surprisingly celebratory core of the Depression-era film.

First, an excerpt from my new book Of Thee I Sing: “it’s worth noting one additional Depression era expression of [celebratory patriotism]: the period’s numerous cultural celebrations of rural American communities. Some of the most prominent such cultural works were photographs, including John Vachon’s and Walkers Evans’s stunning portrait and landscape photography for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the mid to late 1930s. Evans also worked with journalist and author James Agee on a 1936 project for Fortune magazine that combined Evans’s photographs of rural Alabamans with Agee’s written accounts of their stories; when Fortune opted not to run the story, the men turned it into a book, 1941’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The title refers to a passage from the religious text the Wisdom of Sirach, which includes two lines that together sum up Evans and Agee’s goals in depicting these inspiring yet too easily forgotten Americans: “All these were honored in their generations, and were the glory of their times./ . . . And some there be which have no memorial; who perished, as though they had never been.” And perhaps the most telling such Depression era cultural celebration is The Wizard of Oz(1939), in which despite the stunningly color­ful and frequently magical wonders Dorothy Gale experiences in Oz, made even more so when compared to the bleak black-and-white landscapes of Dust Bowl Kansas from which she comes, she never changes her mantra that “There’s no place like home.”

Obviously The Wizard of Oz was an adaptation of an earlier work, L. Frank Baum’s deeply strange The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its many sequels (seriously, if you’ve never read Baum’s works, they are quite bizarre, in many ways more in line with the tone of the 1985 film Return to Oz). And it’s true that Baum’s book ends with Dorothy using the power of the slippers to return home to Kansas, and with a very brief scene where she tells her Aunt Em “I’m so glad to be at home again!” But of course the Kansas of 1900 was very different from the Dust Bowl setting of the film, a dreary landscape only exacerbated by the filmmakers’ choice to depict the opening and closing Kansas sections in black and white in such striking contrast to the vibrant (techni-)colors of Oz. So while the film’s closing officially parallels that of the novel (if at greater length and with more emotion), I would nonetheless argue that both it and the “no place like home” mantra comprise far more of a choice and an argument from the film than their role in Baum’s book.

As I noted in the book excerpt, a celebratory patriotic embrace of rural, “heartland” America is one way to read that choice. But another would be to link it to a text that I had the chance to read and teach during my time as a grad student at Temple University: “Acres of Diamonds,” a hugely popular motivational speech by Temple’s founder Russell Conwell (and first delivered in 1900, the same year as the publication of Baum’s first Oz book). Conwell’s speech comprises one of American culture’s most overt arguments for making one’s fortune and life in one’s home; as he puts it in his conclusion, “Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and what you are.” In The Wizard of Oz, we don’t know what Dorothy’s future will hold, although her courage and leadership during her time in Oz certainly suggests the possibility for greatness. But at the very least, the film seems to offer a clear argument that that future will, and should, play out where she is, rather than somewhere over the rainbow.

Next FilmStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on this or other classic films?

April 26, 2021: Classic FilmStudying: Birth of a Nation

[May 1st marks the 80th anniversary of Citizen Kane’s release. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for Kaneand other classic films, and I’d love your thoughts on them all and other films you’d AmericanStudy!]

On how to view and re-view classic, racist works of literature and art.

My first published article included an extended reading of Gone with the Wind, and as a tangential but not unimportant part of that work I talked to a number of colleagues and friends about their experiences with the novel; all of the ones who had experiences to share turned out to be female, but I wasn’t framing it through the lens of gender and don’t think that my point here should be either. As I was focusing my scholarly attention specifically on Mitchell’s portrayals of racial issues, I similarly focused my questions on those issues, but found that in each and every case my interviewees (all smart and thoughtful people prone by both nature and training to analyze most everything) really hadn’t thought much at all about race in the novel. They recognized that it was in there and that, as one would expect from a historical novel set in the pre- and post-Civil War era and written in the 1930s South to boot, it didn’t feature the most enlightened depiction of race. But for all of these readers, that had been a very minor and insignificant aspect of the novel, certainly not one that had interfered with (or even really registered amidst) their enjoyment of its plot threads and character arcs and relationships and action pieces and emotional shifts and everything else that made it the beloved uber-bestseller that it was and remains.

To some degree, I think the same process happened for many decades (at least) with D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915). The racial politics of Griffith’s film, and particularly its portrait of race in the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, are similar to but much more overt and central than those in Mitchell’s novel; to cite one similarity with that difference in degree, Mitchell’s novel features a heroic Ku Klux Klan raid led by one of its male heroes (a scene that none of my interviewees remembered at all), but Griffith’s film climaxes with the KKK riding to save the day and the film’s hero and heroine from marauding African Americans and Northern carpetbaggers (the movie’s original title, derived from the Thomas W. Dixon novel on which it was based, was The Clansman). Yet Griffith’s film was not only the first genuine blockbuster, a hugely successful financial and critical triumph that fundamentally influenced American filmmaking from then on; it remained for many decades a critical darling, and as recently as 1998 was slotted at #44 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years … 100 Movies retrospective. Certainly the film’s landmark technological advancements might merit such continued praise—and certainly recent critical appraisals have grappled with the film’s racial politics much more fully than had my Mitchell interviewees—but nonetheless, for a movie that climaxes with a heroic KKK ride (and that allegedly was used by that organization for recruiting purposes until at least the 1970s) to receive such critical esteem suggests at least a bit of the same kind of cognitive dissonance that Mitchell’s novel evokes.

At the very least, I would argue that no mention of Griffith’s film in any such list should fail to include the two much less successful but interesting and important films that were made in direct response to it. Both were created by African American activists, if in different ways and with very distinct emphases: Booker T. Washington and his assistant Emmett Scott worked with the NAACP to develop the project that would become Birth of a Race(1918), a World War I-set epic featuring two African American brothers who parallel but invert the wartime experiences of Griffith’s protagonists; and novelist Oscar Micheaux created and directed Within Our Gates(1920), a film that focused much more explicitly on issues of race, lynching, miscegenation, and the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction in the South. Neither film was successful in its own era, and both have been almost entirely forgotten since (Gates in fact disappeared until a single print was discovered in Spain in the 1970s), and that’s not without some cause; if we can recognize the technological and artistic achievements of Griffith’s film, we must likewise note that these two are in neither sense impressive. But each nonetheless features images and moments that not only challenge Griffith’s already-iconic ones but also would force American audiences to re-view our sense of our history and identity: a pivotal shot in Race of white and black soldiers heading to Europe together for action in World War I; the surprisingly graphic and brutal lynching sequences in Gates. Films don’t have to make Best Of lists to be well worth our attention.

It will I hope come as no surprise to anybody that my ideal would be not at all to replace Griffith’s film or Mitchell’s novel with one or both of these other films. Instead, I think the best-case scenario would be one in which we engage with all four texts, both to consider how they form a conversation around a number of crucial shared themes (not only race, but also family and war, among others) and to analyze American art and culture and identity in the early 20thcentury and beyond. There’s no reason to stop engaging with the classics, but we certainly should re-view them with as much context and complexity as possible. Next FilmStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on this or other classic films?

April 24-25, 2021: Kate Jewell’s Guest Post: A Love Letter to College Radio

[April 20thmarks the 50thanniversary of NPR’s first broadcast. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of radio histories and contexts, leading up to this Guest Post from a colleague whose upcoming book on college radio should be a must-read!]

[Katherine Rye Jewell is my colleague at Fitchburg State University, where she’s an Associate Professor in the Economics, History & Political Science department (and where she’s taught lots of American Studies courses, many of them team-taught with me!). Her first book, Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century, changed the conversation around the South in 20C America; and I’m sure her second, on the topic of this Guest Post, will do the same for college radio and media history. I’m proud to call Kate a colleague and friend!]

It’s easy to conceive of a golden era for college radio, one now lost to streaming and Internet radio. 

Never mind that college radio lives on, even thrives, despite the digital disruption and the music industry’s recent woes. For Americans who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s -- the last of whom have turned 40 -- college radio served as a paragon of individuality, authenticity and free expression, or an experimental training ground for the untested and non-commercially viable, perhaps deservedly, depending on one’s perspective.

It’s tempting to construct that consensus history of college radio. But it would be the wrong view. Rather, college radio holds such a particular place in American culture and memory for more than its role in breaking new bands or helping fans discover their next favorite artist. Its meaning grows from its role as a battleground in the culture wars over how the nation would sound — whose voices would represent communities and identity across space, and receive the benefits of broadcast, even if limited. And there perhaps, it has ceded ground to new media. 

College stations connected lovers of the eclectic and avant garde across space. On road trips, music fans knew to keep the dial turned below 91.9 FM, searching for weak college signals that bled through between NPR and Christian radio. The connections they found went beyond mere entertainment, offering more than refuge for young-adult angst and mass culture dropouts. 

Stations sampled local and regional culture that reflected America’s patchwork diversity, featuring local artists and musicians, venues and record stores. They connected like-minded adventurers in the underground, lovers of the unheard, the under-appreciated, and not-commercially viable. They provided underrepresented communities with a voice not found elsewhere on radio.

A network emerged in the 1980s that could reshape American culture, the music industry and mass media structures. They created alternatives to what mainstream record executives or commercial FM formats dictated, but also influenced the music industry, signified by the 1988 debut of Billboard’s Modern Rock chart. Fueling this cultural shift, stations fostered fanzines, independent record labels and genres such as punk and hardcore, rap and hip hop, electronic and dance music. They provided outlets for experimental jazz, folk music, reggae, and news and information, religious programming, or shows focusing on Broadway musicals or a cappella recordings. College signals broadcast religious services or hosted syndicated news in multiple languages, or news and information for queer communities. Among its musical fare, many artists would not go on to commercial success, instead anchoring vibrant local scenes and networks.

Certainly, local, non-commercial radio offered an authentic culture defined by localism and connection amidst national media networks, repeated economic dislocation and globalization. Although alternative rock emerged as a mainstream musical category and commercial-radio format, college stations served as outposts on the spectrum to push the boundaries of expression

In my own musical education, WRVU’s 2011 sale, coinciding with other headline-grabbing closures, convinced me that technology had finally displaced the “classic” college-radio experience. I lost track of music scenes during graduate school, and as with other former DJs, I drifted away from college radio. I had watched as Napster came and went during college, transforming music consumption and venting fans’ frustration with CDs’s gouging prices. MTV had already been lost to reality TV and glorified game shows. YouTube, Spotify and iTunes seemed to undermine the last vestiges of localism.

Yet the technological-disruption narrative belied college radio’s disappearance.

For one thing, stations live on. College icons at Oberlin, the University of Montana, Princeton, MIT and more continue to broadcast new and local music. Community-based signals, also prosper in the Internet Age. WFMU, New Jersey’s famous freeform station, pioneered success through streaming. The dial grows crowded, again. Upstarts in community radio WXNA in Nashville, WXOX in Louisville, and out of  KUSF in San Francisco emerged after the FCC’s removal of barriers for low-power FM.

I began exploring college radio’s history, consulted with radio practitioners, archivists, and experts in the current media landscape. In my research, I found that college radio’s seeming displacement was a red herring, standing in for broader anxieties about transformations in the media landscape. Lamenting college radio’s demise tends to emerge from a sense of alienation with popular culture, of feeling disconnected from voices rising to prominence in American culture. Furthermore, college radio’s popular image as the vehicle for alternative rock acts to remake American music overshadows longstanding, often conflicting purposes and expectations for these airwaves, simplifying the genres served and its cultural significance.  Local bands mailed in tapes, hoping for airplay. Student deejays pored through submissions, attended late-night shows at smoky, backroom venues for playlist fodder—and increasingly executives looked to college stations as a proving ground for new talent to be signed to major-label contracts. While this is true, college radio’s support of hip hop never generated such popular association with college radio, and indeed, even led some stations to be cast off the airwaves, such as Adelphi University’s signal in 1996, the station that was home to members of Public Enemy during their college days. Even in the construction of college radio’s central contributions, mythologies and exclusions in line with larger culture war battles emerge.

It’s true that the Internet contributed to Gen Xers’ repeated sense of dislocation, ranging from latch-key kids, to dot-com entrepreneurs who went bust, to losers in the 2008 financial and housing crisis. While pundits decry social networks as creating “echo chambers,” digital media provide myriad vehicles for expression. Liberated from regulated airwaves, alternative media options are endless. Consumers can curate infinite playlists. But how can new, meaningful communities be built around them? 

When there are infinite visions — transmitted via media on which the seven dirty words and more are entirely permitted — what voices will rise to remake and reunify American culture? As with the culture wars that have emerged since the 1960s, what was at stake for partisans was less what Prince or Twisted Sister song would negatively influence children, despite the sincerity of opponents. Instead, it was more an expression of fear, of lack of control over American culture and institutions: a rather abstract term that adheres much more easily to dirty lyrics and gyrating dance moves as a vehicle to express these deeper concerns.

But as the media landscape has transformed, and technological change continues, new questions have emerged. Where do debates regarding value and authenticity of music and art take place? The Internet nurtures niche cultures—but what happens when you don’t know what your niche is? 

The loss implied in suggesting college radio’s demise bears little connection to the medium’s persistence. Indeed, college radio often failed to uphold professed democratic or meritocratic ideals. University administrations or student preferences often limited station programming, but the Internet poses no such barriers, giving rise to artists such as The Weeknd and Chance the Rapper, whose success also circumvented mainstream labels, or perhaps, the interests of college radio music directors. Instead, what seems lost is not music discovery or community voices, but the sense of their collective potential to challenge the media structures that define American politics and culture. As opportunities to broadcast expand, the result is cacophony. The voices blend into static. 

But the left of the dial persists. It has expanded to the Internet and diversified alongside American culture. Student and community DJs still peruse the latest recordings and construct listenable (for the most part) shows. Nielsen continues to report that most Americans still tune in to the radio during some part of their week.

So rather than mourning college radio’s demise, tune in, hit “Seek,” and find an alternative sound. It might not be revolutionary, or even oppositional—or perhaps it is—but it will provide a sense of place and connection. And maybe some new favorite songs along the way.

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other radio histories or stories you’d share?]

April 23, 2021: RadioStudying: Songs about Radio

[April 20thmarks the 50thanniversary of NPR’s first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of radio histories and contexts, leading up to a Guest Post from a colleague whose upcoming book on college radio should be a must-read!]

On quick takeaways from a handful of the many popular songs about the radio:

1)      “Video Killed the Radio Star” (1979): The Buggles’ pop track isn’t just the first video ever played on MTV; it’s also a really interesting reflection on a quarter-century of music and media, from its opening 1952 setting through its depiction of contemporary trends and challenges. I don’t think they were entirely right about what video meant for music in the 1980s and since, but they sure weren’t entirely wrong either.

2)      “Save My Love” (1978) and “Radio Nowhere” (2007): Leave it to my boy Bruce to highlight the yin and yang of radio so potently: the first a paean to the medium’s ability to link us to distant lovers and a wider world; the second an impassioned critique of pop radio’s reflection of an era’s vacancy and soullessness. I don’t think either of those elements has ever been absent, meaning we need to keep listening to both Bruce songs, natch.

3)      “Pump Up the Volume” (1987): M/A/R/R/S’ (be honest, did anyone know they spelled their name that way?!) electro-dance hit isn’t really specifically about radio, so much as the power of music overall, so I’m including it in large part because of the 1990 Christian Slater filmabout an underground DJ. But what both the song and the film have in common is the idea that music can serve as a counter-cultural force, especially when it’s played loud enough.

4)      “Radio, Radio” (1978): Elvis Costello’s song is as biting and ironic as he tends to be, contrasting a nostalgic glimpse of what radio had been (or at least could be) at its best with a critique of the present situation, in which he argues that “radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools/Trying to anaesthetize the way that you feel.” Ultimately it’s both an impassioned argument for what radio can do and a lament for what it too often is.  

5)      “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” (1983): But what radio can do remains, and one of the best musical depictions of its power is Indeep’s anthem to the way in which a DJ can “save [your] life with a song.” I don’t know that there’s much more to say about it than that, and that’s about as important as it gets.

Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other radio histories or stories you’d share?

April 22, 2021: RadioStudying: Sports Radio

[April 20thmarks the 50thanniversary of NPR’s first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of radio histories and contexts, leading up to a Guest Post from a colleague whose upcoming book on college radio should be a must-read!]

On two lessons I learned from many years’ worth of commutes listening to sports radio.

For something like 5-6 of the 16 years I’ve been commuting two-plus hours a day to and from Fitchburg, I listened to WEEI, one of Boston’s two most prominent sports radio stations (alongside its main competitor, The Sports Hub). Because of timing, both in terms of what time of day I was driving in and during what years I listened (somewhere in the 2006-2012 range, roughly), a great deal of that listening was to one particular and particularly controversial show: Dennis and Callahan, featuring co-hosts John Dennis and Gerry Callahan. Given that those two are known as two of the most overtly and proudly far-right voices in sports radio and journalism history, as well as more specifically known for a 2003 racism scandal that led to their suspension, it might surprise longtime AmericanStudies readers to hear that I listened to the duo at all, much less for years. But instead, I would argue that I learned a valuable lesson about politics from listening to the pair—but also a distinct and equally clear lesson about the undeniable appeal of sports radio.

The lesson about politics is one that has likely become far more familiar over the last half-dozen years, thanks to a certain Orange President who shall remain nameless (and who both Dennis and Callahan vocally support, shockingly): that the loudest political voices are often also the most ignorant. Relatively early in my time listening to Dennis and Callahan, the two featured a segment in which they discussed the public release of salaries of all UMass employees and professors; D&C bemoaned that “even just regular professors” made X amount, and they “weren’t even assistant or associate professors.” This argument, which was central to their extended spiel, got the promotion and rank system for professors entirely wrong (indeed, backwards), making every point they made comically inaccurate as well (I tried to call in to correct them, but pulled into FSU while I was still on hold). Time and time again, I found that D&C were similarly wrong not just about the big issues, but also and especially about the small details and facts out of which such issues are constituted—and it makes sense that they were, because none of this was their job, none of it anything that they were paid or required to learn about for their work. That epiphany unfortunately didn’t lessen their influence (I’m sure a lot of listeners digested and later regurgitated all that inaccurate info), but it sure did clarify things for this listener.

I did keep listening, though, and not just because someone was wrong on the radio (although I will say that some percentage of my time with D&C would have to be classified as hate-listening, and I did eventually stop because they were contributing to my high blood pressure in very unhealthy ways). No, I also remained a D&C and WEEI listener because, when they shut up about political and social issues and talked sports, I found the conversations highly entertaining and compelling. The thing with sports is that it’s a fundamentally communal experience, not just for those who play a sport alongside their peers, but also and in some ways especially for those who watch sports. That includes the powerful pleasures and joys of watching sports with others, which is why it has long been and remains one of my favorite things to do with my sons. But it also includes talking about sports, sharing our reactions and opinions and arguments, hearing those of others, engaging in debates and discussions. In recent years I’ve taken those conversations to twitter, as have many others of course. But for a long time, sports radio was a place where I could hear (and, at least occasionally, respond to) such conversations, and that both kept me coming back and helped me understand why the medium has endured and grown.

Last RadioStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other radio histories or stories you’d share?

April 21, 2021: RadioStudying: Alan Freed

[April 20thmarks the 50thanniversary of NPR’s first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of radio histories and contexts, leading up to a Guest Post from a colleague whose upcoming book on college radio should be a must-read!]

On two contrasting sides to the pioneering DJ, and how to bridge the gap.

If you’re like me, you probably know the name Alan Freed in conjunction with the “payola” scandals of the late 1950s, media controversies and eventually legal battles over the (at the time) frequent practice of bribing radio DJs to play certain songs and artists. Indeed, Freed has come to be so consistently associated with payola (the scandals around which caused him to lose his job and ended not only his DJing career but also in some clear ways his life, as they contributed to the chronic alcoholism that left him dead at the tragically young age of 43) that my initial focus for this post was going to be entirely on payola with Freed as Exhibit A in telling that particular story. Similarly, the 1978 Freed biopic American Hot Wax focuses on a very specific historical moment, one that happens to be at the height of the payola scandal (during the period in November 1959 when Freed [played in the film by Tim McIntire] famously refused to sign a radio station drafted statement stating that he had never received bribes, leading to his firing from New York’s WABC).

Payola may have ended Freed’s career and life, however, but it doesn’t take much additional research to realize that it most definitely did not define them. Freed was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the very first class of inductees in 1986, for two interconnected reasons: his central role in promoting rock and roll in its earlier moments (he’s widely considered the first DJ to play rock and roll music, and even the first the use the phrase “rock and roll” on the radio); and his consistent, vocal promotionof black artists and music during an early 1950s moment when such support was, to say the least, striking. I’ve written before about the cross-cultural origins of rock and roll in relationship to pioneering figures like Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, but it’s fair to say that no single figure better exemplified—and, indeed, did more to amplify—that 1950s cross-cultural moment than did Alan Freed. While Freed didn’t create such artists, he very much helped get their work and voices out to broader American and international audiences, a role and influence that more or less defines the best of what radio can do and be.

So what do we do with that duality at the heart of the hugely influential (if tragically brief) career and life of this radio pioneer? It’d be easy, and not inaccurate, to see it as a contradiction, an example of the worst and best of radio summed up in one telling figure. But I would also say that these two histories are intimately interconnected through one shared lens: that of radio’s profound cultural influence in and on mid-20th century America. In our current moment of YouTube and TikTok and so so so many other ways that artists and music can be shared (and even in prior moments of Napster and MySpace and so on), it can be difficult to really understand just how much power an individual DJ like Alan Freed could have on what music was being played and heard. But one easy way to understand that influence is to read about the payola scandal, during which for example Freed’s fellow DJ Phil Lind disclosed to a Congressional hearing that he had been paid $22,000 (roughly $200,000 in today’s society) to play a single record more frequently. For a time, DJs—and radio more generally—comprised perhaps the single most powerful cultural force in American society—and DJ Alan Freed specifically illustrates the profoundly progressive uses to which such power (and, yes, such illicit money) could be put.

Next RadioStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other radio histories or stories you’d share?

April 20, 2021: RadioStudying: NPR

[April 20thmarks the 50thanniversary of NPR’s first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of radio histories and contexts, leading up to a Guest Post from a colleague whose upcoming book on college radio should be a must-read!]

On three programs that illustrate the evolution and the range of National Public Radio.

1)      All Things Considered: The afternoon drive-time news show ATC was NPR’s first news program, debuting on May 3, 1971, just two weeks after the network’s first broadcast. Hosted by reporter and foreign affairs correspondent Robert Conley, that first show focused on an anti-Vietnam War March on Washington, making clear that ATC would engage with the most immediate and controversial news topics. Over the 50 years since, ATChas continued to do so, modeling a multi-layered approach to presenting such topics that strives less for the myth of pure objectivity (since news coverage always involves choices and emphases) but rather for a genuine sense of balance, featuring distinct voices and perspectives on these unfolding stories that do justice to the program’s name.

2)      Car Talk: As public radio continued to grow, countless local stations sprung up, with one of the flashship such stations Boston’s WBUR. Along with news coverage, such stations featured other local programming, and an early favorite on WBUR was the automotive and humor show Car Talk, which debuted in 1977 featuring Cambridge brothers and mechanics Tom and Ray Magliozzi (or “Click and Clack,” their radio personas). By 1986 the show had become so popular that NPR picked it up for the national network, and it would remain a weekly fixture through 2012 when the brothers finally ended the program (with reruns continuing to be broadcast nationally through 2017). Car Talk illustrated not just NPR’s extension into more specialized topics, but also and especially the evolution of programming to include other genres and tones (including humor), all of which gave the network far more staying power and cultural influence than would have been possible with straight news reporting.

3)      Code Switch: In April 2013, NPR debuted Code Switch, an online blog that contributed stories to a number of NPR programs; three years later, the Code Switch podcast was launched to cover its own stories in more depth (both that first blog post and first podcast episode were spearheaded by journalist Gene Demby). Just about every detail of that sentence reveals how NPR has continued to evolve in the 21st century, and how new media and forms have helped the network extend, deepen, and even challenge its longstanding work and goals. I would particularly emphasize that said evolution, growth, and challenge has been not just through new genres such as blogs and podcasts (although duh), but also and even more importantly the inclusion of the more genuinely multi-cultural voices and perspectives that shows like Code Switch have featured and amplified. If NPR is to remain relevant in the 2020s (and I very much hope it will), more and more programs like Code Switch will have to be part of the mix.

Next RadioStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other radio histories or stories you’d share?

April 19, 2021: RadioStudying: Amos and Andy

[April 20thmarks the 50thanniversary of NPR’s first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of radio histories and contexts, leading up to a Guest Post from a colleague whose upcoming book on college radio should be a must-read!]

On blackface radio, and what makes it distinctive from other such performances.

In this piece for my Saturday Evening PostConsidering History column, I traced some of the many layers to blackface performance’s influences on 20th century American culture. As usual, when I share another piece of my writing, I’ll ask you to check that out if you could, and then to come on back here for the remaining paragraphs of this post. (And if you want to read more on blackface, check out the work of historian Rhae Lynn Barnes, our leading expert on the subject.)

Welcome back! It stands to reason that if (as I argue in that piece) every other genre and medium of 20th century American popular culture was influenced by blackface performance, from film to TV to animation, then radio would be as well. And indeed it was, with one of the longest-running radio programs in history, Amos ‘n’ Andy (1928-1960), as a striking case in point. Created by a pair of white actors and comedians, Freeman Gosden and Charles Cornell, who had met in Durham, North Carolina and were each steeped in the blackface minstrelsy tradition, A&Afeatured Gosden and Cornell performing the voices of its titular two African American characters who lived in Harlem. As with so much of blackface performance, the show relied on exaggeration and stereotypes to create laughs, putting its characters in ridiculous situations and letting their caricatured perspectives and contrasting personalities produce hilarity out of those extremes. But you don’t need to listen to a word to know that the show epitomized blackface performance—just look at the original poster!

So Amos ‘n’ Andy was definitely an example of blackface performance, and needs to be criticized for the same flaws and faults, and the same destructive cultural and social effects, as the genre overall. But I would say that there’s at least one difference when it comes to blackface radio compared to other media, and while I don’t want to overstate it, I believe it has some significance. Because a radio program can’t use visual cues, slapstick comedy, exaggerated reactions, ridiculous makeup, and so on, it relies almost entirely on the voices of its characters. And while of course those voices can be exaggerated and stereotyped as well (and were in the case of A&A), the simple fact of two characters being voiced week after week, over a period of decades, creates a more multi-layered and three-dimensional depiction of those voices, perspectives, and characters than might be possible in more visual forms of blackface performance. Amos Jones and Andrew Hogg Brown certainly weren’t the most progressive of characters (again, far from it), but they are likely two of the most well-developed in the history of radio and pop culture, and there’s a resonance to that which I would argue illustrates the potential of radio programs even amidst cultural limitations.

Next RadioStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other radio histories or stories you’d share?

April 16, 2021: Latin American Invasions: The Bay of Pigs

[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]

On three lesser-known figures who reveal the contours and aftermaths of the failed invasion.

1)      Richard M. Bissell Jr.: If, as I made the case for in yesterday’s post, clandestine relationships with foreign regimes defined much of 20th century American foreign policy, than figures like Bissell—an economist turned the CIA’s chief of clandestine operations in the 1950s and early 1960s—deserve a far more prominent place in our collective memories than they currently occupy. When President Eisenhower decided (not long after Fidel Castro’s successful 1958 revolution) that an invasion of Cuba was necessary to counter the perceived threats posed by the nation’s new Communist government, he put Bissell in charge of planning that operation, and it was Bissell who recruited, organized, and trained the numerous U.S. and Cuban figures at the operation’s heart.

2)      Sergio Arcacha Smith: One of those Cuban figures was Smith, a Cuban American exile who moved to New Orleans and helped form two of the most prominent anti-Castro organizations, the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) and the Friends of Democratic Cuba (FDC). The organizational and fund-raising efforts of such communities, as well as their intense desire to return to Cuba and overthrow Castro’s regime, were instrumental in the recruitment of participants in and the planning of the invasion. And when the invasion went bad and President John F. Kennedy cut off air support for the forces on the ground, figures like Smith became bitter enemies to Kennedy, leading to the lingering questions of whether Smith and his New Orleans community played any role in Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.

3)      José Basulto: Many of those who participated in the invasion were captured, imprisoned and interrogated, and in some cases executed by the Castro regime. But some managed to escape and return to the United States, and one of those surviving Bay of Pigs veterans is Basulto, a CIA-trained spy and saboteur who had previously infiltrated Cuba and played a role in the aborted invasion. He has continued to work in opposition to the Castro regime for the decades since, most notably by forming the aviation group Brothers to the Rescue, which is either a humanitarian aid organization or a terrorist group, depending on whom you ask. All a reflection of how the Bay of Pigs invasion was far from an isolated incident, and illustrates a half-century of complex, evolving Cuban American histories and relationships.

Special Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?