When I’m on road trips, a favorite pastime is to flip through the radio dial trying to find local stations featuring regional music or other hidden treasures I may have overlooked. In recent years, though, these flips through the dial have increasingly become the aural equivalent of what urban sprawl critic James Howard Kunstler has termed the “geography of nowhere,” with the “local” stations’ music having all the color and life of the surrounding strip malls. Fortunately, an important bill just introduced in Congress, the Local Community Radio Act of 2007, will if passed remove an ill-conceived legal barrier that has thwarted the development of community radio for years.

The desensitizing sameness I’ve noticed on the road is not a coincidence. The nonprofit Media Access Project, which provides legal support for independent radio, reports that in the aftermath of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the total number of radio station owners has dropped by a third. Radio behemoth Clear Channel alone now operates over 1200 stations, and in most markets, four or fewer companies control more than seventy percent of total market share. By 2003, the average cost of a conventional radio license had grown to more than $2.5 million.

In 2000, with radio rapidly turning into a tame game played by multimillionaires, the Federal Communications Commission experienced an outburst of common sense. That year, the FCC set up rules that were designed to authorize thousands of noncommercial Low Power FM (LPFM) stations to serve communities at a fraction of the costs of a conventional station. But sadly, Congress several months later succumbed to lobbying pressure from the National Association of Broadcasters, leaving LPFM literally stuck between stations. The resulting law, sneaked into an unrelated appropriations bill, effectively barred LPFM from the 50 largest media markets in the country, by requiring these new stations to stay at least four intervals on the radio dial (0.6 megahertz) from existing full-power stations. And in a twist on Elvis Costello’s prediction in “Radio Radio,” radio is now in the hands of a shrinking number of fools “trying to anesthetize the way that you feel.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Something you probably didn’t know about proto-spudboy, de-evolutionist, and original jocko homo Mark Mothersbaugh: He’s been creating a mixed-media postcard every day — for over 30 years. Originally created as personal diaries, they’ve become an obsession, and now go on tour with him. The postcards combine media and styles freely — painting and illustration, found objects, unexpected backing materials. Some of them are gorgeous, some borderline art brut, but these have very little of the scent of late-model Devo. “I’ve probably got around 30,000 of them filed away now….and I keep making more every day,” Mothersbaugh says. His Beautiful Mutants series is also interesting, but the Photoshop tricks there are much more predictable than his more original paper-based mashups.

God made men, but monkeys applied the glue.
-From “Jocko Homo”

Forget Kenny Rogers (and really, please forget Kenny Rogers). The musician best deserving the title “The Gambler” is our favorite Sonoma County rancher, Tom Waits. On July 10, Anti- will release Healing the Divide, the long-anticipated album version of a semi-legendary 2003 benefit concert at Lincoln Center. The concert features four performances by Waits with Kronos Quartet and Greg Cohen, including the previously unreleased “Diamond in Your Mind,” which may be familiar from Solomon Burke’s version. Other performers on the concert album include the throat-singing Gyoto Tantric Choir, sitarist Anoushka Shankar (Ravi’s daughter who isn’t named Norah Jones), the ubiquitous Philip Glass with kora player Foday Musa Suso, and Tibetan flutist Nawang Kechong in a duo with Navajo flutist R. Carlos Nakai. Internationally renowned impresario the Dalai Lama is the opening act. Sales from the album will support efforts of Healing the Divide, an organization founded by humanitarian and fugitive kisser Richard Gere, to provide health services to Tibetan monks and nuns living in refugee settlements.

That may sound like a safe bet. But as Monica Kendrick of the Chicago Reader has noted, Tom Waits’ sales pitch for the album is a new variation on Pascal’s wager. “I’m no fool,” Waits noted, “It’s a spiritual insurance policy. Hell, at my age, the next group I put together, everyone may be playing a harp. All kidding aside, I owed His Holiness a favor. He did all my papers in school.”

Even Waits’ musical selections for the show hedge his spiritual bets, ranging from “Way Down in the Hole,” a Jesus-thumping gospel blues traditional enough to have been covered by the Blind Boys of Alabama, to the self-explanatory “God’s Away on Business.” As he sings in the latter, “there’s always free cheddar in the mousetrap baby, it’s a deal, it’s a deal.”