People who listen to a whole lot of rock 'n' roll and then try to organize it in their minds in some sort of serious way find themselves doing unnatural things. For example, they make lists that create a linear progression of musical worth, one song being "better" than those listed after it (there have been four lists like that in the two parts of this Supplement).

Now, we all really do know about the fallacy of linear thinking (we're no fools). We've seen how the Western thought processes have led to an inability to deal with religion; we've seen how a belief in "dichtomies" lead Westerners into schizophrenia; we've seen how unquestioning acceptance of chainlike cause-and-effect explanations has left Western academics helpless to describe the complexity of modern existence.

Knowing all this, how can we make this-one's-better-than-that-one lists of all our music?

But more to the point, what makes us want to do unnatural things to our rock?

The answer must lie in the medium that make us want what we want of our music consistently in the most unnatural of ways. That much we can intuit from our situation.

Our medium is the rock music radio. And it is "ours," as such--the kids'. It seems really remarkable to me just how exclusively the rock radio is just for us, the kids, the not-serious people, the smiling people, the hip people, the free, those running around out there with their ears plugged into vibrations. Not that we in any way control what goes over the rock radio, but that the rock radio is aimed specifically at us, to the exclusion of Pat Nixon and Everett Dirksen and your parents and my parents and everyone else out there grumping around.

John Short edits the SUPPLEMENT. It has been said that there is meth in his maddness.

And what this radio that is so much ours does is to present to us all that we know as our rock music. The radio defines the total "envelope" of our rock music experience.

It is important in trying to understand what I am saying to realize the absolute truth of the idea that the radio defines what rock music is. What the radio plays is rock. In order for something to be rock music it has to be radio-played or radio play-derivative. First of all, a given piece of music (perhaps a new kind of music) simply can not become known unless it is played on the radio; mere distribution in record stores of an album and discussion of it in rock magazines aren't enough to bring that music into the consciousness of a significant number of people. And if a certain music isn't effectively known, then it doesn't exist, certainly not as rock music. Secondly, sales of rock records are inextricably hitched to radio play; a manufacturer's survey found that over eighty per cent of albums are bought because people liked some of it that they heard on the radio. So if music doesn't get played, it pretty much can't survive and therefore can't be considered a viable part of rock.

I have defined rock in terms that seem to make it identical to "popular" music. There are those who would distinguish rock by its sound. But rock's sound is always changing, and thinking of it as changing is really allowing your definition to be much more flexible. And, above all, we can just see that rock is tied to what is accepted and radio-played: all the San Francisco Sound never made much money until the radio brought it in out of the cold; and all kinds of other sounds never would have dared to start if they didn't think they might be "accepted." Can't you sense, at least, the big power of the radio being quietly behind the channeling of The Money into freaky music?

Think about it; don't you just know it was the radio? Can't you see how maybe The Blues Project could be an unradioed underground for a few years at the Cafe A Go-Go in New York, but how a big movement never could exist until radio came in?

So, we see, radio defines what music is rock. Also it decides for us what we are going to want and makes us want it.

In other words, it isn't the case, as it might seem, that the radio plays a selection of songs that we could either like or not like depending on our tastes.

It will be seen in this article that the actual music which the radio plays is only a small part of the experience of the medium.

The experience of the medium of rock radio is very complex. And it is made even more infinitely complex by the contradictions between what the experience really is and both what people expect it to be and what people think it has been. People expect the experience will be those songs the most people like most as selected by the measuring of popular opinion. This is not the case. People think the experience has been the varied appeasement of different and conflicting groups of people with their individual favorite songs, playing each group's music a length of time corresponding to that group's percentage of the audience. This also is not the case.