The experience of the medium of rock radio is music selected for the effect it will have on all of us--all radio music affecting all of us in the same way, only to slightly different degrees. The rock radio plays music that it will make us like, on the passive end of our participation with the medium, and music that it will make us want to hear, in our active participation of the radio.

I will explain later how it is that the radio makes us want what our objective tastes deplore. But we all know this is true. "Rambling, Gambling Maa" is a song still in the Top 40, "Sky Pilot" was in it seven months ago; both were the kind of song you waited to hear when listening to the radio, neither one sounds like anything on any kind of record player.

The concept of a Top 40 is a self-preserving entity. There will always be a number one song to which we are to assign the emotion, "best." And there will always be ten records so special apart from all the other records that they will be the Top 10. The Top 10 will always have the same number of records in it so that there will always be enough for us to "like." Most importantly, the Top 40 sets it up so we can assign values to records relative to each other . . . and, by extension, relative to all records and music. Doesn't it seem that we're always liking something?

Now I can further explain what I mean by the "unnatural" things that the radio makes us want. Making lists of songs and their values relative to each other is "unnatural." It is a process which, when we try to do it, seems silly, but which, when done, seems gratifying.

Wanting the radio to play next bad songs such as "Sky Pilot" is unnatural. Humming radio station promo spots as if they were the songs we tuned-in for is unnatural. Also unnatural are excessive gushes of emotion one sometimes feels with the playing of a just average, but old and familiar song; laughing at what are annoyingly stupid jokes by the disc jockeys; and getting any feeling of participation out of what the disc jockey says.

Finding such a wide range of phenomenological experience of things unnatural, we can intuit an explanation and then work back to discover some few of the complex causes which work together to bring about the discovered phenomenon of the "unnatural" reactions.

Thus we see that the nature of the experience of the medium of rock radio is not one of getting the music we like, as we thought, but rather one of which music is only a small part.

We turn in the radio to tune into the flow of existence. Some people remain tuned into the constant flow of the world that they imagine to being going on around them by leaving their TV sets on all day long regardless of whether or not anyone's watching. We kids don't leave out TV sets running because we (1) aren't able to own them, (2) aren't in the house all day, but are in cars a lot, and (3) think we're "too smart" to ever do that anyway. Besides, TV doesn't give you a true sense of being tuned into the flow. What comes over the TV set is clearly a string of episodes that are merely based on what is imagined to exist out there in the flow of daily life.

Whereas the radio, the rock radio, tunes us in very directly to what we consider to be the progress of the changing events that are constantly reshaping the kind of lives we lead. Rock radio gives us "current" music, the time, the weather, the news. Remember that it is all presented over the radio air as a continuous flow of the same kind of sound. That is to say that the radio is all one kind of experience. The disc jockey reads the time and the weather off with the rhythm and sense of timing that makes it all sound like part of an intro to the next record.

In addition to the way in which the disc jockeys make the music, time, weather, and news all seem like part of the same general sound, the actual content of those four things is completely tied up in the idea of progress, or the flow.

The time, of course, defines progress. The disc jockey announces that it is 4:45; later he says it's 4:52. Why, we can see the intervals of progress being marked off. The other three elements of radio programming content mark the flow only slightly less directly. The weather is another sign that our condition is always changing. People who tune in to find out what the world is doing want to know what's its condition is--the weather. And people have been made to believe that what the world is doing is what is on the news. We all think, or are supposed to think, that the events on the news are what is "important." We realize that, when we are trying to get in touch with the flow of life around us, we can't possibly handle all the information people out there would tell us about what's happening. As a result, we're happy to sift off the most valuable information, or what's "important"--the news.

The music (which takes up most of the listening time) marks the most significant kind of progress in the flow--an evolution of ourselves. We see in what is played the changing of our own tastes, of ourselves . . . and all the other people we assume are listening and changing with us. We see individual songs introduced; we assimilate them; and then we finally come to reject them and pick up new ones. And even if we don't listen to radio steadily, we see a constant change in what we like. And we notice a greater change over the years of the kind of music that is played on the radio (e.g., the Beatles become more esoteric and the Canned Heat creeps into the Top 10).

The music is the overt point for why the rock radio stations are there in the first place. Why the time, news, and weather are there is because of what they do to what we think of the music. They help identify the music with a direction we can give our lives. That direction is forward. Way back in those safe pre-industrial revolution days, one used to be able to mark the meaning of his own existence in terms of how much work he had accomplished today towards getting the crops ready to be harvested. "Where are you at, baby?" a farmer in the Massachusetts Bay Colony might be asked; and he would answer, "Need a little more rain, then lots of sun in August and I'll have enough food to last us through winter." We know our existence to be less clearly defined these days. Our music, as the radio defines it for us, helps us to align ourselves with that more complicated form we call the flow.

I sincerely suggest that those of you are feeling "out of touch" should listen to the radio a little to put some more static in your existence. If you're in Boston, the radio you should be listening to is WMEX.

WMEX is, it seems at first listening, one of your basic commercial yahooing-disc-jockeys radio stations. It used to be most familiarly identified with a drive-in called Adventure Car Hop which offered a free second cheese-burger to all who yelled "woo-woo Ginsburg" (the name of WMEX's then biggest disc jockey) to the girl who brought the frappes. It has changed a lot since.