Perhaps it should have been mentioned earlier, but I have used WMEX as the model for what I have described rock radio to be and to do. WMEX truly represents the flow and it does all the things I've said rock radio does to you.

Some rock radio stations are different from WMEX and don't always affect you quite exactly as has been described. There is, for example, in Boston another rock station, WRKO, which, depending on the time of day you're talking about, is either more-listened-to or less-listened-to. But WRKO has a different philosophy of operation: it plays a pretty inflexible Top 40 and has its disc jockeys pointedly avoid all speech other than record titles.

It can become tedious not to hear an unrecorded human voice come over the radio for a long time. The disc jockey has a very important role. He represents the individual who's living in the moment, and who by his reactions to that moment decides what it is of the moment that he should let you know, be it the time, the weather, the news, or the record you will feel like after you start hearing it.

If what comes over the radio is to suggest the flow of human existence, then it all must relate to humanity. The disc jockey is that humanity, man in the radio (as well as being the man in the radio). And the WMEX disc jockey can, after he has established his existence with the listener, make all the parts and sounds of his show all flow together much more smoothly with his changing rhythm and sound of his own voice.

With all these complex and obscure factors influencing what the radio show will sound like, it would seem difficult for a radio station to make sure its disc jockeys were doing everything they should. But no one really knows what makes a good disc jockey. People can't really be trained what to do because no one really knows what to want. That is, all that radio stations can do is go with whoever sounds good and seems to be popular. If he doesn't seem to work, he isn't told to change because no one could tell him how in most cases; he's fired. Whatever doesn't work is gotten rid of so the radio station can try something new to see if that works.

This process sounds very simple, but the experimental method of handling things emphasizes how complex trying to understand the medium of radio is.

We find it's impossible to come up with any idea of what radio should sound like before we hear someone try. Understanding that we can't come up with any theory lets us come to terms with the problem of why radio makes us want "unnatural" things. This is a very important idea.

There's a good example here in Boston of how little we know about what we want out of radio. WBCN started over a year ago as a hip radio station that would (1) play good songs from quality rock lp's instead of the "popular" stuff on the three-minute format 45's, and (2) relieve the banality of AM disc jockeys by putting people who talked naturally about what they really were feeling like. WBCN made it for a while; we all liked it because it was different, it was change (change, of course, being our ethic in radio).

But after a zoom in the ratings last summer, flagging listenership dropped it off the charts. I decided I didn't like listening to it much. I could play most things they did on the machine at home; but that kind of sound was for a different mood anyway. When you're listening to that kind of sound, you like to pick your own records. I decided the radio was meant to do something different, something unknown; and I started tuning in just MEX.

Most people also agreed that listening to what became the cliche of the slow-speaking hip-left disc jockey "rapping" on about whatever he felt like was a drag. But they could never bring themselves to say that they liked the WMEX disc jockeys.

It then became clear how important the disc jockeys were to the sound of radio, to the whole medium. The failure of what we thought we would want on WBCN showed us such "unnatural" things as the disc jockeys (their remarks, if written down, would seem incredibly banal) were an integral part of the medium itself.

All of which leads to an analysis of the medium. What sort of action are we participating in?

First off, we don't really listen to the radio while it's on. We've usually got it going while we're doing stuff, driving in a car, that sort of thing. We talk about having "picked up" something off the radio as if we weren't listening at all and just happened to hear what was actually coming out of the radio.

This only-half-listening-to-it makes it possible to use the radio for tuning into the flow of what we imagine to be the existence around us. If our entire activity was listening to the radio, given the way rock is programmed now, that listening would make us feel really lonely in the face of all the high-adrenalined activity we were tuned in to. (It is interesting to note that back in, let's say, the thirties somewhere, people used to gather their families and pay full attention to their radios; and programming was correspondingly different.)

Next, we find this medium has got a lot of static in it. Most radios we own have generally poor reproduction of sound, at least as compared with our stereos. And it's usually difficult to get the exact frequency of the station you want. Stations crowd each other off the dial in spite of FCC regulation, especially towards the right of the dial where WMEX is (1510 kc).