The Case For Listening To The Radio
It's an antidote to loneliness and the algorithmic-fuelled stagnation of musical taste. Plus, a hack for homemade šš„.
Of all the puzzling daily habits of my grandparents I witnessed while living with them as a kid, one I never understood was waking up every day before the break of dawn to listen to the BBC radio broadcast. In the darkness of early morning, they would lie in bed and start their day with news from across the pond.
A few years later I would be using the same device to wake me up every day for middle school. I didnāt inherit the morning person gene from my grandparents, and so I needed all the support I could get to drag my sluggish adolescent body out of bed. Instead of the news, I would wake up to bright, feel-good indie bops on the alternative stationā102.1 The Edge. The song they would be playing at the exact moment my alarm tapped in was never the same, and I loved not knowing what I would get. Sometimes, I would interpret the song as a prediction of how my day was going to go. If it was a song I liked, I would linger in bed and listen as I let my pupils adjust to the light streaming in through my lace curtains. It was worth sacrificing being late for the brief joy of discovery.
Where radio once tuned me in, streaming has tuned me out. There was a period in my adolescence when the two overlapped in my lifeāwhere the radio mostly served as ambience and my Limewire downloads were for intentional listening. The difference then was my listening wasnāt shaped by an algorithm. Now, Iām most often listening to a playlist I didnāt create, that has been curated for me based on a couple songs the algorithm fed me a few months prior and I happened to play again. There is still occasionally the joy of discovery when it feeds me a song I like, but usually I canāt be bothered to pull my phone out of my pocket and take note of the song or artist. Whereas listening to the radio, the song was always book-ended with a declaration of the artist who made it.
But more than fostering a deeper appreciation for the artist, what I valued most about the radio was how it made me feel less alone. I only realized this recently after swapping streaming for the radio everyday for a month. The house where I was staying had one and after a full day of enjoying listening to a station we always had on as a kid (CBC Radio One), I opted for the radio over Spotify everyday. Where it once was daytime ambience growing up, I now preferred it as my ambience at night, because as CBC host Odario Williams said one evening, āitās a vulnerable part of the day.ā
His words couldnāt be more pertinent. At this time, I was going through an intense bout of anxiety that seemed to always get worse at night. In this context, streaming only made my anxiety worse. Like the loop of anxious thoughts on repeat in my brain, every time I streamed, the algorithm would eventually end up rotating the same few artists not of my choosing (my bestie and I are convinced Chapelle Roan has cut some kind of deal with Spotify). CBCās daily weeknight program After Dark, in comparison, felt like a blank slate on which to form new ideas, and more importantly, was tethered to a real person. āIf youāre alone, we are alone together,ā Williams said one night, encouraging listeners to write him a letter (in the form of an email). āThatās the thing about radio. I donāt know whoās out there.ā At least with the radio, there is this sense of real people all tuned in to the same stationāeven if I canāt see them, they exist somewhere on this planet. In the computer-operated-universe of streaming, there is no one out there, itās an infinite black hole.
Radio has always been about connecting humans. In September of 1899, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi stunned the world when he, from his own backyard, brought the results of the Americaās Cup yacht races from a ship at sea to a land-based station in New York. Two years later, he would broadcast the first transatlantic signal. Then, on Christmas Eve in 1906, Canadian physicist Reginald Fessenden long-distance transmission of human voice and musicāthe first of its kindāwas received as far away as Norfolk, Virginia from his station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, setting the stage for commercial music broadcasts to come. From the late 1920s to the early 1950s, the radio experienced its āGolden Ageā in which millions of listeners across the United States and Canada tuned in to comedies, dramas, variety shows and music broadcasting. (Brittanica).
Just as the radio served as discovery tool to listeners in the early 20th century, it continues to do so today. Growing up with a family that always had CBCās classical station on, I underestimated CBCās other station (Radio One). On After Dark, Iāve been surprised with how often they play artists I already loveāones Iāve discovered in recent years like Emily King and Arlo Parks but also artists Iād totally forgotten about like Jill Scott, Lykke Li, Santigold, and Caribou. Not only has listening to the radio been a discovery tool to catch up with artists Iād lost touch with over the past decade, itās also introduced me to so many new artists, particularly ones I doubt Spotify would endorse (like Indigenous musicians). One night they even played a girl I went to high school with who I had no idea has since gone into music. When an artist I listen to regularly comes on the radio (most recently, Beyonceās āBodyguardā), it feels exciting, like a DJ has just played my request. When the same song plays on Spotify, I roll my eyes, unsure of whether Iām more sick of the algorithm or myself.
Iāve actually started to see listening to the radio as a means of taking back control. It might feel like youāre in the driverās seat when youāre streaming since the music on Spotify is more curated for you versus the random songs on the radio, but itās an illusion of controlāthe algorithm is the one with the agency. When listening to the radio, a space free of algorithms, the music you listen to is totally unbiased to your preferencesāyou have the freedom of choice, which I would argue is its own kind of agency. This is even more apparent with the news. When receiving your news online, itās very easy to find yourself in an echo chamber. Listening to the news on the radio, Iāve found out about eventsādomestic and foreignāas well as different takes on those eventsāthat I donāt think I would ever be exposed to scrolling on social media or reading the curated newsletters from the journalistic outlets I subscribe to. The radio, quite literally, keeps me worldly.
Ever since listening to the radio, streaming feels empty and vapid. I might be listening to some of the same artists, but the technology through which I encounter them has a tremendous effect on the listening experience, and by extension, my overall mental health. When my tastes are always catered to, there is this sense of my world being flattenedāI become a lazy listener and my tastes stagnate. On the contrary, listening to music and perspectives outside my taste expands my palette, and the irreplaceable person who facilitates this tethers me to real humans in real time. In our increasingly lonely online world, the radio is a wavelength that connects us.
Best,
Anna
Published š
Coveteur - How A Kenya Safari Freed Me From Diet Culture
āThe fish canāt see the water itās in unless it jumps outside its fish bowl.ā The old Chinese proverb was all I could think about after returning home from my safari with Micato in Kenya last year. Spending 10 days watching animals whose whole lives revolve around eating and sleeping made me realize the water Iāve been swimming in all these years is diet culture. Learning that a lion will sleep all day to preserve energy for hunting at night and elephants eat upwards of 550 pounds a day; witnessing starved giraffes and hippos amidst a droughtārevealed to me how backwards it is that a starved body thatās easy prey and likely to die in the wild is one we admire back home; that many of the people considered the most high-functioningāfrom biohacking tech billionaires to entrepreneurial celebritiesāare those who boast about denying their body rest when it needs it. There were so many lessons from the African bush in this piece I was certain my editor would cut it down, but she kept the entire first draft!
Reading š
š° The schemers and savers obsessed with retiring as early as possible.Ā
šŗ How the language of TV is influencing how we see ourselves.Ā
āLife in the offscreen world rarely supplies its own narrative meaning; its messiness and mundanity donāt conform to the neat arcs produced by writersā rooms. But the younger users coming of age on social media have encountered the world through an astonishing deluge of content in which life, mediated by narrative tropes, produces meaning that is legible by design. If maturation requires bridging these illusions with the formlessness of reality, then self-narrativization may be a kind of intermediary.ā - Kim Hew-Low.
š¤ Sarah McLachlan is resurfacing.Ā
šøš¦ I turned down a trip to Saudi Arabia earlier this year because I was nervous to write about the countryās investment in tourism given its fraught human rights history. So I love seeing how the NYTās travel section has approached covering the country.Ā
š On the Thailand-Malaysia border, food defies nations.
š Are NYCās viral TikTok eats actually any good?Ā
š©³ The summer wardrobe cometh.Ā
Listening š§
Out of a desire to share the joy of discovery Iāve experienced listening to the radio (CBC) over the past, Iāve put together a playlist of my favorites. Some are old tunes Iād forgotten about but theyāre mostly new discoveries (and mostly Canadian!).
How do we cultivate taste in the age of algorithms? In this episode of The Ezra Klein Show, artist Holly Herndon argues that an over-reliance on algorithms can result in a stagnation of taste.
āOne of the things that I always appreciated growing up was hearing things that I didnāt like and didnāt understand,ā says Herndon. āThat was something I always found difficult with algorithmic recommendation systemsāI just kept getting fed what it already knew that I liked. Being exposed to new music as a young person, I really needed to hear things I didnāt like to expand my palate and understanding of whatās possible in music.ā
Despite this critique of A.I., Herndon is actually somewhat of a techno-optimist. She creates music using artificial intelligence built on human voices, including her own. Her work tries to answer concerns about copyright and how we can encourage experimentation without stealing othersā work to train A.I. models. One of her most interesting ideas is that we should reframe A.I. as ācollective intelligenceā rather than āartificial intelligence.ā
āI see [A.I.] as a kind of aggregate human intelligence. Itās trained on all of us. Specifically, when you look at music, itās trained on human bodies performing very special tasks. I think it does humans a great disservice to try to remove that from the equation. Thatās why I like to draw a parallel, also, to choral music, because I see it as a kind of coordination technology in the same kind of lineage as group singing. Itās a part of our evolutionary story and I think itās a great human accomplishment that should be celebrated as such.ā - Holly Herndon.
Snacking š
In addition to the radio, another old school invention I fell in love with while staying at my friendās house was his microwave. I always associate it with my mom as she used it religiously throughout the day to reheat her coffee. I havenāt had one since she died, as I use my air fryer to reheat everything. But when you need something to cook fast, nothing beats a microwave.
So when I realized I didnāt have my usual banana milk in the fridge (in NYC, I drink Almond Breezeās or Mooalaās, in Toronto, I drink the Korean brand Binggrae), I got experimental with the microwave to make my own. All I did was microwave half a banana in a cup of milk until the fruit melted down and I was pleasantly surprised with how well it turned out. It reminded me of the Thai dessert Kluai Buat Chi, which is a sweet soup of bananas cooked in coconut milk.
How have I lived my entire life not knowing that banana milk was a thing?! Canāt wait to try it!!