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 🍌🥛.
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 didn’t 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 station—102.1 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 str…