{"id":59,"date":"2011-09-13T23:54:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-13T23:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ethanlewis.org\/icarus\/2011\/09\/13\/playlist-posts-1-songs-about-the-radio\/"},"modified":"2019-04-01T09:34:03","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T13:34:03","slug":"playlist-posts-1-songs-about-the-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ethanlewis.org\/icarus\/2011\/09\/13\/playlist-posts-1-songs-about-the-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"Playlist Posts #1: Songs About The Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first in a series of posts that include songs that I would put in a themed playlist.\u00a0 Consider this an “annotated playlist”.\u00a0 Feel free to include your suggestions in the comments!<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

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Not long ago I was teaching my high school course on American popular culture post-WWII.\u00a0 The class mainly focuses on popular music, with digressions about television, computers and other technological advances.\u00a0 One day, while talking about radio, it came out that pretty much NONE of the students listen to terrestrial radio anymore.\u00a0 They either listen to satellite stations<\/a> or they listen to streaming music websites<\/a> or they download music to their iPods.\u00a0\u00a0 This was shocking to me.\u00a0 When I was their age, I listened to the radio every day, and even now I stream my favorite radio station (WXPN<\/a> out of the University of Pennsylvania<\/a>) on my computer on a daily basis.<\/span><\/p>\n

The following songs (in no particular order) are songs about the radio that evoke my memories of listening to the radio all day long when I was young.\u00a0 I definitely owe my encyclopedic knowledge of “classic rock” to my years listening to\u00a0 WIOQ, WMMR<\/a> and WYSP (which sadly just transitioned to the dreaded “sports talk” format).\u00a0 And the two years when I listed to WRTI (which in the 1980’s was America’s most powerful jazz station, watts wise) gave me a very thorough familiarity with jazz.\u00a0 While my listening chops are not sharp anymore, there was a time when I could recognize drummers, bassists, horn players and others without identification.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Obsessive radio listening!<\/span>
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\nAl Stewart– Song on the Radio<\/i><\/b>: I’ve always loved Scottish folk-rocker Al Stewart.\u00a0 His songs take an unusual interest in history, which appeals to me as a history teacher. In fact, the essay I wrote to get into college compared his song about the Siege of Leningrad (Roads to Moscow<\/a>) with a photograph from WWII.\u00a0 Anyway, this song with the catchy refrain “you’re on my mind like a song on the radio” has always struck me as very “true” somehow.\u00a0 I guess today’s generation will miss out on the experience of a station (especially a Top 40 station) playing popular songs over and over again.\u00a0 I mean, they can CHOOSE to repeat songs whenever they want, but the random nature of a “song on the radio” seems subtly different to me.<\/span><\/p>\n