I'm on the Mexican radio ...

I'm on the Mexican radio...--Wall of Voodoo

Ah, radio. I love radio. I grew up with AM radio in the '50s and '60s, surely not its heyday--tho' on Thursday nights until 1961 you could still tune in the radio version of Gunsmoke. But radio in the '50s and '60s spawned the beast that it's become today: the medium that brought rock'n'roll in all its libidinous, gloriously ragged, and inherently flawed Top 40 diversity. And the beast it is today, often characterized as a bloated, automated, corporate dinosaur more focused on market share, advertising revenue, and return to stockholders than quality programming, great music, and public service. Oddly, I'm not sure that it's ever been very different. From the outset radio has been a commercial venture. During its so-called golden age, scarcely a show aired that didn't share its identification with a commercial sponsor--a practice that survives today in television and sports.

But radio is as surely different today from the brand I grew up with as that was from the variety my folks did. Among a wealth of differences, one is the explosion of formats that were spawned in the '70s--album-oriented rock, urban, talk, all sports, and so on. Once the suits caught on that alternative, especially FM, radio was garnering audiences to rival the traditional AM staples, those stations got sucked into the mainstream, became safe money makers and so valuable that their alternativeness disappeared. To protect that value, stations now play only suit-blest fodder, the sad parade of Britneys, Christinas, Justins, Nellys, Shanias, and so on that we're so fond of ranting about.

So where are the alternatives? College radio is one. But unless you live near one or can find a decent stream on the 'net, such as Penn's WXPN and www.xpn.org, pickings are slim indeed. Another alternative is satellite, Sirius or XM, which requires special equipment and a monthly subscription. Happily, there's one operation out of the dinky gold country metropolis of Paradise, California appropriately called "Radio Paradise". Radio Paradise is the brainchild of Bill Goldsmith, a radio veteran most recently of the legendary KPIG in Santa Cruz. It's Goldsmith's tastes that guide RP's play list, a phenomenon which lends credence to the heretical notion that human beings, not computers, can still program a novel format.

Radio Paradise bills itself as "eclectic rock" and offers a dizzying array of music that doesn't even begin to do justice to the idea. A recent one hour's play list, and I'm just picking one at random--you could pick virtually any segment, went like this:

Luka Bloom--"Gone To Pablo"

REM--"Electrolite"