2 of 2

Something in the Air is filled with such detail. It's also a work of advocacy. Fisher laments the paradoxical loss of freedom as radio has enjoyed an explosion of markets and bandwidth. In his diagnosis he is mostly fair, although occasionally a liberal blind spot appears—and it should be said that this is rare, and that Fisher has no reluctance blaspheming against the sanctum sanctorum of lefty radio. Indeed, one of his best chapters is on NPR. Like the most narrowcasted punk-rock ghetto on XM satellite radio, NPR has its programming controlled by numbers people, right down to focus-grouping snippets of classical music to see which bits are most well-received by listeners.

Fisher is much easier on the stoner left that ran fm radio in the '60s and '70s. In his section on the hippy DJs of that era, Fisher explains that "flower power and the Age of Aquarius could not camouflage the pain of a generation that repeatedly poked its parents in the eye." Free-form DJs of the time criticized the war in Vietnam, opposed certain advertisers, and talked like they were stoned (or talked when stoned). Content was everything.

But then a switchback occurs when Fisher turns his attention to Rush Limbaugh, arguably both the most successful and free radio personality of the last 20 years. When it comes to Limbaugh, "content is secondary," Fisher says. "Scratch almost any successful radio talker, and you find an ex-deejay like Limbaugh who has repurposed his quick-tongues manner of dispensing shreds of meaning, switching from music to talk while serving his twin masters—the clock and the spots." Wait a minute. In the 1960s and 1970s, free-form radio was an expression of the political anguish of a generation. So why doesn't Fisher entertain the possibility that Limbaugh's audience was seeking something very similar? This generation—indeed a large swath of the population—was in anguish over the drugs, race rage, welfare state entitlements, and promiscuity bequeathed to them by the 1960s.

Still, it would be unfair to call Fisher an ideologue. In fact he has a deep appreciation, even a love, for all the great radio personalities, no matter what their politics. His accounts of how the squares mixed, often with bad results, with the counterculture types are honest and fair. And he laments, as I do, that with all of our new radio freedom, no rock and roll station would be caught dead playing Sade. Somewhere a college kid is the worse for it.

Mark Gauvreau Judge is the author most recently of God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling (Crossroad).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

first page |  2 of 2

share this page