Protests to preserve classical music in drive-time dayparts on CBC Radio 2 were officially rendered unsuccessful today, with the announcement of the national network’s new lineup effective the 2nd of September. Stand On Guard For CBC got in their last digs before the formal launch, posting a hysterical letter from a woman who claimed she moved to Canada and became a Canadian citizen because CBC weren’t so preoccupied with programming “very listenable material.” Who knew public radio was capable of cultivating its own equivalent to Susan Sarandon.
However, instead of threatening to move to a neighbouring country if she doesn’t get her political way, our version laments that we will soon become that high-culture-deprived country.
How much of the event held this afternoon deep inside the CBC’s Toronto Broadcast Centre was designed to appease the sorts who huddled together on Front Street on a cold and rainy Friday afternoon in mid-April to start raising a ruckus over the proposed Radio 2 changes? Not much at all, on the surface, even if plenty of effort was expended to explain how things are only going to get better.
The adjustments to the main FM feed will be accompanied by the launch of four online music streams — one of which will be exclusively classical, natch. And, introduced to those crossing a literal smokescreen into a cavernous television studio draped with retro renderings of the number “2” were several new on-air talents, including midday classical host Julie Nesrallah, a youthfully 40-ish mezzo-soprano from Ottawa, recruited to bring the vitality to classical programming that protesters believe it doesn’t require.
Nesrallah instantly seems like the kind of media figure that once would’ve been hired by Moses Znaimer, in contrast to the superintendent and schoolmarm types once entrusted with microphones at the CBC. But the lineup of Znaimer’s opportunistically labeled “The Nation’s Classical Station,” heard locally at 96.3 FM, currently employs no parallel. This might be radio but, under the circumstances, appearance is everything.
Freshly perpetuated by CBC Radio 2 is their belief in being all things to all people. The question is, do prospective listeners buy the notion that they are one of those “all people”? Force-feeding Western European culture to Canadian farmers via radio airwaves seemed an archaic enough idea when CBC started producing original FM content in 1964 — 45 years is an awfully long time to leave popular music genres to the free market to decide what to do with.
A need to update the mandate of Radio 2 reflects the fact that, in its effort to make money, commercial radio generally gave up trying to capture the public imagination through spinning music.
That there is an overwhelming amount of wide-appeal music with zero chance of getting widespread airplay is no surprise — things started fragmenting in that direction decades ago — although the evisceration of the record industry gave validation to a new era.
So, then why adopt mainstream broadcast industry doublespeak in trying to explain what Radio 2 will do?
Chris Boyce, programming director for CBC Radio, trotted out the iPod analogy for the first time since… well, since the “We Play What We Want” slogan for born-in-Canada post-boomer variety hits format JACK-FM was paradoxically explained to skeptical American listeners in 2005. No need to bother with the hassle of figuring out how to use an MP3 player when ours is stocked with greatest hits of Huey Lewis and the News, etc.
“You shouldn’t have to settle for anything less than that on the radio,” said Boyce.
Breaking boundaries! Crossing genres! Yes, but whomever are we doing that for?
Maybe it can all be blamed on Paul Simon’s 1986 album Graceland, opening yuppie ears to the notion that there was a world of rhythms previously kept behind global barriers, while they were all caught up in listening to Paul Simon. From that point forward, the enlightened liberals among us would learn to party in all languages: Celtic! Klezmer! Polka! Samba! Zouk!
CBC Radio 2 is promising nothing of the sort, really. Rather, it’s being sold as the more sedate middle-aged interpretation of that world-beating perspective. Yes, the message involves plenty of inclusiveness — live homegrown acts offering songs between speeches at the launch hopped from guitarist Alex Cuba to classical Gryphon Trio, folkie Basia Bulat to R&B belter Divine Brown — but this rebel sell also teeters awfully close to the “no hard rock and no rap” positioning widely adopted by adult-contemporary stations across North America in the early-’90s.
The primary argument made by graying classical purists — that children like they once were are being systematically deprived of the enlightenment that comes with broadcasting symphonic sounds before and after the schoolday — is no less ludicrous. But at least it rationalizes the continued existence of a certain serendipity that the 21st century has otherwise rendered obsolete.
Meanwhile, this new schedule sheds light on the evening shows installed on CBC Radio 2 in April 2007: dinner jazz show Tonic, concert spotlight Canada Live, ambient bedtimer The Signal, and noctural mood-ring Nightwatch. But none of them are hosted by names widely known for anything but broadcasting — unlike two of the newer attention-baiting hires.
Molly Johnson purringly elucidated her history with the CBC: growing up across the street from the Mr. Dressup puppeteer, dropping by Peter Gzowski’s Morningside to explain bohemia to him, and later — while her music career was in corporate flux — getting called in for voiceover jobs, even though she was deemed “too sexy for sports.” Today, she made clear that her role on the new Radio 2 is that of establishment wacky chick, kind of like when Eartha Kitt resurfaced 20 years after playing Catwoman to become a gay disco icon. Mercifully, it seems Johnson has upmarket ambitions associated with jazzy weekend morning radio. The old men who control corporate Canada will love it.
And while the Radio 2 Morning show will continue to be hosted by Tom Allen — shifting gears from classical to the much-dreaded potpourri — the new afternoon Drive presenter is Rich Terfry, cashing in on the image cultivated as avant-rapper Buck 65 with a promised three-quarters CanCon program focusing on the words and music of singer-songwriters.
An east coast hipster who claims to hate hip-hop while rapping longingly about the 1950s? They couldn’t make this stuff up at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is why they had to hire it. Sporting a thrift-store wardrobe that made him look like he was trying too hard to seem younger than his 36 years, Terfry applied his scat style to explain his program’s agenda, closing with a quote attributed to a 1973 Mott The Hoople song, “Drivin’ Sister” — something or another about having been “too much on the clutch.”
Yet, the public unveiling of CBC Radio 2 could have been presented as a funeral for FM radio, and no one would have left feeling any different. Guess that means the wake will commence broadcast two weeks hence.
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