Post by Peter Schaefer, Marymount Manhattan College

Given the tremendous wealth that continues to pour into Manhattan and Western Brooklyn, it’s hard to imagine that in the 1970s New York City came perilously close to declaring bankruptcy. The city nearly defaulted on large loans due in part to revenue reductions associated with decreased local manufacturing. To help remedy the situation deep cuts were made across the municipal budget. As a result, New Yorkers saw a city on the brink of collapse with irregular garbage collection, shuttered local libraries, and public school classrooms bursting beyond capacity. Public broadcasting was particularly hard hit with hiring freezes at the municipally owned public radio station WNYC, along with a reduction in staff and constant threats to curtail broadcasting hours. Budget cuts to stations like WNYC resulted in dramatically decreased efforts to save material from this era. In retrospect, the financial catastrophe of 1970s New York might seem like a mere pothole on the road to the city’s current renaissance. But in regard to radio preservation, the ‘70s fiscal crisis left a giant crater in the historical record.

Before visiting the WNYC Archive I assumed that the older the broadcast era, the spottier the historical record becomes. That is not the case, however. Due to the 1970s fiscal crisis, WNYC recordings from that era are the least represented in the archive. It’s contrary to what one might assume, but there’s a richer and more comprehensive historical record for NYC public radio of the 1930s than for the 1970s. This example attests to the fact that what’s included in an archive depends on much more than the durability of recording formats. Archives develop over time because of decisions made in response to cultural assumptions and economic imperatives more so than the material conditions of sound recording. These decisions are often hidden from view when archives are made publicly accessible.

In regard to radio preservation efforts, such as the vital new Radio Preservation Task Force, how might we think differently about the representation of extant materials such that what’s not preserved is also a part of the public face of an archive? In what follows I consider the implications of embracing the monuments to radio history while simultaneously acknowledging the surrounding ruins. I explain some of the emerging norms for radio preservation, and I conclude by connecting contemporary fallacies about the utility of information to the question of how to represent radio history.

The Radio Preservation Task Force, along with other like-minded initiatives such as the American Archive Content Inventory, is establishing what it means to preserve 20th century radio history in the 21st century. This history is still being written, but so far the public access points for the radio historical record employ tagged audio clips, social media updates, and keyword searches to databases. These interactive options are an important resource for communication historians and the public at large, and at the same time, these options are becoming ossified as the way we access the cultural history of radio. What if we offered additional ways of showing radio history that do more than provide a means to access and comment on surviving documents?

Contemporary radio preservation efforts tend to present history in ways that elide the space between the past and the present. For example, take the show Nights in Latin America broadcast on WQXR from 1947 to 1971 and hosted by Pru Devon. Although the vast majority of WQXR materials are lost to the ages, much of the content and supporting documents related to Nights in Latin America survive. Ms. Devon’s daughter saved her mother’s scripts, research notes, air-checks, and fan mail and recently donated these items to the WQXR archive. The ruins of the station’s past now appear forgotten as preservations efforts for the show oscillates from transient to permanent.

Radio history appears stable, durable, and immutable via tributes to Nights in Latin America aired on NPR shows like All Things Considered and represented online. These preservation efforts and its attendant public face, do not show the fact that the historical record for WQXR is spotty at best. Some lacquer discs, some quarter inch audio tapes, and some assorted ephemera comprise the bulk of the archive for the station’s long 20th century legacy. What we see in this example is the wide gap between the appearance of an archive and its actual content. As a result, radio preservation efforts when made publicly accessible typically appear as an unmediated report of an ideally preserved past.

Without some nod to the ruins of radio, cultural artifacts are represented in ways that gloss over the decisions that shape an archive’s contours. These decisions may be motivated by economics (as seen in the 1970s NYC fiscal crisis example) or by cultural values (as with the historical revisionism of the Radio Preservation Task Force) or by other fortunate circumstances (such as the mindful conservation of a family legacy as with the example of Nights in Latin America). But in all cases, radio preservation efforts stem from a lineage of integral decisions. Some of these decisions might be lost to the ages as well, but there is value in striving to represent this loss, however imperfect.

Just like there are often disguised decisions that shape an archive, decisions are made in the creation of all contemporary data sets. I frequently encounter students who are surprised when I encourage them to use resources other than Google Scholar to access scholarly literature. These students don’t yet know that Google is a filter not a portal to a limitless universe of information. Anecdotes such as this reflect why I think now is the time to call attention to the ruins of radio history. Common access points for radio’s past offer easily accessible and instantly recoverable historical artifacts. These interfaces deepen historical knowledge but also lend credence to notions of information as a means for social control.

The historical record is being deployed in new ways via aggregated data sets. Evgeny Morozov refers to “solutionism” as a mistaken belief in the ability of big data to solve social problems that range from health care to crime. To put such faith in aggregate data analysis ignores the fact that all data are imperfect reflections of the reality they represent. To embrace the gaps in the radio historical record works against current tendencies to believe in the essential unmediated status of data, whether these data pertain to non-network radio broadcasts or data directly connected to social issues. In short, a turn toward radio ruins serves a critical function in the fight against an ideology of information control.

Now you might be thinking that it’s fun to privilege the vibrant strands of radio history, and it’s a downer to acknowledge what’s lost, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The gems uncovered via the vital work of radio preservationists will sparkle even brighter if shown in context as the rare items that they are. In other words, a turn toward radio ruins doesn’t have to be just about loss but could help make what’s found appear all the more special. And in so doing helps embrace the particular against the aggregate.

The Radiolab episode “Crossroads” aired on April 16, 2012 and exemplified how this public radio program uses sound to explore the past for listeners. Radiolab has won numerous awards, has a significant audience, and is on tour this fall around the country. It is thus an important site where listeners interact with narratives about our history, one of the many subjects Radiolab engages with. Radiolab is a program structured around curiosity, and explores familiar issues from a new perspective. We hear this in “Crossroads,” as Radiolab explores the cultural myths that surround the successful and mysterious blues musician Robert Johnson going down to the crossroads in the 1920s and selling his soul to the devil for the talent to play the guitar.

Oh Brother Where Art Thou's Tommy Johnson sold his soul to the devil for guitar talents--a story reminiscent of Robert Johnson's legend.

This is not a current event story, not breaking news, but an issue that digs at the myths and material traces related to Johnson, myths that have pervaded our culture for the last century. It can be heard on Cream’s “Crossroads” or seen in the Coen Brothers’ Oh Brother Where Art Thou. Radiolab mixes actuality sound (sound recorded outside of the studio on location) with new interviews, archived interviews, and music, around the voices of co-hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. All of these components overlap and function together as Radiolab becomes an academic investigation, an artful montage of sounds, and an informal fireside chat. Thus, Radiolab blurs the line between reality and art to tell a story that will pique listeners’ interest in cultural history, a topic with the potential to get boring.

One of the key elements of the show is the dialogue between co-hosts Abumrad and Krulwich. They intentionally use an informal, conversational style to get listeners interested and engaged. Scripted and edited before the show airs, their “natural” discussions invite the listener to feel at ease. Their dialogue also functions in another way, as Abumrad usually tells a story or explains some phenomenon and Krulwich–a stand-in for the audience–asks questions and tries to make sense of what Abumrad is saying. Krulwich’s questions are absolutely scripted, but sound as if they come up spontaneously in conversation.

The infamous crossroads in Clarksdale, MI, which Abumrad tells us is now a tourist attraction.

We hear this at the beginning of “Crossroads” as Abumrad begins to tell Krulwich about his recent trip to the crossroads at midnight and meet the devil. Before he does, we hear actuality noise of the car and the wind as Abumrad talks with someone named Pat and admits that he “is starting to regret doing this.” He then tells us Pat turned off the headlights to scare him. At this point, we have no idea where Abumrad is. This actuality noise builds mystery and engages the listener’s curiosity. Abumrad’s voice begins to narrate over this recording, overlapping with the sounds of him and Pat in the car. Krulwich jumps in, asking, “well, where are you?” Abumrad explains he was in the Mississippi Delta. By listening to this exchange, we can see how dialogue works to tell a story in a more engaging way than if Abumrad just reported where he was and what he was doing. We also see how Krulwich becomes an audience surrogate, acting as if he too is in the dark and does not know Abumrad’s whereabouts, which is doubtful.

Radiolab co-hosts Krulwich and Abumrad.

This segment also points to the show’s overlapping sound tracks, a technique used to help listeners inhabit Johnson’s story. Abumrad continues to tell Krulwich about his trip to Mississippi. The actuality noise fades out as he segues into discussing Johnson, the myths that surround him, and then blues music. Music, interviews, and archived sounds are woven through Abumrad and Krulwich’s discussion as Abumrad takes us through the history of this myth about Johnson and the devil. In “Crossroads,” their conversation moved listeners from one piece of sonic evidence to another as Abumrad essentially builds an almost academic study of Johnson. We hear interviews with historians and music critics; we hear details read from historical records and artifacts; we hear Johnson’s music. These components are pieced together to convey both an exploration and an argument about Johnson.

At the end, the very work of historiography and compiling past narratives is troubled and complicated. In an interview, a historian recants something he wrote about Johnson. As he studied the famous blues artist through oral histories and official records, he came to find out that there were many guitar players in the South at that time named Robert Johnson. We end the program on this note of uncertainty, but Abumrad tells us that we still have recordings of Johnson and perhaps that’s enough. Johnson’s music plays underneath Abumrad’s words. Then Krulwich directs us to further reading on the topic. Here is where we can see Radiolab‘s goal–not to provide listeners with a clear finite answer to a question about the history of Johnson, but rather to arouse our curiosity on the subject and perhaps encourage us to question dominant narratives of the past.

On Radio is a new Antenna column dedicated to contemporary radio programming and other issues surrounding the medium in all its forms.

Hands down, Radiolab is the most interesting American radio program of the past decade. Although, that’s not a particularly bold claim, really, as there are plenty of people out there who have heaped similar praise upon the series, not least of all Ira Glass and the MacArthur genius grant folks. Produced by the New York City public radio station WNYC and distributed nationally through National Public Radio (NPR), Radiolab is a math, science, and philosophy show hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. The program deals with “big questions,” as their website puts it – things like life, death, knowledge, the universe – typically through broadly themed episodes on topics such as laughter, the human brain, race, time, deception, and randomness. Radiolab is a radio feature in that it is a (mostly) non-fiction program that mixes fairly traditional elements of journalism and news reporting with more artistic and dramatic elements. If non-music radio programming can be placed on a continuum with straight news talk placed at one extreme and the fictionalized radio drama at the other, then the radio feature (or “radio documentary,” as John Biewen and other radio producers refer to it) is situated somewhere in the middle, a mix of words, sounds, and music that merges the informational content of journalism with the form and emotion of art.

Just as standard NPR news programs like All Things Considered are often called “news magazines,” in that they consist of numerous stories reported more in-depth than standard “headline news” style broadcasts, the term “radio feature” insinuates an even more extended, highly focused examination of a story or topic, similar to a thoroughly researched and contextualized cover story in a print magazine. Often, as is the case with Radiolab and also This American Life, multiple stories may be covered within an hour-long episode, but they nevertheless all tie into an overarching theme or narrative. This is not breaking news, even though it is journalistic in the sense that it is informative, educational, and frequently timely and topical.

Emphasis is placed on characters – people – who the audience is invited to identify with through fleshed out, exceptionally visualized scenes. This is where the artistic and dramatic elements come in: the focus of a radio feature like Radiolab is on storytelling rather than mere reporting of events and facts, and this is often achieved through vertically structured and intimate, slice-of-life narratives. NPR’s news magazines regularly attempt to craft similar segments, but what really sets a radio feature apart is its meticulous attention to form – Biewen, in the introduction to his edited volume Reality Radio (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), calls radio documentarians “journalists/artists” who “use sound to tell true stories artfully.” This emphasis on form can range from simply playing with voice and basic narrative structure to experimenting wildly with actuality sound and music in a way that verges on sound art – it does not always need to be “complex” or affectedly avant-garde. Still, radio features are able to sidestep conventions and engage in a level of experimentation that standard radio news programming rarely, if ever, does.

Radiolab tends more toward the “wild experimentation” end of that spectrum, even though the core of its aesthetic is what host Jad Abumrad, in an essay he penned in Reality Radio, describes as “the pleasant illusion of ‘two guys chatting’.” He’s referring here to the back-and-forth dialogue that occurs between co-hosts Abumrad (pictured left) and Robert Krulwich (pictured right) – a loose, conversational style that is also extended to the discussions between the hosts and their interviewees. And indeed, there is an emphasis placed on voice and narration – the voices of the hosts and interviewees stitched together to recount experience. Still, the show is, at its most basic, “about curiosity and discovery,” to quote Abumrad again, and this inquisitive, innovative spirit is extended from the show’s focus on “big ideas” to the way it explores, through sound, those ideas.

Most notably, the producers quickly and often abruptly butt voices up against one another, as well as layer voices on top of each other and then layer atmospheric sound, sound effects, and music on top of (or underneath) it all. For instance, in the recent Radiolab episode “Patient Zero,” the hosts examine the concept of “patient zero,” meaning the case that can be identified as the starting point of an outbreak. They begin with the story of Typhoid Mary, the woman who has been commonly understood as the source of the first typhoid fever outbreak in the United States, in the early 1900s in the New York City area. But in fact, they begin the episode somewhat confusingly with a pair of producers randomly speaking to one another (“So have I said where we are? Am I on tape yet?”) in what is clearly an outdoor environment, a brisk wind creating loud distortion in the microphone. Abumrad quickly identifies the producers but does not otherwise introduce the story or the episode. Returning to the actuality sound, one of the producers explains from the field that they are on an abandoned island where a woman with an infectious disease was at one time quarantined, but the exact location and identity of the woman are still unnamed. Then, Abumrad and Krulwich begin their host narration, which takes the form of a conversational, improvisational-sounding dialogue. Krulwich asks, “This is a story that begins when?” to which Abumrad responds, “Well, actually, it starts in 1906….” The narration continues in this conversational back-and-forth mode for awhile, Krulwich playing the inquisitor to Abumrad’s more authoritative storyteller, though quickly a third voice joins the conversation, that of UW-Madison medical historian Judith Leavitt. This is clearly a storytelling style compared to news radio’s standard narrative flow of a host intro and hook followed by a reporter opening. Information is revealed quickly and yet incrementally, and much attention is paid to context and creating a visual image for the audience to imagine. Rather than the thesis, characters, and scene all being set immediately, it is two minutes into the episode before it is clearly established that they are talking about a typhoid outbreak, it is more than three-and-a-half minutes before it is announced that this is the story of Typhoid Mary, and it is not until after the four-minute mark that Abumrad and Krulwich announce the theme of the episode.

Radiolab is about exploring ideas – big, difficult, abstract ideas – and more than anything it achieves that through experience. Here, experience is meant in a double-sense: creating a fun, adventurous listening experience for the listener, as well as connecting, through intimacy and description, to universal thoughts and feelings that the audience will be acquainted with personally. For instance, the tone is loose, accessible, even fun, with digressions and moments of humor interjected. The dual narrator device functions to bring the audience into the story, Abumrad and Krulwich expressing amazement and asking each other questions in a way that often reflects what the listening audience is likely to be thinking. The banter also underlines the sense of discovery. For instance, when a startling point is revealed, the narrator’s stop and spontaneously declare, “Really?!” Moreover, the back-and-forth dialogue also functions as a kind of theater, more akin to a radio play than a news story. This intimate, first-person narration builds tension and draws the listener in, like a group of friends telling an amazing story at a bar.

Music is particularly integral to Radiolab’s aesthetic. Referring again to the “Patient Zero” episode, almost as soon as Abumrad and Krulwich’s introduction starts, musical stings begin to creep into the piece. At first, these are curious sounding, modern classical style piano and string arrangements that quietly stay beneath the voices, mostly solitary notes that sound as though they are searching for something. However, as the Typhoid Mary story begins to build with Abumrad, Krulwich, and Leavitt describing the typhoid outbreak of 1906, the music perks up, horn bursts and tense strings serving to underline the impending danger. The voices and music continue this way, emphasizing and building upon one another in a montage fashion. Pauses and silences are interspersed to highlight moments of confusion or revelation.

Indeed, these elements all work together to make Radiolab sound like the process of intellectual discovery – it is the research and problem-solving process manifested audibly.