Yes, I have playlists of my own music stored on my phone, and usually at least one audiobook too, and my car has excellent Bluetooth. No, I never subscribed to satellite radio after the introductory period ran out when the car was new; the stations available turned me off. So when I am driving, unless it is during one of the frequent periods when I am happy to be in silence, or the infrequent times I am talking on the cell phone, I listen to the radio.
WTOP can be useful for traffic and weather. I have been known to enjoy a Nats game on 106.7 The Fan. American University has a station (88.5?) that often plays excellent bluegrass. But by and large, I am a classical fan.
Nowadays every “feed” is personalized and customized, whether it be streamed music and video, the products advertised and offered, and even the so-called “news,” are honed by the omnipresent algorithms to be “just what you want to hear” -- which often includes just what (they) want you to hear. This honestly become oppressive.
It can be liberating to relinquish my input and simply listen to what the station programs for everybody. The music on our local WETA is usually okay, but the programming is better on WBJC, 91.5 out of (gasp) Baltimore. And with that distance comes a distinction: reception.
Here around Silver Spring, I am close enough to get fine reception, but the same is not true as I move around the metropolitan area; and when I head for the hills for my day off, it gets really spotty. Moving north on I-270, the signal begins to weaken, and static interferes. Usually I am enjoying the music enough to stay tuned despite the static. Sometimes, I catch myself enjoying the static, or more accurately, I enjoy listening to good music through static.
I am not sure why I appreciate static on the radio. I am not old enough to have listened to baseball late at night from distant Chicago or New York stations on my transistor AM radio. I am reminded of the daring ones under propaganda and misinformation of communist oppression huddled around a forbidden receiver to hear Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, or Radio Martí. Now those beacons of freedom are shut down otherwise neutered, and all the misinformation anyone can dream up is available right here at home. That’s why I stick to classical music, with a helping of static on the side.
More than just nostalgia, there is something real about it. It reveals something about where I am. As I head into the District, the signal weakens, but if I head north up I-95 it stays strong well into Delaware. Oddly, it is quite strong over in Loudoun County Virginia when I am heading to or from my parents; I think it’s a higher elevation. As I drove down the western slope of South Mountain toward Hagerstown, I lost it completely, but a few miles further west it came back, staticky but listenable, as I emerged from the mountain’s shadow.
There was the day when I was on the other side of the radio broadcast; I worked at the campus station all four years of my undergraduate time. “This is WLUR, 91.5 FM, and you are listening to Classical Showcase.” I learned a lot about music in that time, and a good bit about microphones, too, which has come in handy in ways I could not have foreseen - but I digress. During those years the digital recording revolution was sweeping the world, and compact discs brought crystalline recordings without the hiss and pop of long-playing vinyl and their needles and tonearms. We oohed and aaahed, and my Christmas present my senior year was a disc player, so I could spend what little money I had on my very first CDs.
Here we are, not yet forty years later, and my housemates make fun of me whenever I refer to discs of any kind, CDs or DVDs or any other such obsolescent media. I disregard their mockery, and do not mention my old LPs, which of course I kept. Oddly enough, there seems to be a revived enthusiasm for vinyl; not only old records (antiques?), but new music is produced in this cumbersome, fallible format, which leads me to believe that not only old people, but also newer generations see the value of pops, hisses, and imprecision. Digital media, it seems, are not only pristine, but they also eliminate nuance and richness by reducing everything to their binary code, ones and zeroes.
Maybe, hearing the evidence of the medium through which we are listening, whether it be static on the radio or imperfections in the record, reminds us of the mediating reality of the medium – there is something, and maybe someone, between us and what we are trying to hear. Even though we cannot separate the one from the other, we can distinguish between them. In our days of digital immersion, online experiences, and the so-called “metaverse,” it is helpful not to get fooled into thinking that the medium is the message, or that the virtual is real. Now that people’s perceptions of events are held up as concrete and compelling, it is helpful to be able to distinguish between event and experience, in the hope of holding onto the real instead of the imagined.
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. (Jn 1:14) God sent His Son, not a representative, interpreter, or message; nor artifact, book, or facsimile. All of these things, though, can help us to Him; and a little static can reveal the difference.
Monsignor Smith
