Listening to Rihanna earlier this week (not on the radio) plead with the DJ to put the song “pon de replay” and also to “turn the music up” because “all the gyal on the dance floor wantin’ some more” suddenly reminded me that I had not listened to the radio in a while. And the reason is that I could not find a DJ who could put it ‘pon de replay.’
Oh I know Rihanna was referring to a DJ in a club in her song. But clubs are places I very rarely visit. So I would want to use the radio to find my dance music, my exercise jams, daydreaming tunes, music to cook by and to fall asleep with. It has been a learning experience.
Back in the day, there were more ‘Radio Announcers’ than DJs. And back then, the radio was where you could hear English the way it was meant to be spoken. Elocution was clearly a must when auditions were done and the way announcers spoke made you aware that they knew it was a privilege to be invited into your home via the airwaves.
Fast forward to today and proper diction is a dying or dead skill. The voices on the radio make you wonder if they still do auditions. On any given day, there is a mish-mash of contrived American and Jamaican accents vying with the local ‘city-speak’—a far cry from the musical creolese you would hear in the country areas.
Today there are more DJs than announcers. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they would just let the music play. But there are DJs trying to be announcers – some of them failing badly – and subjecting the listening public to tones that grate on the ears and disturb the senses. The surfeit of call-in programmes do not help.
Very few of the local programmes on the radio are informative. Some are mildly amusing, you know where you might shake your head and smile wryly. Or you might go ‘hmmmm’. Others are wildly humorous, not that they’re so funny but simply because if you don’t laugh at what you’re hearing you might find yourself deeply depressed.
Ideally for me, radio needs to progress to a medium that provides news, the weather, interesting views and interviews and music – lots and lots of music. But perhaps given the current state of things, I ought to have said regress, because in its heyday that’s what radio once offered.
But I’m a realist. I know what is not possible. So I would settle for music. And not just any music, good music, great music, because it’s out there, and it’s available.
I would be thrilled if the DJs could just pick a genre, or a period on a given day for a given programme and go with it.
I would expect some respect: you know those explicit lyrics in some songs? Well that’s for private listening, Mr DJ. Refrain from playing it on the radio.
I would hope that local singers would get fair exposure. In a seven-day week, is one hour a week of local music too much? No, it’s not enough. But it would do for starters.
And finally, I would settle for DJs not turning the airwaves into some sort of ‘DJ Slam’. In other words, talk less and let the music play.
