The WSJR Summer Podcast

The recent news of the downfall of Frequency Down on KNTU (one of the last good radio shows in town), combined with the continuing limpness and utter irrelevance of the Adventure Club, the Edge in general, and the rest of the radio dial in DFW that isn't called NPR, Legends 77 or The Beat has prompted many recent conversations around here concerning the piss poor state of Dallas radio and the local music media in general. The popular consensus on the subject seems to be that the local Dallas music scene suffers due to a lack of decent radio programming in the area.

And although we would agree that local radio is terrible 99.9% of the time (with that one one hundredth of a percent reserved for Meat Radio, which seems to be getting better and better every weekend), we sort of have to ask why anyone really cares. Not that sarcastic apathy is something that should be worn as a badge of honor, but when has the radio ever been good in Dallas? And in what way does its suckness take away from local music? Again, it seems that this is yet another excuse that scenesters, band members and everyone else likes to make instead of dealing with the whole "lack of talent in the area" issue head on. This might also be why people make empty calls for local radio to focus more on local music, with the idea being that the local scene would improve if more local bands got more radio play. This is one issue that finds us in agreement with Adventure Club Josh: local music, at this point, doesn't deserve much radio play, and if anything, hearing the bands that seem to be popular in Dallas at the moment ( Black Tie, Belafonte, The Valentines, etc.) would probably do more to convince people to stay home than anything else.

While its true that more solid radio programming would probably help local bands, and actually hearing good music on the radio from outside of Dallas might inspire some kid here or there to pick up an instrument and start a band that we might actually enjoy in a few years, podcasts, audio streams, internet radio, Myspace, satellite radio and many other innovations have left that argument with a hell of a lot of holes in it. People don't need broadcast radio to hear interesting music anymore, and while better programming would certainly improve car trips and serve as a nice change of pace, we're not sure what kind of impact it would have aside from that.

So whats the point of all this? Well, the first is that local radio sucks, and requires us to only listen to Meat Radio, talk radio and hip hop (not that theres anything wrong with that necessarily.) The second is that local music gets little attention from local stations for many reasons (corporate controlled playlists, legalized payola, etc.), but one of the main reasons is that local music doesn't happen to be very good right now. And finally, with all the options that people have for hearing music these days, the state of local radio might not be all that relevant when discussing the health of the local music scene. I'd be willing to bet that commercial broadcast radio could disappear all together aside from NPR, Mavs games and The Ticket, and most readers of this blog would hardly even notice. And with Clear Channel running the vast majority of the show in this town, that is probably a good thing. Its a good thing that many of us choose to ignore what they're selling us, because it shows that we can possibly turn our indifference towards boring products into a market force that asks a bit more of our media.

So in that spirit, we're announcing the We Shot J.R. summer podcast. No, this isn't our attempt to "change" anything or to become something other than a blog with a little podcast. Its just our attempt to join in what everyone else seems to be doing: ignoring the overly commercial avenues of communication that have traditionally been available while seeking out better media outlets to hear and share good music. What we're planning isn't a regular podcast, but a 2006 midterm report showcasing the few highlights that have come from the area so far this year. What we plan to do is play the 12 best songs to have been released by DFWd bands so far in 2006, and we'd like to get some suggestions from our readers. We've already got a lot of the songs picked out, and we're not taking a vote. We'd just like to see people share some of the local tracks that they have been digging this year in case we've missed something. So share away in this comment thread if you're interested, or tell us that there couldn't possibly be twelve good local songs to put on a podcast this year, or that the idea is dumb all together. We plan to have this thing widely available in the area within the next four to six weeks, and we might even include some other features in the podcast as well. It seems that a lot of people are already in this business, and we figured we'd give it a try. We'll give you more details when we figure it all out.