#am radio

[blondebrainpowered]

Art deco WJR transmitter building, 1934, Detroit

[stone-cold-groove]

From the classic audio files: the Webcor Imperial Stereofonic Tape Recorder - circa 1959.

[papercutpinetree]

Listening to conference on an AM radio station and remembering how much better FM is while also feeling like I'm listening to Effie and Zebulon Mucklewain give a sermon in 1925 Arkansas.

[justurtypicalinternetnerd]

there is something so incredible to me that in the capatalist hellscape we're living in, radio stations still throw their sounds out into the air like that. there is no way for them to know whether or not i'm tuned in on my 7-year-old alarm clock, but they still get companies paying for ad slots as if their advertisements will (a) reach anyone at all who will (b) be interested in their products. there are very few reliable ways to test either of these metrics, yet that's the lifeforce of most of these radio stations. without the historical context you could not explain this to anyone my age or younger who has grown up with every form of suveillance imaginable and corporations out to get them around every corner. i love radio

[thesobsister]

Jerry Kasenetz, a King of Bubblegum Pop Music, Dies at 82 - The New Y…

Jerry Kasenetz, a King of Bubblegum Pop Music, Dies at 82 - The New Y…

Jerry Kasenetz, who, with his partner Jeffry Katz, birthed “bubblegum” pop music while at Buddah Records in the late 1960s, has died, age 82.

Kasenetz, a child of Long Island wealth, referred to himself in interviews as both “crazy” and “zany,” two of the most damning self-descriptors in the book. What the obituary tactfully refers to as his “high-wattage personality” powered his and Katz’s hitmaking nous and fervor, however, which silenced critics of their then-unhip sounds and bands, as bubblegum hits peppered the upper reaches of the pop charts from 1967 through 1971.

Many of these tunes were some of this sobsister’s early musical sustenance, blasting out via AM on a little transistor radio.

aav.

The Music Explosion, The Ohio Express, and 1910 Fruitgum Company were the hitmakers for Kasenetz-Katz while at Buddha. These are a few of their hits.

[skooodles]

[serpentinesheldonserpentine]

I don’t wanna go too deep here. So instead I’ll simply note that four of the top ten songs listed above are by Black singers or bands. A few years later music moved to the FM band and the dim hippies who made those early programming choices excluded Black acts from their selection.

Reciting Kahlil Gibran while Flying by BeatleGeorge was playing replaced the mile a minute witty song introduction by Jocko Henderson, Jerry Blavat, and other characters.

It was not progress.

Smoke up hippies.

[peteneems]