Hi-Fi Demonstration

In which we posit a new, perverse sub-genre of easy listening

Greetings from Montana. We’re here on Day Four of a spring-break sojourn with the kid to view large North American animals and picturesque terrain in this great land of ours. Luckily, these sights don't need my immense verbal gifts to recommend them, since for now my brain seems to be still in NYC.

That’s my jam!: Faculty rally for academic free speech at Columbia University, April 22, 2024. Sound off. (photo: UPI)

As some of you know, I write, I listen to music, and occasionally write about listening to music. But one thing I can't do is write while listening to music. I realize how out of step this makes me, given that Spotify's hottest genre seems to be "study music," with various shadings and use-cases encoded in its hundreds of other subgenres ("dark study music," "jazz study music," "dark-step organic-chemistry study music," "12-tone aleatory open-form LSAT study music," etc.).

But I could never manage this basic walking-while-gum-chewing feat even when I was 18 years old in the analog age. I've seen countless people manage it in dorm rooms, on TV shows about law school, and films about writers, where the brilliant young man (yes, always a man) hunches over his Olivetti, tap-tap-tapping away as Ornette Coleman's "Happy House" blasts away behind him, because dude has so much bandwidth that following Ornette's diabolical shitstorm of a modernist novel on wax leaves him plenty to spare in crafting his poem, novel, or reportage. (That’s assuming this typewriter isn’t just a Leroy Anderson percussion instrument.)

All that said, I can listen to music while I’m doing research, admin, and other rationalized modes of procrastination, so long as I absent myself from the selection process, which means radio, and which specifically means the jazz and classical shows on Columbia University's historic station WKCR. But this week, when these shows were interrupted by the news department's coverage of Gaza protests occurring right outside the studio door, these broadcasts showed me a listening genre I had no idea existed.

Like any college station, WKCR every so often offers the kind of amateur-hour highlights I live for. Like: nine minutes of dead air followed by the frantic voice of a young madrigal-fixated DJ apologizing for technical difficulties over a chorus of studio phones ringing off the hook. Or: a 22-year-old jazz-nerd doing his best late-night hepcat spiel, clearly confident that the mike isn’t picking up the madly barking German Shepherd in the next room.

This week, these moments were of a different order. Right in the middle of a Mingus deep cut, there’s an all-but-audible needle scratch, followed by two seconds of silence, before the DJ throws it to a jacked-up undergrad news reporter, audibly thrilled and slightly tweaked to be covering a national story on their doorstop.

On her media blog, The Present Age, Parker Molloy approvingly notes Columbia’s student-journalism coverage of the campus Gaza protests, linking to seven articles by the Columbia Daily Spectator. I feel the same of the radio’s news reporters, though their broadcasts’ effects on me are deeper and stranger than political or professional camaraderie.

It’s the medium more than the messages: milling crowd, distant car horn, chants, drumming, the breaths of a walking reporter. It’s the field-recording ambience of interviews with this spectator, that military-veteran grad student, this Palestinian PhD candidate, that organizer. Some are brilliantly persuasive. Some are beside themselves with grief. Some seem drunk on the kind of vaguely Maoist, old-school anti-colonialist rhetoric that calls opponents “swine.” I drop in and out, keeping the radio on all day, warmed by the sound itself.

Why? Why do I find these sounds, in some weird, politically illegible way soothing, reassuring?

Is it the fact that I attended Berkeley, which lived up to its rep as the birthplace of the ‘60s Free Speech Movement by having a protest nearly every week and, for this reason, I now hear shouts and marches as signs that spring is finally here?

Is it that these broadcasts provide audio is evidence that, despite their president breaking up encampments, inviting the NYPD onto the campus for the first time since 1968, and briefly threatening to pull the plug on WKCR, Columbia’s students and faculty are keeping free speech alive?

Or is there an aesthetic at work here?

I’ve been around in various listening circles long enough to suspect that there actually is a subset of audiophile freaks that I need to contact. These fiends and file-trading fans would be somewhere between Deadhead tapers, armchair historians, and the getaway driver in the 1972 heist film The Hot Rock, who listens to vinyl of the Indianapolis 500 to unwind. People, like me, who prefer the parts of Woodstock that don’t have music.

I can almost see the postings on Subreddit, Discogs, and collector blogs. Heads seeking hard-to-find treasures. Aesthetes litigating overrated chestnuts.

-Dakota Access Pipeline — Standing Rock River Reservation, Sep 14, 2016. Decent chants, sick drum circle, eco vibes. B+

-Occupy Wall Street — Zuccotti Park, Nov 12, 2011, Anticapitalist chill-step, autumn air, human microphone! A-

-Women’s March — Jan 21, 2017, Nome, Alaska, Front St. across from post office, on front lawn of Old St. Joe's. Indie AF. B+

-Zine El Abidine Ben Ali Must Go, Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, Dec 30, 2010. Jasmine fervor, sick al-ughniya al-multazima.

-Online rumors of a super-rare Sony TCM-100-captured bootleg of Tiananmen Square, Beijing, June 1, 1989. Must have!

Of course, this kind of listening pleasure relies on not actually being at the demonstration. Not having your own freedom, safety, or principles on the line. Not being driven to the streets because you’ve reached that point Mario Savio described in 1964, when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop.

Some of the people on WKCR’s broadcast have clearly reached that point. I entered college at the tail end of the fight against apartheid in South Africa, a place I’d never have imagined visiting, and a cause that now seems quaintly simple compared to the one on campus today. And having been to 20-25 protests, marches, demonstrations, and riots, I don’t wish I were out there with them. But I’m uplifted by the sound they make. I don’t know what the sound signifies, other than people trying to live together, who haven’t quite given up on the idea of a humane future.