Nicely put
Enough is enough with radio ribaldry
Posted on Tue, Mar. 02, 2004
By Frank Gray The Journal Gazette
The powers that be have begun to crack down on talking dirty on the radio.
One has to wonder, will many of us really miss it? Are we really being robbed of the pursuit of happiness, or is this just another case of the pendulum, having gone too far in one direction, beginning to swing the other way?
Back in the 1950s and '60s, the pendulum was on the other side. Life was squeaky clean, or at least we insisted on making it look that way. Actors playing man and wife couldn't get into the same bed, even if they were married in real life. When it was time to retire, they climbed into twin beds.
The top movies were films such as "Around the World in 80 Days," "The Sound of Music," "My Fair Lady," "The Music Man" and "Mary Poppins" - feel-good stuff with lots of singing and dancing. The type of flicks your mother would point to and say, "That's why you're taking tap dancing lessons."
Hit songs' lyrics concentrated on wanting to dance or hold hands or kiss someone when everyone knew we all thought about a lot more than that.
On the radio, you didn't cuss - period. To say "darn" and "heck" was considered strong language.
Life, for the most part, was presented artificially.
Sometime in the late 1960s, though, the pendulum began to swing in the other direction. What nudged it to do so? Take your pick.
We can argue that this is good, that the make-believe world we were forced to inhabit caused us to ignore ugly realities, that the moralistic constraints we had to live with were like tourniquets that prevented creative juices from flowing.
The pendulum, though, swung back for nearly 40 years. The flow of creative juices became a hemorrhage. We began to confuse outrageousness with creativity.
It all exploded on Super Bowl Sunday when a male singer - some of us still aren't convinced it wasn't deliberate - ripped off part of a female singer's costume, exposing her breast.
Suddenly there were crackdowns all over - four-minute delays on music award programs, the firing of disc jockeys in Florida, the suspending of another national DJ's show from a radio network, a vow by one popular syndicated radio team to tone down its material, and promises by other broadcasters that things were going to change.
In short, people all over seemed to declare, the constant crude sex talk has gone far enough. We're sick of it, and we're not going to take it any more.
Not everyone is happy. One TV network, reporting on the sudden policy switch, referred to talk show personality Howard Stern as a victim of the crackdown after he was suspended by one of the radio networks thatcarry his show.
That's a strange way to look at it, sort of like calling the streaker at the Super Bowl a victim of the rules against streaking.
Stern, according to an Associated Press report, fussed about his suspension on his show, which remains on the air on some stations, and then took a call from his girlfriend to talk about the sex they'd had the night before.
The problem when the pendulum swings all the way is that entertainment ceases to be entertaining. There is no longer an attempt to be more creative or imaginative. Instead, people only pull harder, striving to reach a little further, to be more outrageous. As they pull, they dig themselves into a rut.
When that happens, you end up with people talking to their girlfriends on the radio about the sex they had the night before and calling it entertainment. It's not funny, or clever, or amusing. It's just outrageous, or exhibitionistic, what you could call a geek.
Nothing against sexually oriented jokes, of course. They can be hilariously funny. And geeks should be allowed to exist. You have to make a living somehow.
Too many radio stations, however, began to embrace the outrageous, hinging everything on sex and crudity. Some DJs couldn't talk about a round of golf without introducing sex into it. Punching buttons on the radio dial, one was as likely as not to end up hearing strained attempts at crude, sexual humor, attempts so strained they just weren't funny any more.
The powers that be reacted, like angry parents hopping up from the sofa and screaming, "That's enough. Shut up."
What's going to be fun now, if the pendulum really has begun to swing the other way, is to see who can be entertaining without talking solely about sex, sex organs and bathroom activities.
Frank Gray has held positions as a reporter and editor at The Journal Gazette since 1982, and has been writing a column on local issues since 1998. His column is published Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. He can be reached by phone at 461-8376; fax, 461-8893; or e-mail, [email protected].. To discuss this column or others he has written recently, go to the Frank Gray topic of "The Board" at www.journalgazette.net.[/size]
