Radio Killed the Video Star

Electra got her first radio today. The significance of this is timely.

In this household, and in countless households throughout the world, our children are growing up immersed in the visual. TV, movies, DVDs, YouTube, Facebook, etc . . . it all adds up to a virtually visual bombardment that is is almost impossible to ignore.

Today, a day of transition, the day this single little girl took her first step into the world and out of our cocoon, a radio was introduced. The TV was turned off, the movies were put away, the computer was put to sleep, and a radio was introduced.

You will be glad to know, especially in this time of great transition with regards to the Houston radio landscape, that one more life opened to the power of the radio airwaves.

As she grew to fill the seemingly endless space created by this new universe of experience, her newfound power burst forth with an equally boundless energy. As she traveled across the FM dial she quickly worked her way farther and farther to the left. It was here that she settled, it was here where she felt the radio was actually speaking to her, here where she felt that she was engaged with what she heard, was an active participant and no longer just a captive.

The constant bombardment of commercial gloss had subsided. The brash and almost confrontational affront of the on-air DJ had been eliminated. The neon-glow of thousands of hours of carefully calculated programming, all created as a response to thousands more hours of carefully calculated marketing research, simply went away in the moment of discovery of something genuine.

And on this day, this, her first day of school, this day in which this force of nature made a huge step into tomorrow, on this day, and maybe even more importantly, this girl took a huge step into the same moment of discovery that we too, that you as well have shared, and found out for herself the true power of radio.

Faced with the new power of true creative energy, she did the one thing left to do . . .

She danced.

She danced to the left hand of the dial, she danced to music a person selected because it felt right for the moment. She danced to music the made her feel a part of the experience. She danced, and expressed a sense of joy that for us is bittersweet, because as it stands today, the future of this sort of amazement is dying on the vine.

As of last week, Houston adds herself to the growing list of places that reflect the dying of the true possibility of radio. Losing the resource that KTRU has brought to Houston for decades, both as a literal destination on the otherwise white-bread, predictable product delivery system that radio has become, and as a sort-of cultural attache between the open-ended exploration of an honest love for music and the equally hungry listener is something that cannot be measured.

At least, it cannot be measured on any known scale.

To see this beautiful child dancing to her own reflection in the turned-off television, dancing to the song an actual person picked out, hammers home what makes KTRU so important to Houston, and to everyone, everywhere. And, it points out, without mercy, that in the coming months, when KTRU is gone, these pure moments of human discovery, in this very singular way, will soon be gone as well. We can all relate to this in our own way, and that is why this is a loss that goes beyond the world of money, beyond the world of politics, and reaches directly into our hearts and crushes the life from it.

And that will be that.