Hellchick

I start working around 7:30 in the morning. (I have no commute, so I'm up at 7 and ready to work in thirty minutes.) After about an hour of checking into the gaming sites, reading email, and organizing my list of things to do for the day, I load up Triplej, an Australian radio station that has this terrific blend of good talk programming and current, progressive music. I listen to them while I work; I have no office mates to speak to, no water cooler to gossip around, so this is my human environment noise, really. Triplej's morning show is better by leagues than any American morning show I've ever heard. Plus, they can say "fuck" on the radio, so that makes it instantly better.

So I listen to Triplej until the morning show is over (now that they've moved Steve Cannane's show to a 10:30 pm PST time slot, hmmph), and about that time I'm ready to listen to Radio Rossii (Radio of Russia). Radio Rossii seems to be a Russian kind of NPR — lots of interesting programs that run the gamut from political analysis, human interest, radio plays, music, and even English language learning programs. It's the radio dramas that really intrigue me. Here I can actually get some practice out of my Russian with dialogue and story narration that is far simpler than the higher level and more challenging news broadcasts (to help me with my formal, more educated Russian, I try to read at least one major news story per day in Russian off of either BBC Russia or ITAR-TASS).

By the late afternoon, the weekday's programming tends to be music such as opera or English music, so it's time to switch to something like either NPR or the BBC World Service, or Rhapsody's music service. In Rhapsody I have a large playlist, at least 25% of which is made up of artists I have never heard before I started using the service, represented by independent music labels or in genres that defy radio-friendly broadcasting.

All of these together made me realize today how the Internet has done two things. First, it has replaced my fascination with shortwave radio. When I was a kid, my family had a shortwave radio. I was intrigued by the idea that I could hear radio broadcasts from other countries and they would be picked up by that little receiver. Every night I'd mess with the dial, usually getting in the BBC World Service — and as pedestrian as that is, really, when it comes to the possibilities, even that excited me because it was foreign — but sometimes managing to get in a Chinese station, or a Spanish station, and sometimes, if the atmospheric conditions were right, Radio Moscow. For a long time I didn't have a book to tell me what was on and when, so each night it was a gamble as to what I'd pick up, especially since the atmospheric conditions play a huge part in shortwave transmissions.

Years later my husband bought me a shortwave radio when we lived in Wyoming and had a dial-up connection, and before stations really began broadcasting much on the net because of the bandwidth. I still have that radio, although we only use it now on park outings for the FM and AM bands. But this time he bought me program guides so I knew what was on. For a long time I listened faithfully to a Chinese station that would include Chinese-English lessons in its programming. I also caught a North Korean propoganda station out of Pyongyang that was fun to listen to for the novelty. And I even would regularly get those spy number stations, where they broadcast a series of numbers and that's it. It was truly thrilling to hear this stuff. It was from across the world! I remember hearing from one English-speaking station in another country that it was a tradition for many shortwave enthusiasts to record the details of a station they heard and might have difficulty getting again, and then mail them for a postcard from that station. It's the postal equivalent to putting pins on a map.

Nowadays I don't listen to the shortwave radio and instead I get my foreign culture doses in stations that broadcast over the net now that bandwidth is flowing freely. It's definitely an improvement in that I can listen to virtually anything anywhere without wondering whether I'll be able to pick it up later. But I miss the excitement of turning the dial and hearing foreign voices in foreign languages through the static and trying to decipher just what it is I'm listening to. Some days I think about getting a bigger, better shortwave radio just to keep the dying art alive.

Secondly, I realized just how much the net is changing how we listen to and learn about music. I have so many CDs now from bands I'd never heard of that were local acts I'd either heard about through people in other parts of the country or the world, all because I talk to them on the net. I bought a David Bridie CD, imported, after I'd heard his music on Triplej and had never heard it in the States before. It's such a liberating thought to feel free of the record labels and the cookie-cutter radio programming and be able to find and support bands that can use the net as their radio. Word of mouth has always been popular for a band, but moreso now than ever, I think.

One thing I have discovered through all of this, however, is that I'm not really into Russian pop music. It's very...well...pop-ish.