Phil Hendrie, R.I.P.

This message pertains to radio, perhaps a forbidden topic on this visually oriented blog. But I had to take a moment to note the passing of the Phil Hendrie show whose last broadcast will be June 23rd 2006. to my mind it indicates one of the final nails going into the coffin of the medium of radio which once held so much promise. Initially founded on its simplicity–one man/woman and a microphone–the medium is now one of the most visible demonstrations of how homogenized our culture is. Imagine all of “classic rock” being whittled down to the same twenty songs. Imagine romance covered in the treacle of the Delilah show. Politics is now the province of the commentators who range from mild right wing to quasi fascist; even the mildest leftist point of view is reviled as a secular assualt on THE VALUES WE HOLD MOST DEAR! Even the ubiquituous weather and traffic reports speak to a culture whose sole activity is driving to work. So the passing of the last show–except for the wacky Art Bell–that involved primarily a man’s personality, the simple technology of the radio and a community of like-minded listeners–is reason for despair. Leonard Cohen says, “The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor and there’s a mighty judgment coming. But I may be wrong….” Perhaps not a mighty judgment but a profound sense of boredom, the feeling that the Great Beast has heaved and sighed and brought forth a raisin. Radio, the most intimate of media because of the proximity of the voice to the ear, is now the most empty medium, as it rejects a rich heritage of political thought, the variety of American music that is still available if you look for it and the unpredictable varieties of conversation. Hendrie’s comedy partly turned on exposing the debasing process by which matters become “issues” and his characters, however ludicrous, asserted personality against homogenization. And there was an unpredictability to his comedy, which is otherwise completely absent from radio. imagine laughing with the show, rather than receiving the telegraphic messages of humor beamed to you by the “morning zoo,” messages which are noted as merely adequate representations of a familiar but contemptible genre. Profanity and dark humor played a part as resources for idiosyncratic language, the kind of language systematically eliminated from mainstream radio. Language as a performance of personality, but personality is the enemy for the new conglomerates of radio except as a collection of expectations attached to a particular name. I think it’s radio whose current state best represents the gulf between our technological abilities–broadcasting worlwide to the globe via satellites, etc.–and the paltry content of our desires and expectations. When you look at American music you find an inexhaustible supply of the weird, grotesque, poignant and powerful , but when you turn on the radio you find Steve Miller and Gary Puckett. What machinery is making these choices? As for Phil, here’s wishing him the best and hoping that he jams a shtick into the mechanisms of sameness.