India.Arie teaching Public Radio

Have a listen to the song in the YouTube clip below. Its called Pearls, and it's from the new album by the American singer India.Arie. Listen to the lyrics. And tell me if you have ever heard an American pubic radio show tackle those sort of issues, in those ways.

It would be difficult, but not impossible, for a typical or famous public radio host, I think, to open a link or report like that, There is a woman in Somalia, scraping for pearls by the roadside. There is a force stronger than nature, keeps her will alive. 

Certainly some of what follows is not unknown to our medium and its formats.

But then:

And it hurts like brand new shoes.

Any public radio host would have to apologise in advance for perhaps offending his listeners – I don't think a female host would feel able to us that analogy at all, fearing or feeling too superficial, girly, urbane.

Yes, it brings it home to something everyone can associate with, but doesn't that mean it belittles her suffering? After all, she's off in Africa, her suffering must be far beyond just a new pair of shoes. 

Really?

She's dying to survive. 

For pearls. Now combined with the musical elements, I don't think it's immediately apparent how the message moves. The radio producer, knowing the need for it to be simple to be understood in one listening, will cut the story down. The message moves on from the staid image – a woman in Africa suffering – to a calm celebration of the survival. 

The brand new shoes are contrasting parallels for the pearls, of course. And the imagery is superb.  

As speech radio producers there's a lot we can learn from this song. 

Towards the end, there are some vocals not in English. This is where I think of the typical Africa story on public radio – narrator-heavy stuff, that, frankly, switches me off. Does India.Aries' African ancestry change that? As a listener, hearing it once, not sure either way.

Now my conventional musical vocabulary is limited – I'm comfortably limited to this radio-centric arc – so I know I may have missed some obvious progressions and interpretations. I've listened to the song a dozen or more times – but there are so few 4 minute radio pieces I've heard that often. On the other hand, my interpretation has changed a lot, while with the radio item, at least most of the meaning has to get you first time. Rarely will I listen to an item more than three times, and yes you catch different things each time. On occasion the impact is much less on the second listen, and that would mean a superb traditional radio item. That is not always the case, often as a shortfall in our skill, of course, but increasingly by design. It takes a lot of self-belief to think people will re-listen to a whole hour-long show on their iPod just to get your repeatable report, but I think the people who are conscious of it, are doing work worthy of it. 

I am leaving quite a few loose ends here: please comment!

Finally, if you're at all familiar with my blog or my listening, you'll know what show I have been itching to mention here, but out of self-discipline, I'll hold it in ;-)

How We Got Here (PRI) and Alison Des Forges

Four episodes in, I'm really enjoying How We Got Here, a podcast from PRI's The World. I've never heard The World – what stands out the most about it to me is how a studio manager in Bush House got excited telling how good the ISDN line to WGBH in Boston used to sound, and with so little delay. 

So all I know of the content of The World comes from this podcast, which I noticed when its producer Jeb Sharp mentioned it in her Twitter. And I follow her on Twitter because there, she follows my place of work, International Crisis Group. In this episode of the podcasts, those two worlds have slid into sync. 

How We Got Here, episode 4, is about the Cambodian genocide trials, and moves on to talk about Alison Des Forges, who did astonishing work for Human Rights Watch in Rwanda. I admit I had never heard of her before last week, but she was clearly well known and admired by my colleagues. 

In this podcast, an anthropologist called Susan Cook spoke of how Alison Des Forges, and of how media isn't enough to stop genocide, yet genocide must be documented. This matters to me, and it's why I've ended up, albeit briefly, in Crisis Group's Communications Unit.

The topics for the How We Got Here podcast have all hit the spot for me, and I have been promoting them around the office. If you are interested in these fields, or, to put it simply, if the title appeals to you, then subscribe to How We Got Here.

Finally, a note that I am not staff at Crisis Group, and what I write here is my own opinion, not Crisis Group's.

A poem about Ireland today

A slight change in direction this time, with poetry from a radio producer of yore. Kevin O'Connor is my uncle, and one of his docs came to mind as I was doing a fantasy job interview for Radio Lab in the parks south of Brussels at the weekend.

In the mid-90s he made a documentry about his late brother, which included his sister describing the childhood home something like this: Grand-da lived at the top of the house. I suppose you could say Grand-da was the the matriarch of the family.

I remember my mother asking him why he left that in, it was embarrassing (a show was the term used, I expect), and (as I remember it), he fudged the answer.

The RL context was as a way of illustrating humanity in a radio item. Especially in contrast to Hugh Manatee.

Moving on to the poem in question. Typos are the artist's own. And I admit I can only see reference to The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Let me know what more what I'm missing.

ODE TO A *ANKER

Well Seanie, you’re the Boyo
Built the Bank - and broke the Bank
Skipped away to nurse your wounds
which were all our dreams...

“ Each man kills the thing he loves”
As you’ve oft heard said
‘The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with sword...’

And some with hefty borrowings
Of many, many millions...
as Pensioners in public weep
for their lost shares of comforts

Well, Seanie, you’re the boyo
brought a country to its knees
Fitzpatrick of the silver locks
Put the rest of us in hock

So here’s to you, me boyo, Seanie
Did what no else could do
Built the bank and broke the bank
and flushed our savings down the loo....

Kevin 0’Connor

AudioDocumentary.org

Hat-tip to the Hearing Voices blog, on AudioDocumentary.org. I've never seen it before, but it looks good – like a more demanding version of Public Radio Redux. Basically, a collection or short reviews and pointers to good audio. 

It is all US stuff, as far as I can see, but it goes beyond just NPR and PRI, to include traditional media outlets that are not traditional audio outlets, plus some more. 

Nice links bar on the right too gives me a couple of new sites to check out. 

So far, thumbs up!

Dinky explanation of frequency effects.

Here's a nice (and seasonal) explanation, in pictures alone, of beat frequencies. 

Now maybe the same guy can answer my age-old question: Can you ever hear someone else's tinnitus? I admit the answer is most likely no…

A few months of freebasing

Let me outline my listening since about November:

In the build-up to the new series of Radio Lab last Autumn, I set up a recorder (Wiretap Pro) to save for me the Real Audio streams of older shows, when the "lab" meant a weekly experiment in radio from all over (in contrast to how it's nowgenerally taken as "this is a radio show about science". Anyhoo). I listened on my pocket recorder (Olympus LS-10 -- it can double as a mp3 player after all), on the commute to work, and listened to each episode of the new series twice.

And then it was all gone. Cold turkey.

Next I somehow or other discovered the unofficial podcast of Jonathan Goldstein's WireTap on CBC. I had about two years worth of episodes to listen to. So I did. They fitted very neatly into my commute -- that meant two episodes a day. I love it. And I think it started to show in my podcasts too... ;-)

And then... it was all gone too. I'm down to one a week. 

Twitter wanderings recently brought me to Ear Ideas, and a podcast in praise of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales (the stuff of my childhood), by none other than Stephen Fry. And so I have discovered Stephen Fry's Podgrams. And so I am freebasing again! There is thankfully a backlog, so this morning I listened to something about a year old. And it nearly had me punching the air for joy. Not much to say about the format -- it's just about noticeable. What matters, here as much as in Radio Lab and Wire Tap, is what is communicated. Which really is a pointless statement as that is what everyone does in radio anyway! Maybe though this is a pointer to the difference between an art and a craft. For sure, mixing the two can tie you up -- as it has done for me. As a trainer, I may well have unnerved people as much as other editors did me.

Am I out of the knots yet? Over the fear of people that stops you micing a situation right? Not quite. But if you fear people, you'll only occasionally make great radio. Does the thread follow out to all of art too?