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 ;-)