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Book Review: Radio On
Jul. 1st, 2024 08:03 amI just finished Sarah Vowell’s Radio On: A Listener’s Diary, which has a surprisingly literal subtitle: the book is a diary of Vowell’s radio-listening in the year 1995, a project that would just a few years later have seen the light of day as a blog, but here is simply a book.
It’s a real double-whammy of “my god, nothing has changed” and “my god, everything has changed.” In the first column: now as then, the media complains that young people are underinformed, apathetic, and somehow simultaneously too angry. We are now calling it “climate change” rather than “global warming,” but a large contingent of the country still insists it doesn’t exist. Everyone mourns the loss of civility in our political life. (Did this fabled civility ever exist?)
In the second column: a couple of radio hosts discuss their weird new hobby, “surfing the web.” Vowell is for some reason really mad about young Deadheads wearing tie-dye, because they are stuck in the past, rather than embracing the present by writing a year-long eulogy for Kurt Cobain. (I could not overstate the extent to which Cobain’s death hangs over this book.)
Young Vowell, although already demonstrating the obsession with history that would shape her later work, is also weirdly stuck on the idea that it’s a moral imperative to embrace cutting-edge modernity in music. As a college student, she took over a radio show that played classical music, only she used it to play classic rock, when she wasn’t doing battle with angry callers who wanted their Bach. “Don’t you want to listen to the music of your contemporaries?” she demands. “No,” a caller responds.
But the moment that feels most intoxicatingly alien is the bit where Vowell writes about Clinton’s groundbreaking decision to oppose tobacco advertising aimed at teenagers. Her head is with him: smoking is deadly, after all, and wouldn’t it be better not to try to get the youth hooked?
But her heart is against. Smoking is the god-given right of disaffected teenagers, a sign of rebellion and sticking it to the man. And if it’s likely to hasten your death, well, who wants to hang around anyway on this bitch of an earth?
Which brings us back to Kurt Cobain, and the thin mist of despair that hangs over the book. The appeal of Cobain, Vowell muses, is that he doesn’t give you any chirpy platitudes about how things will get better. The country lurches from Reagan to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich (to George Bush to Trump), and Cobain doesn’t so much sing about as embody despair, and of course that’s not healthy—but that’s such a 2020s buzzword, anyway, and 1990s Vowell is not about to cede to the supremacy of “healthy.” Why should what is healthy take precedence over what is sincere?
It’s a real double-whammy of “my god, nothing has changed” and “my god, everything has changed.” In the first column: now as then, the media complains that young people are underinformed, apathetic, and somehow simultaneously too angry. We are now calling it “climate change” rather than “global warming,” but a large contingent of the country still insists it doesn’t exist. Everyone mourns the loss of civility in our political life. (Did this fabled civility ever exist?)
In the second column: a couple of radio hosts discuss their weird new hobby, “surfing the web.” Vowell is for some reason really mad about young Deadheads wearing tie-dye, because they are stuck in the past, rather than embracing the present by writing a year-long eulogy for Kurt Cobain. (I could not overstate the extent to which Cobain’s death hangs over this book.)
Young Vowell, although already demonstrating the obsession with history that would shape her later work, is also weirdly stuck on the idea that it’s a moral imperative to embrace cutting-edge modernity in music. As a college student, she took over a radio show that played classical music, only she used it to play classic rock, when she wasn’t doing battle with angry callers who wanted their Bach. “Don’t you want to listen to the music of your contemporaries?” she demands. “No,” a caller responds.
But the moment that feels most intoxicatingly alien is the bit where Vowell writes about Clinton’s groundbreaking decision to oppose tobacco advertising aimed at teenagers. Her head is with him: smoking is deadly, after all, and wouldn’t it be better not to try to get the youth hooked?
But her heart is against. Smoking is the god-given right of disaffected teenagers, a sign of rebellion and sticking it to the man. And if it’s likely to hasten your death, well, who wants to hang around anyway on this bitch of an earth?
Which brings us back to Kurt Cobain, and the thin mist of despair that hangs over the book. The appeal of Cobain, Vowell muses, is that he doesn’t give you any chirpy platitudes about how things will get better. The country lurches from Reagan to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich (to George Bush to Trump), and Cobain doesn’t so much sing about as embody despair, and of course that’s not healthy—but that’s such a 2020s buzzword, anyway, and 1990s Vowell is not about to cede to the supremacy of “healthy.” Why should what is healthy take precedence over what is sincere?
