Community Radio

t-shirt designed by Saelee Oh

available from Lemonade Maid

 

Yesterday, on my morning commute, I was listening to KFAI, a community radio station in Minneapolis — not the local NPR station, mind you, but a real hippy-blues Hmong-issues reggae-ass CD-skipping community station.

The show was The FUBAR Omniverse, which is hosted by someone named Blanche and often features spacy art-house Brian Eno ambient I-don't-know-what. But yesterday, being the week of the pledge drive, Blanche was reminiscing about old times.

She recalled the time, many years ago, that she played a 17th-century whaling sea shanty on the radio. She immediately got an angry phone call from a concerned listener who objected that The FUBAR Omniverse was "encouraging whaling." Blanche wondered aloud whether the governments of Japan and Norway were listening to The FUBAR Omniverse ... and if so, what the ominous consequences might be.

In fairness, I do recall, around that time, the Mississippi River down by the Federal Building being mobbed with frenzied KFAI listener-members waving make-shift harpoons, their eyes wild with blubber-lust. They must've heard that song.

And so, anyway ... before we get our first nastygram, The Celestial Monochord strongly supports buying CD's of sea shanties, being nice to whales, and giving money to community radio.

 

Comments

[Cowtown Pattie]

And just what DO you do with a drunken sailor?

I personally love the tune, "Barrett's Privateers"...

[joni]

o angry caller, what would you do with _Moby Dick_? too bad it's the best novel Ever Written, and that it contains the key to life's mysteries (all of em)--and yet, reading it does not drive me to kill any whales. not now, not then!