She Who Tunes the Radio Rules the Drive
As with many women, my car is the family car. It’s the one we use after work, on weekends, the one with the car seat, diaper bag, and the permanent rime of graham cracker and pretzel crumbs. But my husband drives it frequently, and so we have been forced to forge a compromise. Not over anything as insignificant as care and maintenance, although my husband is so strict about the personal grooming of his own car that he carries a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex in the back seat. No, we save our limited diplomatic abilities for the big stuff: the radio.
See, when I get in my car and turn on my radio, I do not want to hear a woman with an Oxford accent intoning pork-belly prices, a country-western song of any variety or the harpsichord. I want to hear the rock ‘n’ roll of my youth (Bruce, Blondie, Pete Townsend), jazz that has a melody, or any current top-40 song that I can sing in the presence of my 18-month-old son.
So after months of setting and resetting the memory buttons, we negotiated a settlement--he gets all six AM preset buttons, as well as the last two of the FM buttons.
This is, of course, only our personal skirmish in an ongoing universal epic: the Battle of the Radio. The knob-twisting, button-pushing, static-sliding campaign to control the music and the noise has been an enduring family conflict around the world since the advent of the second radio station.
Parent versus child, husband versus wife, brother versus brother--this generation of channel surfers cut its teeth on the radio. And the car has always been the arena for the best battles because controlling the dial resulted in complete aural dominance: If you chose Aerosmith, everyone had to listen to Aerosmith. This is why today, when every member of the family could be plugged in, Jetson-like, to individual Discmen, they often are not. Many are listening to the radio, often at a higher volume than our parents would have ever stood for. Because the point was not the music, the point was the power.
That power is probably why, in this era of TV, MTV, VH1, CDs and CD-ROM, radio even exists. Unlike its televised counterparts, radio stations remain symbols of identity and community, which is why so many people listen to the radio--rather than a CD player--in their car. Radio makes us a part of a bigger thing, whether it’s the audience for a Brahms concerto or a Hole concert, of an evangelical sermon or a right-wing diatribe.
This explains the thrill you feel when one of your favorite songs, which you were just thinking about two minutes ago, comes on the instant you turn the knob. Surely, with the variety of stereo systems available, one never needs to wait for a deejay to play “Darlington County” or “Dancing Queen.” But when it comes on the radio, it does more than make you seat-dance. It confirms your place in the cosmos. You are not alone. There are others like you. And they are seat-dancing too.
Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.
