Page 510 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Shock Jocks: Mak ng Mayhem over the A rwaves |

raDio as a shoCking mEDium
While contemporary shock jocks engage in a form of extreme public speech
not heard by past generations over the airwaves, the very medium of radio has
possessed a capacity to shock since its very beginning. Admittedly, audiences
accepted and accommodated radio as a form of public communication in rela-
tively short order after the first national broadcast by the RCA network in
1921. However, we should recall that each consumer invites the participation
of others into their lives by choice. In its essence, radio can be thought of as
a kind of desired or designated intrusion, a fact that was authoritatively dem-
onstrated in recent times by the excessive amplification of boom boxes. Once
radios became reasonably affordable, around 1927, the technology came to be
thought of as a kind of acoustic hearth, though audiences expected those who en-
tertained them to wipe their shoes, so to speak, before they crossed the threshold
of their homes.
This desire not to be disturbed or dismayed by what was broadcast over the
air particularly applied to announcers and later disc jockeys, the predecessors to
and, in some cases, influences upon present-day shock jocks. On-air personali-
ties received considerable leeway to display the full range of their idiosyncrasies,
but announcers were expected to be virtually invisible and extinguish any quirks
from their personalities. Some compared the phenomenon of their voices to
God, as they came invisibly out of the very air, and they were expected, like the
deity, to promote and not abuse community standards.

roCkin’ is our BusinEss

This trend began to change with the emergence of the disc jockey, a position
that while not inaugurated by Martin Block and his show Make Believe Ballroom
in 1934 is by many associated with him as its originator. He gave a name and
defined personality to a figure that heretofore remained anonymous, even if the
music he played was the audience-friendly pop tunes of the day. Disc jockeys
adopted an even more colorful role with the emergence of rhythm and blues
and subsequently rock ’n’ roll in the 1940s and 1950s. They broke the moderate
mold not only by the type of music they played but also and more importantly
through the manner with which they presented it. Individuals like Hunter Han-
cock of Los Angeles, the black announcers on Memphis’s WDIA (Nat Williams
and Rufus Thomas), and most famously Alan Freed of Cleveland and later New
York injected a more raucous tone to their position. They concocted idiosyn-
cratic vocabularies, solicited the opinions of their teenage listeners, and enthu-
siastically advocated the music they played. Even now, tapes of their broadcasts
retain a vibrancy and audacity that time has not erased.
Many parents and some politicians feared the power these men held over
their children and worried that the repertoire they featured threatened the very
fabric of society. Some less open-minded citizens even called attention to and
chastised the disc jockeys for playing music that they felt encouraged racial inte-
gration. When government investigations called attention to the fact that many
of these men accepted payments for records they played, known at the time as