After MTV, radio struck back in 1981


On the second day, radio struck back! MTV had refocused the business of music on the visual when it launched on August 1, 1981. But just a day later, audio would reassert itself...from space! A date, a place, a seismic tremor in the very bedrock of American radio! Forget your quaint local DJs, your chummy neighborhood announcers spinning platters in a haze of stale coffee and cigarette smoke. Forget that whole cozy, small-town illusion! Because on this day, dear friends, something utterly, terrifyingly new burst forth from the heartland, soaring skyward on invisible waves, then plunging back down, zap! directly into your very living rooms!

This was the dawn, the blinding, technicolor, high-fidelity dawn of the Satellite Music Network!

Imagine it! No longer shackled by the whims of some regional jock, no longer tethered to the parochial tastes of a single town. Oh no, this was a vision of pure, unadulterated, centrally-controlled, FORMATTED sonic perfection! From Mokena, Illinois – Mokena! – the pulsating heart of this audacious enterprise, music, perfectly curated, perfectly timed, began its relentless journey through the ionosphere!

Think of the sheer, unadulterated, AUDACITY of it! One moment, a station in, say, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is playing some local hero’s lament; the next, BAM! - a pristine, pre-programmed, perfectly pitched power ballad, beamed down from the celestial sphere, momentarily displacing whatever earthy, human sound was there before. The local disk jockeys, those often rumpled, slightly jaded purveyors of pop, were suddenly, irrevocably, utterly superfluous! And soon to be UNEMPLOYED!

For years, the radio business had been a patchwork quilt of regional quirks, of personality-driven patter, of human foibles spilling out over the airwaves. But the Satellite Music Network, oh, it promised something different. It promised EFFICIENCY! It promised CONSISTENCY! It promised a sleek, streamlined, almost CYBORG version of radio, where the human element was…well, let's just say, optimized out!

They started with two anodyne, unassailable formats: Adult Contemporary and Country Music. No messy experimentation, no wild departures into the unknown! Just the smooth, reassuring, statistically-validated sounds of what the masses, by God, wanted to hear! And all of it orchestrated from a single, gleaming control room, with breaks, of course, for local advertising and those quaint, old-fashioned, local news updates. A nod, perhaps, to the rapidly receding past, a polite tip of the hat before the future devoured it whole.

By 1989, this Mokena-born behemoth would be serving six hundred stations, a veritable army of radio outposts, all marching to the same satellite-dictated beat. It was a triumph of technology, a testament to the irresistible allure of scale, a monument to the chilling, exhilarating beauty of progress.

So, the next time you hear a perfectly sequenced song on your radio, a seamless transition, a voice that sounds just a little too perfect, remember August 2, 1981. Remember Mokena. Remember the moment when radio went from being merely heard to being BROADCAST in a way that forever changed the sound of America! It was a revolution, folks, and it came, quite literally, FROM SPACE!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Hypercard links to the future on August 11, 1987

Image
Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...
Read more

Members Only jackets give entrée to the 80s' most-exclusive club

Image
ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...
Read more

Street Fighter establishes a new pugilistic order on August 30, 1987

Image
It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...
Read more