Current music:

Kanye West, "Diamonds from Sierra Leone"

THE UNION: JACK?

More variety? Underplayed songs? Clever mixes? Hey, isn't this what we said we wanted? Why we aren't thrilled about Jack, commercial radio's version of free-form FM.

Like Jack White, I've been known to quote my favorite scenes from Citizen Kane. And recently, as I've been listening to the radio, one particular scene has been running through my head. Charles Foster Kane has just lost his gubernatorial bid, and while he's feeling sorry for himself, his best friend tells him off:

KANE: All right, if that's the way they want it, the people have made their choice….

LELAND: You talk about “the people” as though you owned them – as though they belonged to you. Goodness! As long as I can remember, you've talked about “giving the people their rights,” as if you could make them a present of liberty – as a reward for services rendered! Remember the working man? ... You used to write an awful lot about “the working man.” Well, he's turning into something called organized labor. You're not gonna like that one little bit, when you find out it means your working man expects something as his right, not as your gift.

Imagine, for a moment, that in this scene, Charlie Kane is big radio – Clear Channel, Infinity Broadcasting, those behemoths – and that "the people" have been given, not picket signs and union delegates, but iPods.

This is the best way to explain the across-the-board scorn being heaped on Jack, an FM radio format that's sweeping the country.


IF you live in a big city, by now you almost certainly have a Jack on your radio dial – or a Bob, a Ben, or some other three- or four-letter dude's name. The operative word is "dude": according to the inventors of the format, "Jack" and his brethren are supposed to remind you of your awesome buddy from college, the guy who'd play cool mixes of music at parties – format-free, mass-appeal, always catchy, a spectrum of songs crashing into one another. The Jack programmers call these juxtapositions "train wrecks."

According to a recent Billboard article, Jack was invented by a Canadian radio executive about four years ago. The story, however apocryphal, is that this program director went to a birthday party filled with thirtysomthings and discovered that they didn't like half the stuff the local classic-rock station was playing. After doing some research, he discovered that there were gaps in rock and pop history that most FM stations were underplaying, or avoiding entirely.

There were underplayed disco songs, like "Cherchez La Femme," "S.O.S." or "Pick Up the Pieces." Near-hits or non-hits from the '80s, by now-revered new wave bands like the Cure and Talking Heads. Old funk songs abandoned by R&B radio, from the likes of the Gap Band or Zapp. Forgotten one-hit-wonder songs like Melanie's "Brand-New Key," Matthew Wilder's "Break My Stride" or Jane Child's "Don't Wanna Fall in Love." That third or fourth single from a big album that never gets played anymore: Def Leppard's "Armageddon It" instead of "Pour Some Sugar on Me"; Dire Straits's "So Far Away" instead of "Money for Nothing." Seemingly cheesy songs that people still secretly like: Haddaway's "What Is Love," Roxette's "The Look." And all of these songs are so well-liked and catchy that they could coexist in the same mix. You could crash big hits against lost classics, rhythmic songs against hard-rock songs, and as long as most of the lesser-played songs sounded familiar but didn't suffer from eternal radio burnout, they worked together.

This concept may not be news to you – hey, playing songs we're not sick of! what a concept – but in the world of post–Clear Channel, "narrowcasted" radio, this amounted to a revelation. Radio playlists have shrunk to as little as 100 songs over the years; at an average "top 40" station, only about 30 songs get genuine regular airplay. True free-form FM radio hasn't existed since the '70s (except at low-wattage college stations, which never played hit records, anyway).

The Canadian PD's concept wasn't totally "free-form," either; he intended to play a steady diet of proven hits. But it did feature a rotation of hundreds or even 1,000 songs, scores more than the average classic-rock or adult-contemporary station would play, to say nothing of top 40. His mix would even place current songs next to decades-old tracks, something AOR (album-oriented rock) stations used to do but basically haven't done in about a decade; even in AOR's heyday, those stations would never put a disco or R&B song next to Pink Floyd. The goal: to create what PDs call "Oh, wow!" moments – juxtapositions that turn your head, or songs you haven't heard since high school.

Launched in the winter of 2002, Winnipeg's "Bob-FM" was an instant smash. By year's end, a version named "Jack" launched in Vancouver. Within two years, every major Canadian radio market (except Montreal) got a Jack, Bob or Ben. By 2003, U.S. programmers tested the format, and now, less than four years after its launch in Canada, Jack/Bob/Ben has appeared in almost every major U.S. city.


THIS rapid colonization has not come without controversy. In Philadelphia, two seemingly unrelated events caused fan outrage: the shutdown of much-beloved modern rock station Y100 (replaced by a Latin station) and the near-simultaneous appearance of a Ben-FM halfway up the dial, going after the former Y100 demographic. In Boston, a long-beloved dance-pop station flipped to Jack last spring. (My favorite Bostonian and best friend, Ed, is up in arms: "'Jack'?!" he wrote me two months ago. "What the hell is that?")

But these skirmishes were nothing compared to New York City's recent declaration of war. In June, WCBS-FM, a decades-old titan of New York radio and the creator of the oldies format back in the early 1970s, flipped to the Jack format, and all hell broke loose.

Imagine if the New York Mets were suddenly, unceremoniously replaced by a professional lacrosse team, and you have some idea of the shock and outrage expressed by radio listeners across the city – old-timers, blue-collar guys, even under-40s who loved pre-disco pop and had come to regard WCBS as an institution. There's actually a Wikipedia entry that details the whole controversy, complete with links to jeremiads in the New York Post and Daily News and expletive-laden quotes from no less than Mayor Mike Bloomberg. My own Dad recently offered his novel theory that WCBS was a public trust, and the government should step in.

Clearly, Jack's takedown of a half-century-old radio station was, for many, the final straw. But I started to notice angry comments from columnists and friends of mine months ago, whether they had a Jack station in their town or not. Fueling the suspicion is the fact that Jack is almost invariably DJ-free – the better to cram in more songs per hour – and thus creepily impersonal; this has added fuel to the ongoing debate over Clear Channel–style consolidation and the de-localization of radio. Just last month, Naunihal, an old college friend in South Bend, Ind., e-mailed me a New York Newsday article with his own colorful subject line: "Bob? Jack? These are radio formats? WTF?" In short, people feel cynical and even a little threatened by Jack.

Even before I started listening to the new WCBS a few weeks ago, I sort of wondered what all the fuss was about. Did my Dad really think he'd go to his grave (hopefully no sooner than 2030) listening to Cousin Brucie's "The Doo-Wop Shop"? Wouldn't my friend Ed in Boston rather listen to a station that played catchy dance songs and classic rock songs and good pop songs, rather than just dance songs?

Straight-up: Hasn't everybody who's listened to FM radio in the last 20 years wished, begged, demanded that stations stop playing the same songs over and over, stop insulting our intelligence by assuming we only listen to one tiny format, bring back the element of surprise? However stupid its name, isn't the Jack format exactly what we've all asked for?

It's easy for me to say this – Jack is aimed squarely at my aging Gen-X ass. As free-form as Jack claims to be, Jack loves him some '80s: a glance at WCBS's current playlist reveals a lot of MTV-era gold. While our buddy Jack will reach back into the '60s to play the Beatles or the Doors, or reach forward to the '00s to play OutKast or Kelly Clarkson, any song he picks had better sound decent coming after Adam Ant's "Goody Two Shoes."

Replacing the '60s/'70s-centric WCBS with a new '80s-centric WCBS is just trading one demographic for a younger one, even if the new WCBS does occasionally play "Twist and Shout." So it's understandable that fans of doo-wop or Motown, who grew up with Cousin Brucie's WCBS, would feel like they'd been put out to pasture. On the other hand, I have never had much sympathy for "classic" pop fans who feel popular music went off the rails after "The Hustle." If your real problem with Jack is a problem with femmy '70s drag-queen music and foppish '80s mousse-hair music, take a number and sit down, buddy.

I am enjoying Jack as far as it goes – the morning when they segued from Depeche Mode's "People Are People" into Frank Sinatra's "Theme from New York, New York" blew my mind – but that may be because I have such low expectations for commercial radio. Don't we all?

This, in fact, may be another root cause of Jack hateration: 30 years of narrowcasting have conditioned radio listeners to expect a comforting, limited format, and the whacked-out variety of Jack just weirds them out. My friend Ed forwarded me this comment from a fellow hater of Boston's Jack: "People don't tune into a station that 'plays everything' HOPING that MAYBE they MIGHT play a song or two that the listener actually wants to hear, while suffering through 30–40 minutes of stuff they hate."

In other words, if you've decided that you're a rock guy, you're never going to tolerate Sister Sledge or Technotronic, no matter how interestingly they're mixed together. You want your radio station to narrowcast. This reaction is understandable but seems Stockholm-syndromesque to me. Have we really ceded that much of our tastes to our captors?

But I think the real problem with Jack is that it promises more than it delivers. To paraphrase Charlie Kane's friend Leland, the people have already tasted freedom, and they're not going to accept a watered-down version of freedom just because some media impresario deigns to offer it to them.


THE invention of Jack in 2001–02 coincided perfectly with a far more influential invention, the iPod. Right around the time that Canuck was attending his fateful birthday party, Apple's first music devices were rolling into stores. Within weeks, cultural critics were praising the iPod's (then) least-heralded feature: shuffling, which on early iPods was a feature buried in a menu. (Within a year, Apple wisely moved "Shuffle Songs" to the iPod's top screen.)

Sure, the ability to randomly play back the songs on a CD, or a half-dozen CDs, had been around since the '80s. But, in ways not even Steve Jobs anticipated, the act of filling a device with hundreds or even thousands of songs you love and then letting the device randomly create your very own radio station was powerful and unprecedented. This went beyond CD shuffling, beyond mixtapes, beyond your cool college roommate; this was a nonstop personal soundtrack that managed to surprise you and comfort you at the same time.

When interviewed by Billboard and the other media rags, the programmers of the various Jack stations across the country invariably make iPod comparisons. "An iPod on steroids" is their favorite quip to describe the format and its seeming randomness. It is a handy shorthand, especially as the iPod has come to represent musical freedom and genre ecumenicalism to a generation of music fans.

But the fact is, this shorthand is kind of a lie: "an iPod on a diet" is more like it. Even at its best, Jack has limits, and a couple of days of listening to the format reveal them. Meanwhile, even if you're only carrying around an iPod mini, with its 1,000-song capacity, you've already got access to more songs than a Jack station is rotating. Better yet, you picked them.

What's more, the songs on your iPod probably span more genres than the Jack station will ever play. By definition, Jack only plays hits, or at least well-known songs; that cool but little-heralded album track isn't going to make their cut. And as admirably wide-ranging as Jack's selection is, it's not like they're playing hardcore hip-hop, twangy country or actual indie-rock; if "U Can't Touch This," "You're Still the One" and "Float On," respectively, don't satisfy your genre fix, you're going to be reaching for your iPod. Conversely, if your idea of genre balance is, say, lots of hip-hop, a smattering of country and no '80s pop music at all, your iPod, not Jack, will provide that for you. And you'll still have the pleasure of not knowing what song's coming next.


MAKE no mistake: as mainstream, shamelessly commercial radio goes, Jack is pretty awesome. If I could program a high-cuming radio station in a big city with a library full of hits, it might sound like Jack. The format has reclaimed songs I thought I'd never hear on FM radio again, on college radio or anywhere – who else is playing the Fixx's "Red Skies" or George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" these days? On a long car trip without a tape deck, Jack would be a godsend. A few hours ago, WCBS/Jack in New York played, swear to God, Foo Fighters' "My Hero" back-to-back with Kool & the Gang's "Fresh." Who does that?

Oh yeah – your iPod does. And it knows what you love and what you hate, knows just how far to push you and what you call a "hit." In just one hour of shuffling my iPod last night, I heard the Shins, Ghostface Killah, Snow Patrol, a Beatles/Goldfrapp mashup (illegal, of course), the Velvet Underground, Norm Greenbaum's classic "Spirit in the Sky," Eminem, Britney Spears and the Decemberists – only a couple of them would be likely to appear on a Jack playlist anytime soon.

How can even a wide-ranging FM format like Jack seriously expect to compete with my iPod? Answer: it can't, it shouldn't, and that's okay with me.

I say, let's all calm down and welcome Jack into our lives – it's a damn sight better than anything commercial FM radio has produced since the '70s. But we've all lost our innocence, and if Citizen Jack thinks we're going to fall to our knees and thank him for liberating us, he's bound to be disappointed. Musical freedom is our right, not his gift.