In Lehmann's Terms

Less is always less

As if Clear Channel Communications didn't have enough on its plate, what with its numerous ongoing battles to shut down shock jocks and growing encroachment on its market by satellite-subscription competitors and podcasting, the radio giant is now being force-fed a lesson in Antitrust 101 -- the one that explains how coordination costs and the powerful incentive to cheat doom most all cartel schemes that seek to suppress competition.

New York Post columnist John Mainelli reports that several of the company's Big Apple affiliates appear to be flagrantly violating a corporate directive to air fewer commercials and station promos. As industry magazine Radio Ink put it:

Mainelli’s survey claims that at least two New York stations appear to be ignoring Clear Channel's "less is more" policy which limits commercial time to 12 minutes per hour during the lucrative morning drive and 10 minutes the rest of the day. The Post logged Q-104 in at 14 minutes and Power 105 at 17 minutes and 15 seconds.

Link courtesy of another old Independent Institute buddy, Harry Helms. Hey Harry!

Cue the young kids rolling their eyes

My download of the week is a tune I'd actually heard in a club a few months back, but only recently learned the name or the artist. It's called "One Thing" by a local D.C. singer named Amerie, who looks like Aaliyah and sounds like J. Lo doing her very best Mary J. Blige impersonation.

Like the aforementioned Ms. Lo, Amerie's voice is just a tad too reedy, and her range similarly narrow, to ever really have a shot at venturing successfully into Mary J territory. However, on this particular track, she stretches that range to its absolute breaking point, which really helps sell the emotion of what would otherwise be some fairly pedestrian lyrics.

But what really makes the whole thing work is the incredibly terse, raw Meters-style backing track, with drum fills that are a bit reminiscent of Beyonce's "Crazy In Love"...but in a good way. Not sure who the producer was on this track, but I hope he has a bright future.

Do check it out.

ADDENDUM: My fellow Newarker Chris Redwood informs me that both "Crazy In Love" and "One Time" draw upon the D.C.-centric genre of "go-go" music for their incessant, driving rhythms. I thank him for the pointer. I'd heard of go-go before, but I always associated it with E.U.'s "Da Butt," which has quite a different flavor than these songs.

How is it that a former urban hipster wannabe can find himself so out of it, so early in life?

Pretentiousness as a fashion choice

One of the truly spectacular perks of my apartment complex here in Alexandria is this free shuttle that comes to pick me up right outside my door, and drops me off at the Metro station over at Pentagon City. (Yes, it is just as surreal as it sounds -- replete with commuters who head to work every morning dressed in full combat fatigues, presumably because the camo helps them hide from their bosses in the copy room.) 

In the evenings, I'll occasionally need to stay in the city later than the last shuttle home, leaving me no choice but to take a cab. But in general, given the traffic nightmare that is the Beltway and the complete dearth of parking at any of the stations, I really have no reason to complain.

Well, except one.

The shuttle bus' radio is permanently set on Washington's own WJZW, aka "Smooth Jazz 105.9." As a long-time bop aficionado, it would be quite an understatement to declare I've never been a fan of so-called "smooth" jazz, that antiseptic aural pablum whose most endearing legacy has been succeeding in the seemingly incomprehensible task of making dentists' offices even more dreadful places than they were before.

To give a sense of how artistically bereft the genre has been, one need ponder only this: While Shaquille O'Neal was mostly laughed off in his attempt to become a rapper, former Sacramento Kings forward Wayman Tisdale plays bass with a smooth combo called the Fifth Quarter (ya'geddit?!?) ...and fans of this slop actually seem to lap it up.

But I digress.

At first, I made a concerted effort to try to drown out the cacophony by listening to books on tape. But as time goes by, I've actually been paying more attention, and have discovered something very curious about the district's largest smooth jazz station. Namely, that they don't actually play any.

Now, I don't just mean they don't play any jazz that qualifies as smooth, or any smooth that qualifies as jazz. I mean, they don't seem to play much of anything that bears a passing resemblance to any kind of jazz, not even of the "smooth" variety.

Here's a sample playlist of tunes I've noticed in heaviest rotation on 105.9:

George Benson - "On Broadway"

Alicia Keys - "Fallin"

Hall & Oates - "Sara Smile"

Nora Jones - "Don't Know Why"

Average White Band - "Pick Up the Pieces"

Santana - "Black Magic Woman"

Outkast - "I Like the Way You Move"

Steely Dan - "Reeling in the Years"

Now, granted the AWB song is a horn-based instrumental, and George Benson has had his jazz moments (that ain't one of them,) and Santana was a great improvisational musician in his heyday, and Steely Dan had some stuff on Aja that could almost be called fusion, and even Nora Jones could, I guess, be labeled vaguely "jazzy," but....let's get real. This isn't a jazz playlist. This is a pop playlist. At best, it's a slightly R&B-oriented pop playlist, but a pop playlist nonetheless.

It's not in any way substantially different from what you could hear on any of a gajillion other adult contemporary stations with taglines like "soft rock," "the wave," "light FM," or "super oldies." Not that I lament the exclusion of Bobby McFerrin, Manhattan Transfer, Spyro Gyra or the immortal Ken Gorelick, but why bother to call the station "smooth jazz" when that's clearly not what's on offer? 

The only answer that comes to mind immediately is that the programmers found a way to tap the larger-than-you-would-think demographic of poseurs who really want to be able to SAY they're the kind of folks who listen to jazz...without actually having to do it.

And that, my friends, is pure marketing genius.

Late to the party...so where's the keg?

Ok, ok, I relent.

After years of being asked when, exactly, I was going to get around to setting up a blog, I'm finally giving in to the pack mentality. Apparently, if you're a writer on Capitol Hill, maintaining a completely self-indulgent web presence is required by statute.

Tyler Cowen's passing reference (right in the midst of an AEI presentation on "The Future of Culture in a Globalized World") to having thrown a "bloggers party" the other night was just about the last straw. It's bad enough that I only know about two other locals since moving to the belly of the statist beast. Since one is Julian Sanchez and the other is Alex Tabarrok , then I can't well let future social opportunities like this pass me by.

Incidentally, the protocols for meeting new friends grow more baffling to me the older I get. Approaching a woman -- though fraught with anxiety and the potential for rejection -- is at least a relatively straightforward process. Both parties immediately recognize the nature of the encounter, and whether welcome or unwelcome, one's advances will almost certainly be greeted with, at the very least, understanding.

Contrast that with approaching a man, or group of men, in an adult version of "do you want to play with me?" Occassionally, one can get lucky with the right group of guys, and find nothing but high-fives and enthusiastic chest-bumping. But it seems you're just as likely to be greeted by bewilderment, or even outright hostility. It's just all so very Frans de Waal.

Anyway, I can't yet be sure whether the "business, regulation, economics, philosophy, politics, culture and the law" tag up top won't ultimately prove to be false advertising. Yes, those are all topics that interest me greatly, but it's not at all unlikely that I won't just end up using this space mostly as a soapbox to expound upon the finer points of bootyology...and to bitch about the Mets.