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      Martin Bookspan, Cultured Voice of Lincoln Center Telecasts, Dies at 94

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      The longtime announcer for “Live From Lincoln Center,” he said he wanted his audience “to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”Martin Bookspan, who parlayed a childhood grounding in classical music into a career as the announcer for the “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts and the radio broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, died on April 29 at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 94.The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter Rachel Sobel said.Mr. Bookspan started violin lessons when he was 6, but he realized by the time he entered college that he would never be the next Fritz Kreisler or Jascha Heifetz. After an early career behind the scenes at radio stations in Boston and New York, he established himself as a stalwart of “Live From Lincoln Center,” the PBS program that became America’s premier source of classical music on broadcast television. He joined the program when it went on the air in 1976.“Live From Lincoln Center” was, for him, not that different from radio — he was heard but not seen. He would open the broadcast, then hand off to on-camera hosts like Beverly Sills, Dick Cavett or Hugh Downs.“The camera was never on Marty,” said John Goberman, the program’s longtime executive producer. But, he added, Mr. Bookspan “was more than just the announcer. The comfortable and familiar part of every broadcast was Marty Bookspan.”Mr. Bookspan’s voice “didn’t sound like a lion,” Mr. Goberman said. “He spoke in a very straightforward, friendly, conversational way.” The Palm Beach Post, describing Mr. Bookspan’s voice after an interview in 1994, said: “Even on the telephone, it’s a voice that resonates with the rarefied air of high culture, the sort of voice you might hear on a public-television pledge drive. But it’s not so stuffy that you couldn’t imagine it delivering the play-by-play of your favorite team.”Mr. Bookspan himself said, “If I have a technique, it’s the technique of the sportscaster.”“As sportscasters make the game come alive, I hope I have made concerts come alive,” he explained in 2006, as he prepared to leave “Live From Lincoln Center” after 30 years. “I want the audience to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”By then, the “Live From Lincoln Center” audience was accustomed to hearing his preconcert warm-ups and his postconcert signoffs. With a well-dressed crowd in the audience and big-name performers on the stage, the proceedings had a touch of glamour, but not necessarily for Mr. Bookspan. He and his microphone were sometimes installed in dressing rooms, closets — even, at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, in what had been a women’s restroom. He was connected to the stage through his headphones and a video monitor.The soprano Renée Fleming and the conductor Louis Langrée on opening night of the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2005, which was broadcast on “Live From Lincoln Center.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesMartin Bookspan was born on July 30, 1926, in Boston. His father, Simon, was a dry goods salesman who later switched to selling insurance; his mother, Martha (Schwartz) Bookspan was a homemaker. Simon Bookspan was passionate about Jewish liturgical music and took his son to hear prominent cantors.At Harvard, Martin majored not in music but in German literature. He graduated cum laude in 1947.He was also heard on the campus radio station, where he conducted his first important interview in 1944. His guest was the composer Aaron Copland, who revealed that he was considering writing a piece for the choreographer Martha Graham. It turned out to be the ballet “Appalachian Spring.”In his future broadcast career, Mr. Bookspan would interview more than 1,000 performers and composers, from the conductor Maurice Abravanel to the composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.After working as the music director at WBMS, a classical-music station in Boston, he joined the staff of the Boston Symphony in 1954 as its radio, television and recordings coordinator. In 1956, he moved to New York to become the director of recorded music at WQXR, then owned by The New York Times.At WQXR, he hired John Corigliano, at the time a fledgling composer, as an assistant. He proved to be a concerned boss.Mr. Corigliano called in sick one summer morning. “I should’ve known better, because Marty was so considerate, he called later in the afternoon,” Mr. Corigliano, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2001, said in an interview. “I went off to the beach. Marty called, and my roommate answered the phone. Marty said, ‘How is John feeling?’ My roommate said, ‘Oh, he’s great. He’s at the beach.’“The next day I walked in. There’s Marty. I approached him slowly and said, ‘I’ll never do it again.’”Mr. Bookspan left WQXR in 1967 and joined the music licensing agency ASCAP as coordinator of symphonic and concert activities. He was later vice president and director of artists and repertoire for the Moss Music Group, an artists’ management agency. He was also an adjunct professor of music at New York University.In the 1960s and ’70s, he was an arts critic for several television stations, including WABC and WPIX in New York and WNAC (now WHDH) in Boston. He was a host of “The Eternal Light,” an NBC program produced with the Jewish Theological Seminary, and, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the announcer for the CBS soap opera “The Guiding Light.”He also wrote reviews of recordings for The New York Times (on open-reel tapes in the 1960s and compact discs in the 1990s). He wrote several books, including “101 Masterpieces of Music and Their Composers” (1968) and, with Ross Yockey, biographies of the conductors André Previn and Zubin Mehta. He handled radio broadcasts for the Boston Symphony and later for the New York Philharmonic.His wife, Janet Bookspan, died in 2008. Besides Ms. Sobel, he is survived by a son, David; another daughter, Deborah Margol; six grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.The tenor Jan Peerce called Mr. Bookspan’s knowledge of music “encyclopedic,” and it served him well when he had to ad-lib.One night in 1959, he was the announcer for a Boston Symphony broadcast that featured the pianist Rudolf Serkin playing Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Mr. Bookspan did his usual introduction before Serkin and the conductor Charles Munch made their way across the stage. Mr. Bookspan told The Berkshire Eagle in March that once they plunged in, “I did the one thing that I learned I should never do again: I left my broadcast booth.”With Serkin “flailing away with a vengeance, pounding the pedals for all they were worth, caught up in the work and oblivious to all else” — as Mr. Bookspan recalled in a different interview — he headed to the green room to chat with Aaron Copland, who was on hand for the concert.Suddenly, in the second movement of the Brahms, there was silence.“I ran across the backstage and up the stairs, and en route picked up the news that there was a problem with the piano,” he told The Eagle. “I got to the microphone and huffed and puffed my way through, reporting, ‘There was a problem with the piano’ and that ‘as soon as I catch my breath, I’ll tell you what’s going on.’”Mr. Bookspan talked nonstop for more than 15 minutes until the piano had been fixed and Serkin and the orchestra started playing again. More

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      Bob Porter, Jazz Producer and Broadcaster, Dies at 80

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      Hundreds of albums bore his name, notably reissues of classic material. And he helped make WBGO the biggest jazz radio station in the New York area.Bob Porter, who as a record producer guided the reissue of vast swaths of the classic jazz canon, and who as a broadcaster helped build WBGO into the largest jazz radio station in the New York City area, died on April 10 at his home in Northvale, N.J. He was 80.The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, his wife, Linda Calandra Porter, said.Rock ’n’ roll had mostly eclipsed jazz in the public ear by the time Mr. Porter produced his first album for Prestige Records, the organist Charles Kynard’s “Professor Soul” (1968), for which he also wrote the liner notes. Mr. Porter began regularly producing sessions for the label, mostly in the soul-jazz style of the day, including outings by the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, the organists Jimmy McGriff and Charles Earland and the guitarist Pat Martino, among many others.He went on to take part in the creation of hundreds of albums as a producer and author of liner notes for a variety of labels. Much of that work was on boxed sets and reissues of archival material.He won a Grammy in 1978 for his liner notes to the five-disc “Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions,” which he also produced. He later won the best historical album Grammy in 1986, for producing the compilation “Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974, Vols. 1-7.”Interviewed that year by Rolling Stone, Mr. Porter recalled putting together the Atlantic box alongside Ahmet Ertegun, the label’s famed co-founder. Some of Atlantic’s original master tapes had burned in a fire, so Mr. Porter drew upon his network of fellow vinyl collectors to track down original pressings. His main goal, he said, was accuracy and completeness.“We tried to list in copious detail everything we could about the original recording date — the singers, the bands, every piece of information we could unravel,” he said. “The most important thing in doing any work of this nature is that you get it right.”But he also wanted to make a historical point about how social history shapes genre. “We decided to stop in 1974 because that, in a sense, marked the end of an era,” he said. “When you get into disco and rap music, you’re really talking about something that’s very different. The conditions in the country were a lot different when this music was being made. I think that the demise of soul and R&B may ultimately be viewed as a casualty of integration.”In the 1980s, jazz’s commercial fortunes perked up, in thanks partly to the advent of compact discs, which led listeners to buy reissues of old albums. Working most often with Atlantic, Mr. Porter led the remastering process for CD reissues by the likes of Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and Lester Young.As soon as WBGO hit the airwaves at 88.3 FM in 1979, broadcasting out of Newark but reaching across New York City, Mr. Porter started volunteering as a host. Two years later he began a daily show, “Portraits in Blue,” which went on to be syndicated by NPR stations around the country and would continue for the next 40 years. He later hosted two additional shows: “Saturday Morning Function,” which focused on R&B and jump blues, and “Swing Party,” heard on Sunday mornings.On his own podcast earlier this month, Nate Chinen, the director of editorial content at WBGO, called Mr. Porter “a Mount Rushmore figure when it comes to Newark public radio — someone who was on the air, really, from Day 1.”Robert Sherwin Porter was born in Wellesley, Mass., on June 20, 1940, to David Porter, who ran the financial advisory firm David L. Babson & Company, and Constance (Kavanaugh) Porter, a homemaker. The eldest of four siblings, Bob attended Whittier College in California, where he studied English before serving in the Army, stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brothers, John and William Porter; a sister, Linda (Porter) Owens; a son from a previous marriage, David Porter; two stepsons, Michael and Rick Tombari; and a granddaughter.After his military service, he returned to Whittier to complete his degree. While still in school he began contributing to DownBeat magazine. His articles caught the attention of Bob Weinstock, the head of Prestige, who was impressed by Mr. Porter’s erudition and offered him a job with the label.Mr. Porter’s passion for the artistic and cultural history of African-American music stretched back to its earliest known recordings, and he was deeply knowledgeable about blues as well as jazz.He received awards from various music societies and foundations. In addition to his two Grammys, those included a 1986 W.C. Handy Award (now known as the Blues Music Award) from the Blues Foundation and a 2003 Community Service Award from the Bergen County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In 2009, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.Mr. Porter became a published author late in life, self-releasing “Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975” in 2016. That book gave a detailed history of the jazz musicians who were especially popular in Black communities just after World War II, but who at the time had rarely come under the gaze of white critics.A white writer himself, Mr. Porter felt compelled to redress the omission. “Black communities had their own heroes, and Black fans of jazz had their own way of responding to the music,” he wrote in the book’s preface. “I have helped dozens of researchers and writers through the years, and I always hoped that one of them would tackle this untold story. Nobody did, and now most of the greatest players are gone. Thus, I decided to do this myself.” More

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      Morgan Wallen Rebuked by Music Business After Using Racial Slur

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCountry Star Morgan Wallen Rebuked by Music Business After Using Racial SlurThe musician apologized in a statement to TMZ, saying, “I used an unacceptable and inappropriate racial slur that I wish I could take back.”Radio stations and streaming services distanced themselves from Morgan Wallen, one of the top country artists, after video surfaced of him using a racial slur.Credit…Sanford Myers/Associated PressJulia Jacobs and Feb. 3, 2021Morgan Wallen, one of country music’s biggest new stars, was swiftly rebuked on Wednesday by major radio stations, streaming services, record labels, fellow artists and the CMT network after a video surfaced of him using a racial slur.The genre’s brightest new headliner so far this year, Wallen currently has the No. 1 album in the United States for three weeks running, having found traction even on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, where country has traditionally struggled. But all of that threatened to crumble starting Tuesday night, when TMZ posted a video, seemingly filmed by a neighbor, that appeared to show Wallen returning from a night out in Nashville and shouting at someone to take care of another person in his group, referring to that person with a racial slur.By morning, Spotify, Apple and some of the largest radio conglomerates in the country had removed Wallen from playlists and airwaves, while the singer’s record label and management company, Big Loud, announced that it would “suspend” his contract indefinitely. Republic Records, a division of Universal Music Group that distributes Wallen’s releases in partnership with Big Loud, said it supported the decision, adding “such behavior will not be tolerated.”Big Loud did not respond to follow-up questions about what it meant to suspend a recording contract or whether it planned to cease selling or promoting Wallen’s new album and past work.Representatives for Wallen did not immediately respond to a request for comment. TMZ reported that the singer had apologized in a statement, saying, “I’m embarrassed and sorry. I used an unacceptable and inappropriate racial slur that I wish I could take back. There are no excuses to use this type of language, ever.”But the prompt action by the industry, and especially by power players within tight-knit country music circles, seemed to signal a shift in a world that has traditionally struggled with race, representation and political issues.A major owner of country radio stations, iHeartMedia, decided to remove Wallen’s music from its playlists immediately in response to the video, a spokeswoman said, and Entercom, another large player in radio, did the same; representatives for the companies said the decisions would impact more than 150 stations. SiriusXM has pulled Wallen’s music from its platforms, which include Pandora, a spokesman said. Variety reported that Cumulus Media, another major owner of country music stations, had sent a directive to hundreds of its stations asking them to remove Wallen from their airwaves.The TV network CMT also said it was pulling all of Wallen’s appearances from its platforms. “We do not tolerate or condone words and actions that are in direct opposition to our core values that celebrate diversity, equity & inclusion,” CMT said in a statement. Later on Wednesday, the Academy of Country Music said that it would “halt Morgan Wallen’s potential involvement and eligibility” in its annual ACM Awards. The organization added that it would “expedite the offering of long-planned diversity-training resources” for its members and staff.The uproar comes as Wallen, 27, is at a high-point of his young career. He first gained national visibility as a contestant on “The Voice” in 2014, and has represented a major breakthrough for country music in the world of streaming, which now dominates how music is typically consumed but has been slower to catch on in Nashville.His latest album, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” has topped the all-genre Billboard 200 chart, and it broke the country streaming record by a wide margin, with its songs racking up 240 million streams in the first week. On Wednesday, Wallen held 17 of the Top 100 spots on Apple Music’s overall song chart, including two in its Top 10, but he had been removed from the service’s flagship Today’s Country playlist. Spotify had also removed Wallen’s music from its Hot Country playlist.Spotify declined to comment on how it would promote Wallen moving forward; Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Despite the formative roles of Black musicians in early country and hillbilly music, racial inequity has persisted for decades in the genre and conversations regarding insensitive language and popular Confederate imagery have often been shunted aside.Last year, during the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many Nashville artists broke with tradition and addressed race directly, making statements of solidarity on social media and issuing apologies for past ignorance. The Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum, two best-selling acts with names that suggested the Civil War-era South, announced that they would alter their names.Beginning Tuesday night, several country music performers spoke up about Wallen’s use of the slur.Mickey Guyton, a country singer-songwriter, posted on Twitter about being a Black performer in the industry and the “vile comments” she receives daily, suggesting that Wallen’s behavior was hardly a surprise and questioning his “promises to do better.”“When I read comments saying ‘this is not who we are,’” she wrote, “I laugh because this is exactly who country music is.” Guyton recently became the first solo Black woman to be nominated in a country category at the Grammy Awards with her single “Black Like Me.”She added, “I question on a daily basis as to why I continue to fight to be in an industry that seems to hate me so much.”The country singer-songwriter Kelsea Ballerini tweeted that Wallen’s behavior “does not represent country music,” while another performer, Maren Morris, said the opposite.Wallen, has been in the limelight for the wrong reasons before. Last year, he was arrested and charged with public intoxication and disorderly conduct in downtown Nashville.Months later, he came under scrutiny after he was seen in videos on social media flouting social distancing guidelines intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus, drinking shots, kissing fans and mingling in groups while not wearing a mask during a celebration after a University of Alabama football victory.That led “Saturday Night Live” to drop Wallen from an upcoming show. Wallen apologized, saying that he planned to “take a step back from the spotlight for a little while and go work on myself.” Two months later, Wallen was invited back to perform on “S.N.L.”, and he appeared in a skit that poked fun at the incident.“To no consequences!” Wallen says in the clip, raising a beer bottle to make a toast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Rita Houston, WFUV D.J. Who Lifted Music Careers, Dies at 59

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRita Houston, WFUV D.J. Who Lifted Music Careers, Dies at 59From a studio in the Bronx, she introduced listeners to artists from a wide range of genres. She was also a mentor to the stars, and a sometime-confidante.Rita Houston in 1996 at WFUV’s studio at Fordham University in the Bronx. She was one of the station’s best-known personalities. Credit…Linda RosierDec. 30, 2020Updated 6:30 p.m. ETRita Houston, a big-hearted disc jockey with an intoxicating voice who championed artists like Brandi Carlile, Mumford & Sons, Adele, the Indigo Girls and Gomez at the widely followed WFUV-FM in the Bronx, died on Dec. 15 at her home in Valley Cottage, N.Y. She was 59.Laura Fedele, her wife, said the cause was ovarian cancer.Since 2012, Ms. Houston had been program director at WFUV, a listener-supported station licensed to Fordham University. She was also perhaps its best-known personality, hosting a popular Friday night show, “The Whole Wide World,” which was her vehicle for updating the station’s sound, balancing a new mix of indie rock, world music, hip-hop and electronica with the more familiar one of folk, rock and blues.“Rita could pull together all those things and make you feel, ‘Wow what a big world of music there is here,’” Chuck Singleton, WFUV’s general manager, said in a phone interview.“In her music she contained multitudes,” he added.Ms. Houston was also the impresario of in-studio performances — by Tom Jones, Adele and Emmylou Harris, among many others — and musical events in Manhattan at venues like the Bottom Line and the Beacon Theater as well as on the High Line, the elevated park.“I’m a singer girl, I’m a vocal girl, I don’t like when people don’t sing,” she told the musician-artist Joseph Arthur in March on his podcast, “Come to Where I’m From.” “I don’t want everything to sound like Ella Fitzgerald, but I just love a good voice.”One of those was Ms. Carlile’s, the folk and Americana singer-songwriter who credits Ms. Houston with giving her music its first airplay as well as the confidence to talk publicly about being a lesbian.In a remembrance on Facebook, Ms. Carlile wrote, “‘Is that your plus one?’ Rita Houston said to 22-year-old me as a picture of my girlfriend accidentally popped up on my cellphone screen.”Ms. Houston, sensing Ms. Carlile’s uneasiness at confiding to people in the music industry that she was gay, had persuaded her to open up.“I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but this is N.Y.C.,” Ms. Carlile recalled Ms. Houston telling her. “We’re going lesbian karaoke singing right now. Do a shot of tequila and get your coat.”Ms. Carlile cast Ms. Houston in the music video for “The Joke,” which won Grammy Awards in 2019 for best American roots song and best American roots performance.Ms. Houston’s recognition of the Indigo Girls had a significant impact on their career as well.“You knew you were doing something right if she played your songs,” Amy Ray, a member of that folk duo, said in an interview. “And she was one of those people we weren’t afraid to be ourselves and be queer with. We could be who we were. She gave us a lot of bravery.”Since earlier this year, Ms. Houston had guided a station initiative, called EQFM, to put more female artists on the air.“WFUV is on the right side of this issue, but we acknowledge there was more work we can do,” she told AllAccess.com, a radio industry news website. “For example, our music mix is 35 percent female-coded. That is higher than most but needs to be at 50 percent for true parity.”She added: “Good songs come from everywhere, across race, age and gender. Good radio should celebrate that, without bias.”Ms. Houston with Paul Simon in 2003. She balanced the station’s offerings between a mix of indie rock, world music, hip-hop and electronica and the more familiar format of folk, rock and blues.Credit…WFUVRita Ann Houston was born on Sept. 28, 1961, in White Plains, N.Y., and grew up in nearby Mount Vernon. Her father, William, was a home heating oil company executive. Her mother, Rita (Paone) Houston, was a waitress.Ms. Houston majored in urban studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, N.Y., but was expelled for tripping fire alarms and tipping over vending machines. “I went out big,” she told Mr. Arthur on his podcast. “I was in the wrong place.”She worked as a waitress before finding work as a D.J. at Westchester Community College’s radio station, then at another station in Mount Kisco, N.Y., for $7 an hour. She left for a job at ABC Radio as an engineer, and worked with the sports journalist Howard Cosell and the talk show host Sally Jessy Raphael. The pay was far better than her low-wage radio jobs, but she missed being on the air. In 1989 she was back behind a microphone at WZFM in White Plains.“Someone said to me, ‘I want to introduce you to the voice of God,’” said Paul Cavalconte, who, as the WZFM program director, hired Ms. Houston. “She was so engaging and charismatic, which worked on the radio and in personal appearances.” (WZFM is now WXPK.)When WZFM’s format shifted from adult album alternative to modern rock in 1993, Ms. Houston was told that she had to adopt on-air name with an X in it. She became Harley Foxx. But, seeking more diversity in the format, she sought refuge a year later at WFUV, of which she had been a fan for some time.“I just called the station and was, like, ‘Hey, can I work here, please?’” she told Mr. Arthur.She started hosting the midday show in 1994, then stepped away from it after a few years to become the full-time music director. She returned to the air in 2001 to host “The Whole Wide World.”In addition to her wife, she is survived by her sister, Debra Baglio, and her brothers, Richard and Robert. Another brother, William Jr., died in October.Ms. Houston recorded her final show from home on Dec. 5, with Mr. Cavalconte, also a D.J. at WFUV, as the co-host. It was broadcast three days after she died.“She was short of breath and aware that her voice was not strong,” said Ms. Fedele, who is the station’s new media director. “I nagged her for a couple of days, I wanted her to think about the playlist. Finally, she asked me to get a pen, and she just reeled off 30 songs.”Her playlist was a distillation of the genres that she had brought to her show and the station. She opened with James Brown (“Night Train”), moved on to artists like Deee-Lite (“Groove is in the Heart”), Emmylou Harris (“Red Dirt Girl”), Los Amigos Invisibles (“Cuchi Cuchi”), LCD Soundsystem (“New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down”) and David Bowie (“Station to Station”).The finale was the Waterboys’ “In My Time on Earth,” which the group performed last year at a WFUV event at Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan.Given the time she had left, the song resonated with her.“In my time on earth,” it goes, “I will speak the secret / In my time on earth / I will tell what is true.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      What Are the Greatest 2,020 Songs Ever? Philadelphia Is Deciding

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWhat Are the Greatest 2,020 Songs Ever? Philadelphia Is DecidingThe Philly radio station WXPN polled its listeners and is revealing their choices in a marathon show. “I treasure the folly of it,” our critic writes.Edith Piaf, from left, the Notorious B.I.G. and Paul McCartney are among the artists with music on the WXPN list of the 2,020 greatest songs.Credit…From left: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Raymond Boyd/Getty Images; Wood/Evening Standard, Hulton Arcvhie, via Getty ImagesDec. 14, 2020Updated 7:34 p.m. ETAre you busy right now? And if not, are you up for another year-end list? Are you up for another list that’s also basically another election? You see, since Thursday, WXPN, a public radio station in Philadelphia, has been unfurling what its listeners chose as the 2,020 greatest-ever songs, based on a preferential balloting system that permitted voters to choose as many as 10 songs and as few as one, of any kind from any century. Late Sunday afternoon, the countdown passed the halfway point. I like the collective act of building a list. I like the story it tells about the art form and the people who claim to love it. I love the aggregation of sensibilities and generations and blocs. I might more than love it.The unfurling lasts 24 hours a day until a summit is reached, which means that catching the songs you voted for (or would have) might entail some sleeplessness. On the first overnight, I missed the best song ever written about anybody named Leah (Donnie Iris’s “Ah! Leah!,” No. 1,826) and one of my Top 3 favorite Donna Summer songs (“State of Independence,” No. 1,797).Why do this to myself? Why do it for what’s essentially just another canon? Enough with those! They’re exclusionary, history-warping, gate-kept; perpetuators of the same-old same-olds — the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan. These hierarchies of worth are rarely about passion for art; they’re papacy. And didn’t I mention that this is a Philadelphia station and the list was likely determined by Philadelphia-area radio listeners? That means hours and hours of rock ’n’ roll — old rock ’n’ roll. Tons of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon. An onslaught of Led Zeppelin. Basic rock, as a friend put it when I told him what I was up to. Bad Bunny just had the No. 1 album in the country. Anything like him on this list? As of Monday afternoon: not so far.My best answers for “why do it?” include the aforementioned accounting for taste (I, at least, like knowing what other people like) and something more particular to our having to retreat indoors yet again. It’s been a terrible year for experiences — pleasant, frivolous, collective ones, anyway. This countdown is an oasis amid the sands of monotony and worse. I’ve done no dancing at any bar or club (or illegal house party) since mid-February. But there I was in my kitchen Friday night presented with a block of nourishment, wagging my fanny against the cabinet doors as Janelle Monáe’s “Tightrope” led to Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” then the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” (traditionally, a song that keeps me seated) and “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” the most physically addictive song Stevie Wonder has written, followed by “Highway to Hell,” essential AC/DC that my body treated as if DJ Kool had produced it.Frank Ocean has at least three songs on the list, including “Pyramids” at No. 1,891.Credit…Visionhaus#GP/Corbis, via Getty ImagesSo far, the usual suspects (see “old rock,” above) find themselves overrepresented. (It’s a mark of a kind of progress that, at some point, Radiohead had as many songs as Steely Dan and the Who. The station’s site is keeping track.) There’s also been much too much Van Morrison and Moody Blues yet no or not nearly enough Nina Simone, Carly Simon, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, Reba McEntire, Madonna, Björk, Tracy Chapman, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Shakira, Beyoncé and Erykah Badu. Joni Mitchell currently leads the song count among women. And an event featuring more than 1,300 titles so far has turned up less than 20 by rappers; that number includes De La Soul’s appearance on Gorillaz’s “Feel Good Inc.” I’m looking on the bright side. There’s plenty of time.Either way, that is not WXPN’s problem. Loosely, the station’s format is listener-supported rock, down at 88.5 on the proverbial radio dial. Rock was foundational to its programming the way flour and water are to dough. I would describe it as “modern-rock singer-songwriter,” somehow without also being too “coffee shop” or “college radio.” XPN introduced my adolescent, late-1980s, early-1990s Philadelphia self to Joan Armatrading, Iris DeMent, Lyle Lovett, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Ben Folds Five and Olu Dara (a.k.a. Nas’s dad). It led me to Keb’ Mo’, Jonatha Brooke, Matthew Sweet, the Jayhawks, Jeff Buckley, post-“La Bamba” Los Lobos and Don Dixon, whose “Praying Mantis” is the “Boogie On Reggae Woman” of skintight, smarty-pants pop-rock. When John Prine died over the spring, years of WXPN are the reason I knew to shed tears.The city had other stations. WDAS for what I’d call grown-and-sexy R&B. Power 99 was rowdier and eventually more rappy. Q102 was pop. WMMR had become classic rock. WYSP seemed like rock before it was classic. One station had an alternative Friday night that played Nine Inch Nails and Meat Beat Manifesto. I was into all of it. XPN, though, was mine.The station still airs a show devoted to the ecstasies of lesbian musicianship (“Amazon Country”) and retains a Peabody-winning hour for kids. Today, its programming seems even more broad. In a given hour you could hear Solange Knowles, Sudan Archives, Chicano Batman and the late Sharon Jones, as well as Courtney Barnett, Josh Ritter, Kathleen Edwards, Fontaines D.C., Spoon, TV on the Radio and the War on Drugs. It’s still not a place where much current hip-hop meaningfully happens.This is a station in a city with a local music scene that it has remained part of. (The University of Pennsylvania provides its broadcast license but that’s really all.) The buoyant, affable on-air talent are audio veterans, not Penn students, and some of them sound like they couldn’t have grown up more than a mile from the West Philadelphia studio.Lady Gaga popped onto the list at No. 1,382 with “Born This Way.”Credit…Darron Cummings/Associated PressThis is a long way of saying that my personal excitement around this station daring to mount a greatest-songs-of-all-time chart arises from a tension between its inherent format and the music toward the other end of the dial. How much will the final list reflect WXPN’s values and broad, devoted audience and how much will it also ultimately reflect a station like WMMR’s?On Sunday, while the countdown was unveiling Beck’s “Loser” and Dion’s “The Wanderer,” I asked Bruce Warren, XPN’s program director, if he worried whether the results were going to tell him something about his station that he didn’t want to know. He laughed and reminded me that the program includes some kind of annual countdown and that, in his 30 years at XPN, eclecticism has always been the station’s raison d’être. Indeed, over the first five days, anyone listening even a little might have heard Metallica; Kurtis Blow; John Coltrane; Tash Sultana’s atmospheric dazzle; the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mozart; Lady Gaga; Frank Ocean; and a lot of Genesis.Warren has no official way of knowing how many of the 2,400 ballots cast were from the Philly area, but his hunch is most of them. “Today, we played a song by the Meters,” he said of the New Orleans funk band’s “It Ain’t No Use,” which came in at 1,063. “We’ve played them on XPN for years. They’re probably a band that, in that genre of music, we play a lot of. That speaks to the core listeners of XPN. They know the Meters because they know we play their music.” The same is true for the surfeit of Wilco entries, the high-ish positioning of Indigo Girls, and the decent showings of Loreena McKennitt and Bruce Cockburn, two very different Canadians and former XPN staples.But Warren is no fool. All of that Genesis testifies to some of the station’s older listeners “who grew up listening to them on WMMR.” He says that the final 200 songs will represent something of a consensus among those ballots, and that “No. 1 is No. 1 by a lot.” I wouldn’t let him spoil what kind of consensus, but I do wonder. Would it be what my friends who are also following along wearily predict? “Stairway to Heaven”? “Born to Run”? Would Aretha Franklin serve her usual canonical function of hauling both Black America and womankind to the top of the pile? Did no one write the words “Sinead” and “O’Connor” on their ballot?One compelling aspect of this countdown business is philosophical. At 2,000-plus songs, some percentage was probably always going to hew to XPN’s taste. Local acts like the Hooters, Amos Lee and Low Cut Connie are very much here. And believe it or not, “local” extends to Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, who, as of midday Monday, had almost 30 entries between them. But how would a countdown of the 2,020 greatest songs proceed over at, say, WDAS, where the format is now old-school R&B and “The Steve Harvey Morning Show” anchors the a.m. block? Power 99 used to have a nightly countdown show that one song — Shirley Murdock’s “As We Lay” or Keith Sweat’s “Make It Last Forever” or Prince’s “Adore”— would dominate for what felt like weeks. What would a more epochal undertaking look like? Would WMMR find a way to make inroads there, too?And what would the same countdown reveal at a similar station in Anchorage or Montgomery or Chicago or the Bay Area? Does it matter that a few corporate behemoths have flattened pop’s palette? Can a chart still quantify local taste? Would an accurate answer prove as vexing as precise electoral polling data, because, in part, we now live on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube? Is this entire process just too random and subjective to be worth continuing?I vote no; it’s not. I treasure the folly of it, the surprises, the mind-bending idea that a ranking process could place the number 1,995 next to something as celestial as Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” and go on to play another song after Ella Fitzgerald turns “Mack the Knife” into thrilling mass murder. I think “Brilliant Disguise” is a better Springsteen song than the certain finalist “Born to Run,” but no chart will ever reflect that, because it’s a blasphemous position. But I like the drama of the blasphemy and the certitude of what a chart tells you: Modernization is hard work. XPN’s is a kaleidoscope nonetheless.It’s true that you could build your own massive, perfectly tailored playlist. But you’d miss the astonishment of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” kicking off the 767-to-764 block and A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” ending it in smithereens. There’d be no shock at all in hearing, say, Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” (1,093) follow the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” (1,094), which had chased Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run” (1,095). There’s no happening upon Dan Fogelberg’s 40-year-old “Same Auld Lang Syne” and swearing it’s the lonely ghost lurking on Taylor Swift’s two quarantine albums. Ditto — if you’re up late enough — for hearing XPN’s newbie host Rahman Wortman go a little bonkers exclaiming that Outkast’s “B. O. B (Bombs Over Baghdad)” did indeed make the cut.And you certainly couldn’t cringe at Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu” and the Richard Harris travesty known as “MacArthur Park.” I suspect that the people who voted for those two know that they’re trolls. But it doesn’t matter. Even songs as baffling (fine, as horrendous) as those have culminated in days and days of something we’ve grown increasingly estranged from: word-of-mouth radio.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Radio Disney, Launching Pad for Young Stars, Will Shut Down Next Year

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRadio Disney, Launching Pad for Young Stars, Will Shut Down Next YearSince 1996, the network has been a go-to music destination for preteens and helped jump-start the careers of future superstars. Disney said it was ending it to focus on streaming and TV.Selena Gomez at the 2014 Radio Disney Music Awards. The network boosted the music careers of several young Disney Channel stars.Credit…Michael Yada/Disney ChannelBy More