Christian radio is becoming less, well, Christian, reports Sojourners—and the shift is treating stations well. By including more “family-friendly” songs (i.e., less overtly religious) and paring down bible-thumping programming, Christian stations have grown their pool of listeners, even nabbing listeners outside the faith who are simply looking for uplifting music.

Not all Christians are fans of the trend. Daniel Radosh, whose rollicking book Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture is excerpted on Utne.com, tells Sojourners that “the fact that committed Muslims can listen to Christian music actually says quite a bit, and I think not anything very good about Christian music these days.”

Christian music’s new listeners tend to disagree. Christian stations and artists “have an opportunity to offer the mainstream market the kind of inspiration and hope that people really need,” a Muslim listener tells Sojourners. “I appreciate it if they can touch the hearts of people like me.”

Source: Sojourners

What are they listening to in Paris? Gareth Murphy at the new and impressive Journal of Music fills us in on the expansive playlists of Parisian radio stations:

Classical, jazz, electro pips and boinks, apocalyptic gangster rap from the Paris hoods, gay house, Congolese rhumba, chanson française, Hebrew religious songs, arty hip-hop from New York, Zouk from the Antilles, salsa from Havana, crooner slows from the 1980s, accordion cheese, Arabic trad, Algerian raï, French R&B for suburban girlies, weird cinematic soundtracks about geese flying to Moscow. Parisians approach music rather like food: they want to taste every dish that human civilisation has ever invented.

Murphy attributes this wild eclecticism to several factors. France is better known for painting, literature, and cinema than for music; hence its relatively small music industry “does not possess the arrogance and influential export market that the pop music scene in London is renowned for” and is free to play what it wants. He also posits that theater is a subliminal artistic reference point for the French, resulting in a strange combination of musical tastes:

Caught in a split personality between the brooding of Northern Europe and the simplicity of Mediterranean culture, it’s almost as if the French still don’t know whether music is supposed to be stupid or serious, ironic or first degree.

Murphy notes that many talented artists who failed to launch their careers in their homelands end up being the toast of Paris. For example, have you ever heard of the U.S. folk singer Alela Diane? Neither had I. But Murphy reports that this “rising genius” has gotten huge exposure through repeated plays on France Inter, the country’s news, society and culture broadcaster, launching her on national tours. “The Paris music scene does not have any special secret to teach the world’s musicians,” he writes, “except maybe that the expectations and values of your audience will denote the ambitions and content of your work.”

Source: The Journal of Music (subscription required for full article)

Young people in Swaziland will soon be able to connect to their peers via “Ses’khona,” the country’s first youth-driven radio program, set to air weekly starting this month. The project is an extension of “Super Buddies,” a UNICEF-backed children’s outreach program and magazine that started in 2003. Both the radio show and the magazine are Swaziland’s only examples of media by and for children.

The show will be broadcast on the government station and features directors, producers, and reporters ages 12-14. With a huge majority of the population getting their news from the radio, along with an overwhelmingly positive response from test audiences, Ses’khona will give a voice to the oft-ignored youth demographic. The name translated from SiSwati to English means “We’re here,” but its original connotation is one of “the arrival of a group that intends to stay and be heard.”

Native communities currently broadcast on 33 U.S. radio stations, a number that may double within the next couple of years, reports Mike Janssen for In These Times. Tribal communities applied for 51 radio stations last year, and 12 FCC approvals have trickled in thus far. These soon-to-be stations aren’t on the air yet—they’re still in the fundraising and planning stages—but they could play a significant role in strengthening Native communities. Janssen writes:

Many noncommercial stations around the country focus on community issues. This is especially true of Native stations, which cover topics such as health, education and the environment; feature locally programmed music; and broadcast in Native languages that in some places are spoken by very few people.

Several applicants are still waiting to hear back from the FCC. In the meantime, the nonprofit Native Public Media has a short list of Native stations that stream online and a directory of the stations currently broadcasting.

The Sound of Young America’s podcast aficionado Podthinker (née Colin Marshall) recommends the New York Review of Books’ new(ish) podcast, which debuted in June and already is filling out an impressive archive of conversations with literary luminaries such as Oliver Sacks and Edmund White.

I am grateful to Marshall for turning more people on to this terrific podcast, but I take issue with his one criticism of the NYRB’s audio and print content: that it’s too political. “Evidently, the editorial board of the magazine will not rest until a certain number of otherwise pleasing articles are dragged into the much [sic?] of unseemly political territory,” Marshall writes. “Your podthinker has, in other venues, repeatedly reached the conclusion that when it comes to the place of politics in art, it doesn't have one.”

Really? There’s no place in art for politics? I know a few people who’d disagree—namely, 99 percent of my favorite writers, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists.

It still amazes me when people deem politics a separate and easily demarcated external force we can segregate from the rest of our world. Marshall evidently prefers a “pleasing” aesthetic universe free of political content—which, remember, includes but is not limited to gender, race, class, education, the economy, transportation, healthcare, and war (or “something about Iraq,” as Marshall refers to an interview with CJR contributor and foreign affairs scholar Michael Massing). Because really, who cares about such trifles? And who could possibly be interested in Joan Didion’s ideas about the narratives of presidential campaigns or Samantha Power’s global policy analysis?

I encountered this same desire to segregate politics from life while writing about the politics of bicycling. While I certainly share the public’s weariness of partisan rancor and have developed an acute allergy to the mere mention of Sarah Palin’s name, I firmly believe that it’s naïve and unwise—let alone impossible—to try and scrub our daily lives clean of politics.

Pardon me. I seem to have lost focus and let the unpleasantness of politics divert me from my main point, one on which Marshall and I agree: the NYRB Podcast is definitely worth checking out. And so is the Sound of Young America, which boasts shows featuring art/media darlings like Patton Oswalt, George Saunders, and cast members of the Wire—three cultural forces whose work is, no doubt, completely devoid of political overtones.

One of the best (and most overwhelming) parts of a conference like this weekend’s Free Press event is the confluence of energized people, all armed with sharp ideas, many working on innovative, exciting projects. On Saturday afternoon, one project making innovative use of radio stood out from the fray:

Thousand Kites , a project of the Appalachia-based arts and education center Appalshop, is “a national dialogue project addressing the criminal justice system” that uses video, theater, radio, and the Internet to help people to share their experiences and motivate reform. Amelia Kirby, the project’s media producer, played several minutes of a radio call-in show for conference attendees during a session on “Connecting with Social Justice Organizations.” Over crackling phone lines, family and friends sent holiday wishes to incarcerated loved ones from whom they were separated.

Before one airing of the show, Kirby explained, they had a caller who was outraged at the premise, offended that they’d be doing such a thing for incarcerated people. After the show aired, Kirby said, the man called again. He had listened to the program. He had changed his mind—he’d never “thought of things this way.”

It reminded me of what Janine Jackson, from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, had said the day before, when someone asked her how media critics might also be activists. Her answer resonated beyond media criticism: To make change, she explained, you don’t have to necessarily change the institution. You just have to change how one person thinks about the institution.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

On many reservations, cell phone service and internet access are spotty or nonexistent, and radio is an important resource for tribal communities to share information and stories with one another. Neelanjana Banerjee writes in New America Media that one national radio show, Native America Calling, connects many tribal nations by reaching 500,000 people via 52 stations. The call-in show, which broadcasts live on weekdays, invites listeners to join conversations on Native education, health care, arts, literature, and many other subjects. As Harlan McKosato, the show's host and producer, told Banerjee, "It’s about identity, first and foremost. That’s the core issue."

But even though most reservations have access to radio, getting ahold of station frequencies creates a major hurdle. So Native Public Media, a project of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, worked with several tribal communities to apply for non-commercial educational programming FM licenses from the Federal Communications Commission (the FCC accepted applications during a short window from October 9-15). Native Public Media will also testify before Congress on tribal telecommunications issues October 24. —Julie Dolan

For almost 50 years, the Arbitron survey-research firm has been paying select radio listeners to keep a handwritten log of every station they listen to. Once the logs are completed, Arbitron does its survey-research company fandango, throws the results back to the radio stations, and radio listeners everywhere are stuck listening to the same 50 songs over and over.

Wired (article not available online) reports that Arbitron recently introduced a new, allegedly more precise, way to log peoples’ listening habits. The Portable People Meter will clip onto listeners’ clothing and will automatically record every radio song they listen to, based on hidden tones embedded in the music. The devices will go nationwide in 2010, when 70,000 of them will be sent out to snoop into listeners’ music lives.

These paid listeners can forget about secretly tuning in to “Karma Chameleon” and conveniently forgetting to write it in their log. Arbitron knows all. -- Cara Binder