Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  There were those among us, he said, who would complain nonetheless. People “at odds with the masses.” People who believe that “the mass in our country are stupid.” People who would tell you that you “should read Atlantic Monthly, not Time.” But that was all right. “You can have anything you want,” he said. “You just can’t have what you want everywhere.” He smiled. “Some people don’t like that.” He leaned forward and patted the coffee table, a little gesture to let me know that he knew that I knew what he was talking about, that I was, with him, part of “the mass.”

  Which is why I felt pretty bad when I asked him about “Butt Pirates of the Caribbean.” He reared back, and in a gentle, rumbling tone, he asked, “What are you saying? That it should not have been on?”

  “No,” I said. I told him I wouldn’t want anything banned from radio. My question was about the Clear Channel formula of provocation as a kind of reassurance that the center will hold, that old jokes will always be funny, that old prejudices can be preserved as in the amber of rock-and-roll humor. “Switch ‘Butt Pirates of the Caribbean’ for something like, say, ‘Jigaboos of Jamaica,’ and I think you can see what I mean.”

  Larsen frowned. He took some time to gather his thoughts. When he spoke, his tone wasn’t defensive but meditative. “Personally, on one of my radio stations? I’d probably have some angst over that.” I left aside the fact that it had been on one of his stations. “I know,” he continued, “clearly, that you couldn’t do a bit like that, that’s ethnic. I know that, okay? Maybe, in the area you’re talking about, that might still be open. Society’s still trying to figure out the line there.”

  What, I asked, is the line on “Butt Pirates”?

  “Okay, if you took that bit and put it on a classical-music radio station and played it, well the people would be outraged. It’s out of context.” But there was a time and place for such things. “If every radio station was doing ‘Butt Pirates,’ then you would be saying, ‘Well, what is this?’ But they are not.” At the station I had heard it on, he explained, “the talent must have felt that was within the bounds they could work within, and was something that the audience that was listening to their radio station could relate to.”

  But he seemed worried. “If on one of your stations an on-air personality wanted to do a racist thing, ‘I want to make fun of black people,’ ‘Jigaboos of Jamaica,’ or something like that—” He paused, made a steeple with his fingers, and fixed his eyes on his Broncos helmets for a long moment before returning to me, lowering his hands to his knees as if he was confiding a painful secret. “On the radio,” he said, “the red light’s on and you’re talking. And you say something. Just like you do in real life. And you go”—he shaped his lips into an O and let his eyes bulge as he covered his mouth—“I. Wish. I. Hadn’t. Said. That.” He shrugged, held up his palms in a “what can you do?” gesture. “But, it’s too late.”

  FROM DENVER I WENT to Oklahoma City to meet with former congressman Julius Caesar “J. C.” Watts, who had recently been named to Clear Channel’s board of directors, paid twenty thousand dollars per meeting. During the hour and a half we spent driving around and listening to the radio in his shiny new black Cadillac Escalade, Watts referred to Americans as “dogs” five times. Not in the slang sense—Watts loathes what he refers to as that “hip-hop bebop rap” stuff, calls himself a Barry White man—but in the idiom of business. He was trying to get at what business is all about. Watts has a deep voice with a Midwestern accent that sounds cautious at the beginning of a sentence, mocking at its end. He wasn’t concerned about Clear Channel’s overwhelming control of music, he said, because “the dogs are eating the dog food.” He said that the reason talk radio is so conservative is that “the dogs ain’t eating the dog food” offered by liberals: “You can’t force bad dog food on people!”

  A former football star for the Sooners and a Southern Baptist preacher at a church called Sunnylane, Watts had an easy manner that could nevertheless be disconcerting, as when he took both hands off the wheel at seventy-five miles an hour, turned, and gripped my arm, saying, “I’m ready to go to the American people with my dog food.” He kept looking at me, driving with his knees. “The dogs want the dog food, don’t they?” I was speechless, wondering if he’d be offended if I put a hand on the wheel. Then he heard a song he seemed to like, “Get Busy,” by Sean Paul, and turned it up. It was hip-hop, but it did have a spiritual message: “From the day we born Jah ignite me flame / Gal a call me name and it is me fame / It’s all good girl turn me on / Till the early morn’ / Let’s get it on.”

  The former fourth-ranking Republican in the House, Watts may have been out of office at the moment (he left of his own volition to go into business), but he still wielded considerable power as chair of GOPAC, an organization designed to develop Republican candidates at the state level, and as the GOP’s great black hope. When Democratic dealmaker Vernon Jordan retired from Clear Channel’s board, he pushed Watts, a man who considers LBJ to have been a “wild-eyed radical,” as his replacement.

  But I don’t think Watts’s connections—or his politics—were why he “aligns nicely,” as Clear Channel CEO Lowry Mays put it, with the company. Rather I suspect it had something to do with his mix of aggressive amiability and angry defensiveness, like a shock jock declaring fag jokes the height of First Amendment freedoms. Watts often got called an “Uncle Tom”; Clear Channel’s radio and concert guys were sick of being called “sellouts.” Watts thought it was unfair that as a black man he should have to defend himself for also being a Republican; Clear Channel couldn’t understand why people were upset when it competed as fiercely as it did. Both Watts and Clear Channel looked at what they were doing as revolutionary, unsentimental, necessary. Watts, author of a book called What Color Is a Conservative?, thought Clear Channel simply needed to do a better job of telling the American people—the dogs—what the company is.

  We pulled into the parking lot of a motel next to a Denny’s. Watts said, “In politics or in business, you’re either on the offense or you’re on the defense. If you’re on the defense, you’re losing.” As far as he was concerned Clear Channel didn’t have to respond to critics who said it was too big, or too rough, or made music too boring. The company had done its homework, just like politicians reading the polls. It was listening to the howling of the dogs. “Jeff, I think today that people are concerned with”—he reached out and banged the dashboard speakers of his Escalade—“this. They don’t care where it’s coming from!” Then he turned the radio on again and tuned it to his daughter’s favorite station and cranked it up. “Get Busy,” by Sean Paul.

  “Same song!” Watts shouted. “Thirty minutes ago! I couldn’t have planned that in a thousand years!” To Watts this was a good thing.

  He said Clear Channel needed a great slogan, like Fox’s “Fair and Balanced.”

  “You mean,” I said, “something like ‘Clear Channel: We Give You What You Want’?”

  “Yeah!” Watts slapped my shoulder. “Yeah! Or maybe . . .” He paused to think, then held up his hands to frame his idea. “Clear Channel, Your Community, you know, Involvement, you know, Network, or, or Station, or Whatever. . . .”

  Whatever wasn’t the point. The point was playing offense.

  “An enemy says, ‘Jeff, I don’t want you to have what you have. You know, I’m gonna be a self-righteous income distributor. And I’m gonna balance this thing out.’” (Watts believes in balance, so long as it isn’t, as he put it, “communist,” which, presumably, pre-1996 radio in America was.) “ ‘And I’m gonna take from all those who’re producing and give to those that aren’t producing.’ ” He shook his head. “Uh-uh. When we get to the point where people are envious and we say, ‘We’re not gonna allow [consolidation] to happen’ ”—Watts clapped a hand over mine and shuddered—“that is a fiendish business.”

  REGULATION OF RADIO OWNERSHIP—Watts’s fiendish bus
iness—began not with the creation of the FCC, in 1934, but seven years earlier, with the Radio Act of 1927. The commission created then determined that the only way to keep radio free of “ideology” was through advertising, the piecemeal sell-off of the airwaves. Those who considered advertising a form of ideological propaganda itself—a surprisingly diverse group that included both John D. Rockefeller and John Dewey—were, of course, welcome to buy ads proclaiming their views. They pinned their hopes for a more genuinely public spectrum on Franklin Roosevelt. But he took a pass—radio broadcasters were his only way around the then-Republican newspaper business—and institutionalized the privatization of the airwaves with the creation of the FCC as a permanent commission. The two biggest giveaways of the public airwaves, then—the Communications Act of 1934 and the Telecom Act of 1996—occurred under liberal presidents loathed by conservatives as enemies of big business.

  Which should be a clue that privatization isn’t about conservatives vs. liberals; it’s about privatization. You could say it’s about the notion that we could ever collectively own things—mountains and rivers, schools, airwaves—giving way to the belief that what makes America great is everyone’s right to own, all by him- or herself, as much as possible. Either way the protection of the commons—government regulation—has for so long been a cause obscured by static that even its proponents now fight for it, perversely, in the language of business, touting ownership caps as a means to preserve the “marketplace of ideas.” This phrase, or even the “free market of ideas,” has become a rhetorical fixture of anticonsolidation activists, for whom it connotes a free and fair system by which ideas compete for the minds of the citizenry. Implicit in the phrase is that ideas compete in roughly the same manner as do brands of soap; that, given equal price and placement, the most effective ideas will win the day. By owning so many stations, the argument goes, Clear Channel reduces the number of songs, sounds, formats, and opinions from which American listeners can choose.

  But to so frame the argument is already to have lost. Media corporations want nothing more than to create new, popular formats with which to segment their audiences on advertisers’ behalf. As advocates of deregulation never tire of pointing out, the “diversity” of U.S. radio content—in terms of average number of different formats available in each market, varieties of rock tuned precisely to what you already like—has increased with consolidation since 1996, not decreased. In fact nothing resembles a “free market of ideas” so much as Clear Channel itself, where infinitesimal changes in ratings are tracked, mapped, and responded to; where Boston’s successful new format can appear in San Diego overnight. This is what Lee Larsen meant when he spoke of giving the people what they want. It is what J. C. Watts was trying to express when he jabbed the tuner on his radio and shouted, “This is democracy!” A democracy of top-down distribution, not participation.

  Activists fret that Clear Channel is foisting a right-wing agenda onto its listeners. To the contrary, the company seems to advance no ideology whatsoever; nor does it seem to advance any aesthetic that could be called good, bad, ugly, or beautiful. Perhaps the most instructive example here is the controversy over what has come to be called The List: the roster of songs that, immediately after September 11, were not supposed to be played on Clear Channel stations. The List’s recommendations ranged from the obvious (AC/DC’s “Shot Down in Flames”) to the saccharine (Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young”) to the grotesque (Van Halen’s “Jump”) to the unexpectedly poetic (Phil Collins’s otherwise unremarkable “In the Air Tonight”). Antiwar activists pointed out that The List “banned” Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train” and John Lennon’s “Imagine,” but ignored the fact that The List also proscribed Judas Priest’s “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll” and the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” said to have been popular with U.S. pilots on bombing runs over Iraq during the first Gulf War.

  Everyone seemed to see The List as the ultimate case of censorship by a corporate head office, but in fact The List came together just as might a great promotion by John Hogan’s hypothetical program director in Dayton, Ohio. On his or her own initiative (nobody knows for certain where, or with whom, The List started), a Clear Channel PD drew up a list of songs; this PD e-mailed The List to a PD at another station, and he or she added more songs, and so on. When, eventually, The List was leaked to the press, Clear Channel pointed out that it was the work of independent program directors who were free to play—or not to play—whatever songs they liked, so long as the advertising followed.

  Confusing The List for ideological censorship reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of Clear Channel. It reflects the misguided notion that the company means anything at all. Every Clear Channel talent buyer, “on-air personality,” news director, and executive I spoke with shared a basic disregard for both the content of the product and its quality. The market would take care of those. Clear Channel’s functionaries seemed to view the company as some marvelous but unfathomable machine with whose upkeep they had been charged. They knew only that it accomplished a miraculous task and did not care to trouble themselves with how.

  BRYAN DILWORTH SWORE to me he had nothing to do with Sean Agnew’s show at the Church getting shut down. He said that any suggestion to the contrary was “Davy-and-Goliath bullshit.” He claimed he walked into his bosses’ office and asked them if they had been involved. He told them he needed to know, because he would quit if they had. He said they swore innocence. I tried to confirm his story, but his bosses never returned my calls.

  But I believe Dilworth. As he said: “Dude. It’s. Not. About. Me.”

  Nor was it about Agnew. I went to one of his shows, a band called Thursday that was popular enough to sell out Clear Channel venues ten times the size of Agnew’s church basement. A few hundred kids packed into a low-ceilinged room cooled by only rotating fans on one of the hottest nights of the year. Before the first act was through, the floor was slick with sweat. By the time Thursday played, I felt as if I were standing in a bog. They were hardly the avant-garde band I’d expected. They had big guitars and the singer twirled his mike over his head and leaned into the crowd for choruses shouted in unison by half the kids in the room, and whenever that happened I thought fondly of the Riverboat Gamblers show I’d seen with Dilworth, more rock and roll by a mile.

  But then I stepped outside to cool off, and discovered a crowd as big as the one inside. Not people waiting to get in, not Thursday fans. Just folks who knew about the Church and knew there was a gathering there this evening and who thought they’d come down and sit together on the steps, hang out with the musicians between sets and with each other. They weren’t just kids, like I’d thought in the dark; in the yellow glow of the streetlights I saw all ages. I spoke with an elderly woman with braids and a hippie skirt and the pungent scent of marijuana who said she didn’t care for the music—too loud for her—but she liked the company. I spoke with a middle-aged plumber with a mouth full of broken teeth who’d been moshing at punk shows for twenty-five years; he’d never been to a Clear Channel venue because he didn’t see what he’d get for his thirty-five bucks that he couldn’t get sitting on the Church steps, talking old school with punks too young to remember. I spoke with a high school kid, a beefy, intensely freckled boy who said he liked shows at the Church because they were his refuge from “jock-rock assholes,” and I spoke with a college lacrosse player in a Duke U. cap who said he’d come because he wanted to see Thursday in a setting more intimate—that was his word—than an arena.

  The show ended, and more people drifted up from the basement. A band from Indiana called Murder by Death loaded their cello into their van. DJR500 appeared with a broom and announced that everyone had to leave so that the homeless men he hired to help him clean up could earn some drinking money for the evening. With a little sweeping he got the crowd moving. It broke into smaller groups that headed off to bars or to diners, into SUVs and onto anarchist bicycles rebuilt by an an
ticar collective that squats in a commune in West Philly. The jocks went back to their dorms to rest up for another day of summer training; the plumber went back to Jersey; citizens for an evening, not dogs or consumers.

  The next day I met Dilworth at his home in South Philly. His wife needed a nap, so we took his ten-month-old for a ride in the stroller. We walked through the Italian market, dead quiet at six on a Sunday evening, empty wooden stalls fronting pork shops and bakeries. We stopped to watch a group of boys on skateboards work a ramp they had set up in the street, performing for a video camera one of the kids was holding. Dilworth laughed. “The dudes who own those stores knew these kids were out here, skating on their stalls like that? They’d break their legs.” This delighted him, all of it: The men who owned the stores who wouldn’t give a damn for the law, the kids who took over the street who didn’t give a damn for the owners. “This place is totally . . . this place,” he said.

  I asked him how that squared with his working for Clear Channel, which seemed dedicated to making every place the same. Dilworth didn’t look at me but he smiled. His grin pushed his baby-fat cheeks up and made his eyes small.

  “All of a sudden I’m supposed to be super-evil?” he said. “Fuck that.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” I said.

  “Fuck that. I just wanted to make money doing something I liked. There are different opinions about how far down the road America is businesswise, but dude, whatever, it’s too far gone for anything to change.”