“Producer Michelle Parise†(emphasis added):
“We never want it to seem like we know so much about this great music and here it is. To be know-y is not our goal. We want to share music with people, just like a friend who always seems to know everything about music, but doesn’t do it in a snobby way.â€
I want my public broadcaster to be “know-y†(Tintin’s dog?). Who the fuck else is gonna be “know-yâ€Â in this country? Ben Mulroney?
6 Comments
Better to smarten’em up again than to euthanise’em.
“This is Art”, the best music program CBC radio ever aired was its know-y-est. Every service of the CBC is now commited to dumbing itself down. Put the institution out of our misery.
Yes, this was the most common – and to my mind the most unfair – criticism of Brave New Waves: that it was somehow “elitist” because it treated everything as high art worth discussing, whether it was weirdo classical, hip hop, indie rock, or the sound of two sheets of sandpaper being rubbed together.
But of course, if you treat white noise the same as a symphony, “elitist” is exactly what you aren’t.
There are college stations in every big city in Canada that offer breathless coverage of which band is “hip”, who’s on tour, who’s remixing whom, who might sign to a major label, and other mostly pointless details.
If you’re going to have a paid staff putting a show together, they might actually, y’know, read up on stuff and be able to present music in a way that’s interesting, informative and entertaining.
Otherwise, um… what’s the point of having a staff? I’m sure Mr. Terfry has enough discs and info in his head that he could simply whip up the show on his own, at his own house, and just show up at the end of the day with a script and an executive producer to hold his hand (exactly how “Gilmour’s Albums” was produced, a “know-y” show if there ever was one).
To my mind, the biggest crime committed by newer CBC shows (as always, “Q” is the easiest target) is that, not only is showing any kind of “book-learnin'” out of fashion, but it’s been replaced with very self-conscious, skin-scratchingly awful attempts at showing how “hip” the host is.
And hipness, whatever it is, is a far more elitist, snobby concept than “being knowledgeable”, if that’s what “know-y” means.
“Know-y” is bad. “Hip” is good. So goes the new Radio 2.
A revolting example of the 'newspeaking' of radio.
This 'non-knowy' , cool, savvy imaginary friend of Parise's scares me. A perfect example of 21st century faux-fistication – where you might not know a whole lot about the original version of something – but you sure know where to buy a distillation of it.
Even though, Buck 65 likely has piles of originality in his 50 000 LP collection – and may even be an oldskool BNW listener, I think we'll still be getting the same old
commercially-viable crap on the show.
It's like R3 is the farm league, and this is is the next step. Yawn.
BNW knew about EVERY GENRE and treated them all with aplomb and elan and it was never a snobby experience.
Between the cool, approachable friend in the tight jeans who can pre-select some titles for my next trip to [insert trendy record store name] or the more traditional presenter, backed by a skeleton crew of researchers who listen to everything that arrives in the mail, not just what gets written up in magazines and give me a true musical cross-section … well I still think that the latter would give the new R2 some real cred.
Though it is funny to see the classical commenters on the G&M article decrying 'rap' as 'crap'. Guess they haven't had any 'know-y' friends over the last 30 FUCKING YEARS who could have given them some basic information on the stuff.
After all is said and done, Jurgen's a sucka MC.
I could act surprised, but then, you would just feel my sarcasm oozing back at you from your computer screen.
Know-y. That’s Classic. Somewhere in the realm of Legendary even.
Could be worse, it could have some from someone in News.