All posts by jmp

WFMU-FM Jersey City, NJ There are a lot of great stories in the history of radio. Being focused on freeform radio as we are, we can assure you there are many terrific tales to be told about that brilliant period of broadcasting. None is bigger or better than the story of WFMU-FM in New Jersey. Read More

source: unknown How to ‘splain it? Garth Brooks sold more albums than Elvis Presley, more than Led Zeppelin, more than the Eagles, even more than Michael Jackson. Wha? Well, them changes seems to be the answer: growth in population and in the music-buying public, new and more convenient (if not better sound quality) packaging when Read More

First Steps – Pablo Picasso 1943 – Yale University We took the first steps in our Freeform Radio project a few years ago. We built a website (HERE) as a place to archive material about that era of broadcasting. It was a time when artistry and artistic vision was the focus, where the music was Read More

credit: Akiomi Kuroda Photography / 黒田 明臣 Sometimes things don’t make sense. Perspective is skewed. Intelligence is artificial, the sum of what is gathered from a repository of ideas good, bad, indifferent and cobbled together into some Frankensteinian beast of an addition to the social system. Then we get to live with the monster. Sure, Read More

Crazy Horse – Lakota c. 1870 The great Lakota leader and humanitarian Crazy Horse saw the future. He saw the world raining Blue Coats, that their invasion was unstoppable, and that it was a good day to die. But he saw too a time seven generations in the future when his people would reclaim their Read More

Father Guido Sarducci – credit: discogs.com What’s the most amazing thing you ever learned? Something that blew your fuse. A factoid that rattled your cage and still today won’t settle gently in the brainpan. There are more than a few contenders that come to mind. How about carnivorous worms in Antarctica that generate heat to Read More

Tony Pigg c. 1977 – credit Lucinda Scala Quinn in New York Times What is the Last Deejay? It’s what we call that vanishing breed of radio broadcasters who did it their way, played what they wanted to play from the entire songbook of music and said what they had to say about it, whether Read More

Etienne Girardet on Unsplash Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where we were assaulted by solutions rather than problems? It would be different, for certain. For every issue that disturbed us, a quick and simple fix would be at hand. There we go. Just so. That’ll do it! Next. Take for example Read More

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – credit: Keystone Features/Huston Archive More than a few people who know about www.radicalradio.media ask me why we’re spending all this time and money on a long-past period of radio history. Who cares about this stuff? We’ve chased down tapes that have been sitting in boxes in basements and closets, Read More

This newsletter had its humble beginning when we founded the Center for the New Northwest in 2016 as a place to talk about social systems and solutions. We wanted to ask questions about the status quo, which was increasingly untenable. Was there a better way to do what we’re doing? That was question number one. Read More