We’ll all be dead soon enough, CBC or no CBC…..

You know, I really, really, really miss CBC Radio….I used to have CBC Radio on everywhere I listened to stuff….car, house and a few other places. Then, back a number of years ago, my favourite CBC guy, Peter Gzowski, died. And shortly after that, management at the national broadcaster seemed to pretty well gut the network. They announced that they were shifting CBC Radio’s focus to try to attract more young listeners. And they did. Almost overnight, most of the CBC programming that I loved was dumped overboard. The kind of serious, reflective radio I was used to vanished. The great Canadian music that I was used to vanished. They were replaced by a whole lot of fairly superficial kind of silly stuff and a whole lot of pretty bad music – still Canadian in most cases – but pretty bad.

Take today, for example. My wife and I were driving to Windsor, so we turned on CBC for the trip….Tom Power on Q was interviewing this young woman, who, I guess, is a current music sensation and she has a new album coming out this week. So, they played a few of her songs during the interview and Tom Power kept repeating what a great voice she has. Problem was you couldn’t really hear her voice because it was so wildly distorted you couldn’t begin to tell whether it was good, bad or indifferent. Also, my wife is a huge words person – she really likes to listen to lyrics and pick up on the meaning of a song. You couldn’t, under any circumstances, understand any of this girl’s lyrics – they were just part of the mix – totally lost in there somewhere. It was sort of funny because good, old Tom kept telling her what a great producer she was as well – in my world, if you can’t hear the lyrics, it’s lousy production.

My friend, Rick Fines, was nominated for a JUNO, and I’m not sure he got an interview on national radio – because musicians from my generation can’t get played much on CBC Radio any more. In fact, it almost seems like there’s some type of age cut-off date and if you’re older than, say 28, CBC’s just not interested in you. In my own world, I have been totally unable to elicit even a single word from this huge monolithic media giant despite being perhaps the hardest-working independent writer in Canada. I have submitted my podcast, Stories for the Soul, to them a couple of times for possible inclusion in their huge podcast section. They don’t even have the decency to get back to me to tell me my work stinks or sucks – which would be better than this wall of silence.

Back in the olden days, CBC Radio was a class act all the way. These days, it’s pretty much bush league. When you turn on the CBC morning program and you hear Sally Field or Barbra Streisand being interviewed, you know it’s more about celebrity culture than Canadian culture and it’s a damned shame. CBC Radio used to make me feel proud to be a Canadian. I liked hearing about some lady’s prize winning butter tarts in PEI, or how things were going with the harvest in Western Canada…I liked hearing about all the little things that make Canada somehow special. CBC has strayed far from that mission – to celebrate all things Canadian.

Certainly, for curiosity’s sake, I’d be pretty interested in how the great CBC-Radio experiment has worked out. I wonder what kind of overall listenership numbers they have…and I wonder if those numbers can be broken down demographically to see if young people are actually listening to the network. Because I’ll tell you straight up that I’m in contact with a certain number of younger folks in my daily travels and I never hear CBC mentioned – not a single time. However, CBC is often discussed by people of my generation and the talk always revolves around the same thing – what an enormous shame what’s happened to Canada’s national broadcaster. And the fact that most of us listen very little any more. There’s not much on it we can identify with. The music, for example, is a total non-starter for people of my generation….we like odd things in our music – like the occasional melody, the occasional undistorted vocal line, lyrics you can hear and understand. Structure is good too – some structure.

Anyway, I know I’m just whining on here and people have bigger fish to fry than worrying about CBC Radio. There was a time when I think my generation of Canadians would have marched in the streets to save our national broadcaster, but I’m sure that would happen today. And maybe it doesn’t matter – we’ll all be dead soon enough, CBC or no CBC.