Paul
Simon’s “Kodachrome” comes on the car radio, and suddenly I’m sitting by the
pool at Lisa Scandelli’s 6th-grade end-of-year party. The next song I hear is
Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and it’s nearly a decade later. I’m dancing
on the sunken dance floor in my college’s bar. Now the radio is playing some
sappy country song. I hit scan.

Random
radio, also called Jack, Bob, or Fickle, features a wide variety of styles from
the last four decades of popular music. It’s a Canadian import which took hold
in the US a little over a year ago and has spread to at least a dozen stations
nationwide. For people who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, random radio offers a
collage of memories, each song a data chip eliciting information specific to
when the song first appeared: the boyfriends, crushes, teachers, clothes, and
friends. But I hear more than aural scrapbooking in this trend.

Random radio is partly a
reaction to the payola-fueled, narrowcasting of the ’90s, and partly an attempt
to emulate and compete with the iPod shuffle concept. Critics say this
inch-high, mile-wide programming will grow tiresome. But for now it’s catching
on and we’re geared for it.

The
experience of listening to songs of diverse styles and from several eras with
trainwreck segues would have once been jarring, but now even the most low-tech
among us, armed only with a television remote, is as nimble as a mountain goat
when it comes to leaping from one image or sound file to the next. The key
difference between our own ADHD use of remotes, scan and shuffle modes, and
multiple Internet windows is that we’re the ones in control.

Musical
chaos, as found on random radio, is not custom-contrived. It’s out of our hands
and we like it. It’s wacky! It’s wild! “We don’t know what’s going to happen,”
one local station ad boasts of its random radio segment. They say this as if
it’s a good thing. Since when do we welcome chaos or random events in our
lives?

Since
now. In a time when random events have never seemed so threatening — suicide
bombers walk among us looking like grad students, their backpacks filled with
deadly agendas — maybe the randomness of varied songs is a kind antidote to
the fear. A safe, small-scale way to experience the unpredictable. Even as a
station cycles through a lifetime’s worth of music, wary commuters silently
update the bumper sticker “practice random acts of kindness” to: “avoid random
acts of terror.”

The
laissez-faire attitude of random radio dovetails nicely with the “whatever”
phenomenon. Inasmuch as a popular phrase can capture the zeitgeist, “whatever”
reflects the electorate’s feigned lack of investment in the world around us.
The twin concepts are even married in a local radio station’s copycat random
radio “Whatever Weekends.”

Compare
“whatever” to an outdated phrase from a different time. “Where’s the beef?” is
cringingly nostalgic not because it’s decades old, but because of its earnest
appeal for information, for substance. In an era of war built on lies, fake
journalists welcomed into the White House, and real journalists jailed for
having integrity, putting forth a bald request for content — or taking a
stand on an issue — is just not done.

Protesters
— that is, people historically heralded for giving a damn about this country
such as Minutemen, abolitionists, Civil War fighters, civil rights activists,
et al — are the new pariahs, routinely hassled and separated from the crowd
at political events like quarantined mad cows. Conservative talk show hosts
call environmentalists — the people who want to save the world’s great natural resources, not exploit and destroy
them — anti-American and communists.

The
pervasive “whatever” ethos isn’t just for teenagers anymore. “Whatever” is the
keyword of the whole Iraq conflict. We’re in Iraq to find WMD or we’re there to
install democracy. Whatever. American service men and women are told their
tours of duty will last three months or they’ll last six months or, no, actually,
they’ll last a year. Whatever.

The
random, out-of-control nature of Bush’s handling of our foreign affairs is
mirrored in the day-to-day experiences of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These Americans find enemies mixed in with friendly faces and insurgents
masquerading as allies as they make their way warily through the countries they
are trying to protect, ever open to random attacks. Madrid and London taught us
that we, too, may soon know this horror.

Although our approach-avoidancedance with the concept of randomness
leads us to “whatever” territory, that doesn’t mean we don’t care about
anything. Au contraire. Never before
have we spent so much time thinking about so little, specifically custom
lifestyle objects and activities.

Americans
customize everything, from when we watch shows and what we listen to (TiVo,
iPod, podcasting); to what we wear (sneakers we design at the Nikelab, bathing
suits laser-cut to our proportions); to what we drive (Saabs and Smart Cars we
“build” online). Even the M&Ms that jolt us out of our late afternoon
stupor can be decorated with colors and words of our own choosing.

If
you pause long enough on one station during your evening’s random review of the
hundreds of television channels, you might hear a snippet about Pakistan’s use
of rape to shame its citizens or get a quick sense of the explosive situation
in North Korea. Just as likely, though, you’ll catch some chef screaming at a
worker or 50 Cent sneering out a few gruff notes. At least random radio, for
all its unpredictability, plays whole songs. What we think about when we hear
them, however, is up to us.

This article appears in Aug 10-16, 2005.