About Casey Kasem, and his death, and his relevance to the world of djing: I did hear a lot of Casey Kasems programs on popular radio when I was very young. It was the first time I heard radio-friendly New Wave, New Romantic, or power pop bands, who were admittedly in the minority of what he would play. Kasem once said: When someone says, What do you do for a living?, well, [I say] Im not a radio personality. I am a disc jockey, and I play records. I play music for people to hear from 8 to 80. That is not entirely true. He *was* mainly a radio personality, not least because of his meant-for-radio voice. But he wasnt a dj in the sense that early rock n roll dj Alan Freed or John Peel were djs. Those two djs (and I am using the original sense of the term dj) actually broke new or underground bands, and gave an incredible degree of support to them, whether those bands would have resonance with a Top 40 demographic or not. Kasem only broke or introduced bands that the recording industry had decided should be popular. Unfortunately, in a strictly cultural sense, Casey Kasem was to music what the Ford Taurus is to the world of automobiles. When I started doing the Radio Schizo show in 2005, the templates I used for my DJing (a term I felt had way too much negative cultural baggage) were not folks like Kasem. It was folks like Al Quint, John Peel, and, yes, Alan Freed. These djs played what they personally liked, buttressed the careers of bands they believed in, and wanted to expose the public to what was current and exciting and going down in the world of contemporary music. (Nowadays, dj can mean all kinds of things, completely unrelated to this cultural function -- see: Benny Benassi and his pyrotechnics-laden show much lampooned in a recent SNL skit about EDM music.) So, its sad when anyone dies, but as far as being a DJ, which Kasem preferred to be known as, he was the Nickelback of that world. I suppose a culture as mediocre as ours demands folks like this -- in fact, our culture produces them in spades -- but lets never kid ourselves that in the long run he contributed anything meaningful to music. reuters/article/2014/06/15/us-people-caseykasem-idUSKBN0EQ0Q720140615
Posted on: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 08:00:50 +0000
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