Lovesong Dedications
Authors: Cook Jackie 
Published: October 2020

Song dedications are among commercial radio’s most enduring formats. Yet those very few studies which address music radio rarely consider its role within a consumer economy.
As John Patrick noted when analysing ABC broadcaster Christopher Lawrence’s popular (and commercially exploited) Swoon genre as a form of nostalgic Utopianism, many music analysts view music listening as constructing a cultural space of

other times and places, when romantic love held sway, when the certainties of religion vanquished doubt, and when authentic folk culture gave a sense of belonging to traditional ways of thinking and feeling (133).

This “emotional, largely imaginary” space is explicity constructed outside the pragmatic focus and urgent stylings of commercial sponsorship. Patrick cites Flinn on the capacity of music to seemingly transcend social institutions and discourses. But here I will argue that commercial music-radio practice clearly operates within them. More significantly, it does so by very virtue of this capacity for offering transcendence:

Music ... has the peculiar ability to ameliorate the social existence it allegedly overrides, and offers in one form or another the sense of something better. Music extends an impression of perfection and integrity in an otherwise imperfect, unintegrated world (Flinn).

This study suggests that it is precisely this lack of any perceived connectedness into the social discourses of the day which marks music as available for the occupancy of individual desires, and which targets its various genres for integration into selected sets of social practice.
What we do while listening to the radio…
Willis (1990), investigating music as a key element of the “symbolic cultural creativity and informal artistry in people’s lives”, discovered multiple appropriations, creolisings and re-accentuations within social use of broadcast music (85). His empirical work provides accounts of the various uses made of broadcast music, including the audio-taping of new music tracks; planned social listening to particular shows or DJs, often combined with extended phone-call discussions with friends; the use of broadcast music as company in periods of social isolation, or its use in structuring daily living or working routines; the preparation of personal master-mixes and exchange of taped compilations or transcribed song lyrics. To these should be added more contemporary updates: digital sound-bite downloading and re-editing via Internet broadcasts; the burning of personally tailored CDs; MP3 collection-building through web-exchange, and the construction of a personalised virtual sensorium for asserting private space in public through the use of the Sony Walkman or Discplayer (Hosokawa, Chambers, Bull).
The capacity music broadcast gives for personal engagement within various music sub-cultures needs further work at exactly this active-reception level. Nor has the activity of broadcasters in constructing technologies of reciprocity around mediated intimacy been fully explored. The social formational power, over 75 years, of the song-dedication formula, in compensating what Thompson described as the “non-reciprocal intimacy” of electronic media, is incalculable. Instead of opening spaces for “free association” working pre-discursively on the “physicality of the listening experience”, music-radio talk has been operating to structure those exact spaces: to create regulated activity, and interactivity, where none has been thought to exist.
Fixing a self to a favourite track: music and memory
From the 1930s to the 1960s, vastly popular “music request programs” encouraged radio listeners to write in to presenters, not only selecting a favourite music play, but describing in detail the social relation mediated for them by the music and lyrics, and the uniquely individualised expressive weight it was claimed was carried – ironically yet significantly, a reference often immediately generalised by the attachment of several other requestors to the particular track.
More recently, Richard Mercer’s evening program of Lovesong dedications on Sydney’s MIX 106.5 connected this drive towards social identity work with the escalating sexual-emotional confessionalism of Australian radio talk. Mercer’s format: extended play of the staple love ballads of the “easy listening” mode – carefully selected to highlight the sexual arousal elements of the breathy female performer or the husky-voiced male balladeer – operated from the centre of the newly reciprocal expression of intimacy, made possible by the live call-in capacity of contemporary radio. Listener-callers can now model their identification techniques directly – or so it is made to appear. In fact, the emotional expressiveness and the centrality of the equation between direct listener-caller comment and emotional-interpretive link into music tracks remains problematic, for a number of reasons.
How to construct loving sincerity – through the precision of digital editing
Firstly, the apparent spontaneity and direct interface which underlie radio’s “live call-in” relations as a discourse of authenticity, are today heavily, if not obviously, compromised, by the production techniques used to guarantee the focus on caller concerns. This is phone-in but not talkback radio – a distinction not made often enough, in either professional production literature or academic analysis of radio practice. While talkback is relatively raw radio, centring on live-to-air talk-relations between callers and hosts (and thus fostering the highly confrontational hosting persona of the “shock-jock”), phone-in radio seeks briefer, more focused comment on topics pre-selected, constantly monitored and re-themed by both host and call-screening staff, who choose which caller comments get to air, and in which order.
Lovesong dedications not only follows this more restrictive practice, but intensifies its commodification of the resultant calls, by a consistent top-and-tail editing of caller contributions before broadcast. This acts to heighten the expressiveness of each segment, and to insert the program ident. into the pivotal “bridge” position between caller-voice and music play. The host is thus able to present to listeners a tautly emotional sequence of seemingly spontaneous sentimental expression; but to his sponsors, a talk-flow which interpolates the show’s name fluently into the core of the fused private/public moment. With all the hesitations, over-explanations, initial embarrassment and on-air inexperience of the average caller cut away, what remains looks like this:

Host: Hello Carly - I believe you want to dedicate a lovesong to Damien?

Caller: Yes that’s right ... it’s our anniversary?

Host: How many years ...

Caller: Well actually it’s just our first!

Host: And you’ve had a great first year together?

Caller: Sure have: I love you more than ever Damien ...

Host: And Damien: here’s Carly’s Lovesong dedication to you.

The perversity of the practice lies in the way the host’s “prompt” cues, with their invitational suspensions, actually direct the caller contributions, not only to their moment of “personalised” emotion, but to the powerful agency of the program itself, always positioned between caller and dedicatee. Further: the fluency of the talk exchange, and especially its expert segue into the music track, conceal the fact that calls are very often being held before broadcast. Between the average call and its broadcast, a listener-caller’s phoned-in experiences and expressed feelings – even their peak-moment of address to their loved one – may be digitally edited, to remove awkward hesitations and intensify the emotionality. A 24-hour call line operates, highly promoted in other programming, allowing selection and sequencing of requests around music availability – including station play-rotation regimes. Even calls received during broadcast can be delayed, edited, and clustered around the – actually quite limited – availability of music tracks (some callers have reported being offered a playlist of only three tracks through which to “personally address” their loved one). Sincerity is fabricated, at the very moment of promoting its authenticity, and absorbed into the “seamless” flow of MIX106.5’s “easy listening” format.
“Schmalzy like Oprah: almost Sleepless in Seattle”
The Lovesong dedications host – busy elsewhere – plays a very restrained on-air role: often only three dedications per half-hour of programming. While back-to-back music play dominates, Mercer’s vocal performance marks the show with notably atypical radio qualities. The tone is low and subdued, without ranging into the close-in microphone huskiness of the “late-night listening” mode, which usually performs intimacy. Mercer is closer to the “serious music” style of ABC Classic FM announcers, with the male voice remaining in a medium-to-light vocal range. This is tenor rather baritone, with a clear suppression of its stressing, to produce a restrained authority, rather than a DJ exuberant enthusiasm (Montgomery) or an unassailable certainty (Goffman). Mercer and his interstate colleagues use a normal conversational level, with no electronic enhancement into “fullness of tone” as employed by both DJs and talk hosts to amplify their authority. In contrast, the Lovesong dedications voice is carefully, if naturally, dampened in tone – by which I mean as a result of physical voice-production control, rather than by sound-mixing in the broadcast console. Not only is the pitch slightly subdued and intonations compressed rather than stretched, as in the familiar DJ hype, but the dominant intonation is a very unusual terminal rise/slow fall. This provides a male host’s speech with an interestingly tentative note, which deflects or at least suspends power. Under-toned rather than over-toned, it invites sympathetic listening and increased attentiveness, while its suppression of the sorts of powerful masculine authoritativeness more common in male broadcasting (see Hutchby) cues listeners for conversational participation on their own terms, rather than on those dictated by the host.
This structured tonal diffidence in the Lovesong hosts’ self-effacing vocality acts as an invitation to self-direction: a pathway to participation. No surprise then that its careful constructedness has been read as the exact opposite: sincerity. What is more surprising is that it has been read as sexually alluring – given its quite marked deviation from norms of high masculinity in relation to vocalisation. Other attempts to render a desirable masculinity at the level of voice have tended to the over-produced baritones of the traditional matinee idol: the “swoon” voice of lush-toned actorly excess, with deep pitch, slow pace, fruity vowels, and long glides – the vocal equivalent of TV comedy’s “Fabio” as kitsch or camped hyper-masculinity.
This vocal problem in radio hosting is also endemic to operatic performance, where male vocal range is read as age. Patriarchy reserves deep voices for authority, therefore also reserving the most powerful roles for “older” characters, performed as baritone and base. Lovesong dedications are far more suitably presented by a male host whose vocality matches the sexually-active age profile suited to romantic seduction – and this calls for the tenor voice of a Richard Mercer. The Daily Telegraph’s Sandra Lee (1998) was among many who succumbed to that “mellifluous voice which drips with genuine sincerity, yes genuine, not that contrived radio fakeness, and is soothing enough to make you believe he really care”. Even when Mercer actually shifted in a phone conversation with Lee from his ordinary voice to “The Loooooovvvvve God with a voice so smooth it could be butter”, she remained a believer.
No surprise, then, that as the format is franchised from state to state on the commercial networks, much the same vocalisations are reproduced. The host’s performance formula and the callers’ sentimental witness are both safely encoded as “sincere sentimental expressiveness” – while actually audio-processed and digitally edited to produce those qualities. Here, as elsewhere, Lee’s loathed “contrived radio fakeness” continues to work unseen and unexamined, producing in the service of its own commercial imperatives a surprising yet vastly popular reputation for sentimental expressiveness among “ordinary” Australians. Where music-radio analyst Barnard (2002) considers music-request shows as a cynical commercial device for “establishing a link with the audience” (124) – a key requirement of the sponsorship system of commercial broadcasting from its origins to the current day – Lee’s tabloid populism endorses every detail of Lovesong dedications’ techniques for acting upon and reproducing the lush romanticism it sets out to evoke. Between the two views the cultural work of this programming: the mediation and commodification of interpersonal emotional expressiveness in the homes, workplaces, bedrooms and parked cars of listener-callers around the nation, goes unnoticed.

Works Cited

Barnard, Stephen. Studying radio. London: Arnold, 2002.
Barnard, Stephen. On the radio: Music radio in Britain. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989.
Bull, M. “The dialectics of walking: Walkman use and the reconstruction of the site of experience.” Consuming culture: power and resistance. Eds. J. Hearn and S. Roseneil, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999. 199-220.
Chambers, I. “A miniature history of the Walkman.” New formations, 11 (1990): 1-4.
Flinn, C. Strains of Utopia. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Goffman, Erving. Forms of talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981.
Hosokawa, S. “The Walkman effect.” Popular music, 4 (1984):165-180.
Hutchby, Ian. Confrontation talk: Arguments, asymmetries and power on talk radio. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996.
Lee, Sandra. “When Love God comes to town.” The Daily Telegraph, 30 November 1998: 10.
Montgomery, M. “DJ talk.” Media, culture and society, 8.4 (1986): 421-440.
Patrick, John. “Swooning on ABC Classic FM.” Australian Journal of Communication (1998) 25.1: 127-138.
Thompson, John B. The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
Willis, Paul. Common culture. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990.
Willis, Paul. Moving culture – an inquiry into the cultural activities of young people. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1990.

Links

http://acnielsen.com/ For information on commercial radio ratings

Useful site for watching music radio trends http://www.radioandrecords.com/

Ever wondered where radio presenters get that never-ending supply of historical trivia? Now their secrets can be Yours. http://www.jocksjournal.com/

APRA The Australian Performing Rights Association monitors Australian music content on radio – here’s how they do it. http://www.apra.com.au/Dist/DisRad.htm

Two Internet broadcast sites offering online music streaming with an Australian bias. http://www.ozchannel.com.au/village-cgi-... http://www.thebasement.com.au/

FARB: The Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters – a useful site for the organisation of commercial radio within Australia. http://www.commercialradio.com.au/index.cfm

Citation reference for this article

Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc...
MLA Style

Cook, Jackie. "Lovesong Dedications" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovesongdedications.php>.

APA Style

Cook, J., (2002, Nov 20). Lovesong Dedications. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovesongdedications.html