WHEN Chuck Berry, hummed to himself the embryonic bars of Mayhellene while he drove around in his 1938 V-8 Ford, or when Lennon and McCartney skipped school to write I Saw Her Standing There, I doubt if it occurred to them that they were setting off towards enabling the greatest form of marketing colonisation the world would ever see. Even in their wildest nightmares, they could not have glimpsed the sceptre of dassic hits radio.
Even when someone stumbled upon the classic hits format a few years ago, it seemed like a gimmick that would have its day and - then disappear into the marketing graveyard, to be interred between the De Lorean car and Guinness Light. Now, it is clear that it was an idea waiting to happen - perhaps, in a certain dark and negative light, the one pop was born to deliver. All radio now aspires to the classic hits format. When RTE management tells us that there is "too much talk" on Radio One, what it means is that it would like to clear the decks to make way for, more classic hits.
The classic hits radio strips individual songs of most of their intrinsic magic and mystery, reducing them to polaroids of sound. This kind of music radio is not about music, but memory. Its secret resides in exploding for the maximum number of people the bubbles of euphoric recall which make them feel that, because they were happy once, they can be happy again. It is a type of drug, a means of accessing the painless areas of the past, and as such its hegemony on the radio market would amount - if we were short of such things - to a serious indictment of the present.
When classic hits radio first came along, we thought it was about playing the best of the music that had gone before. But that was a tentative and preliminary exploration of something that would reveal itself as ancillary to the art of selling. In the beginning, music, radio was primarily about music, with advertising as a relatively painless way of making it pay. Classic hits has turned the turntables and made the music into a device to expose the right kind of people to advertising for consumer durables to make the world just the way it is in their pop dreams.
From a marketing viewpoint it is utterly perfect. Marketing is all about niches, which in turn are to do with age and background. And nothing in the history of the world has had the power to define and divide in precisely the way that taste in pop music can segregate or unite people from the age of 55 downwards. There is no more effective way of delivering an audience of a certain age than by playing the music from the era when they came of age. But it is even more fiendishly clever than that, because music also charts differences in aspiration and attitude between people of the same era. This has turned pop radio into a kind of science, with people called "radio doctors", versed in the dark arts of audience differentiation and playlisting, creating ever more cynical strategies to deliver to advertisers the souls of the listening public.
Before classic hits radio, the weekly pop charts were, in retrospect, a meaningless contest between songs that had perhaps little or nothing in common other than the coincidence of their release; but classic hits gives this process retrospective meaning as the clearing house of memory and nostalgia. Each new wave of music attaches itself like paint to each new generation of pop fans, and forever afterwards becomes a code for summoning up that generation's most idealised version of itself in the world. Already we can perceive the beginning of the fragmentation of what were formerly known as "people" into layers of similarly inclined consumers. In Dublin, for instance, it is clear that competition between 98 FM and FM104 has already divided the listening public into under 35s (FM104) and over 35s (98 FM).
Because this form of radio is so effective at delivering age specific audiences, it puts immense pressure on other forms of radio to go the same way. The trouble is that such radio is ultimately cannibalistic both of itself and of the music it plays. If all radio stations are in competition to serve up various concoctions of music from the past, who will exist to serve the needs of the new generations?
The greatest danger, however, is not to radio, but to pop itself, which is now in grave danger of disappearing up its own posterior. As with so many things, when the big money is in skimming off from past resourcefulness, there is nothing to be gained from serving the present, never mind thinking of the future.
