To hell with the calendar - this column will do its best not to go all millennial (or even centurion) on you. Still, a pause at the threshold - even an entirely arbitrary threshold - is, at least, tempting, and maybe even wise; and the folks on the radio have been doing quite a bit of that for us.
For whatever reason, the looking-forward has been kept to a minimum. The other night, BBC Radio 5 Live executed the classic and appropriate mockery of futurologising by playing old recordings from the 1970s, I think it was, of young people imagining life in the year 2000. With helicopters to school and all sorts of convenience robots, it sounded like fun. How did we fail to guess that the most obvious technological advances of the late 20th century would have nothing to do with practical life-enhancement, and everything to do with making us easy and willing recipients of ever-more "information"?
Anyway, if we're modest about what we can know about the future, the same modesty hasn't necessarily infected reflections in other realms. "What is the meaning of life?" was the main topic on Tuesday's Radio Days, Joe Duffy's contribution to RTE Radio 1's rather good week of morning radio. (Five big-name presenters each hosted a substantial three-hour programme Monday to Friday, and while continuity across the week was obviously sacrificed, continuity across the morning displayed its ample charms.)
Duffy left the philosophising to a panel of philosophers, but invited other guests to indulge in more playful reflections on realworld history, i.e. looking back. Damien Corliss - now with Magill but still wearing his T-shirt from the Hot Press School of Kneejerk Revisionism - even managed to pin the blame for turn-of-the-last-century licensing laws on "Gaelic, Catholic, [pause to spit] nationalist Ireland".
If anyone claimed the 20th century for the medium of radio, I didn't hear it, so allow me quickly to plant the flag. Globally, no other medium has come close in terms of reach. Culturally, radio is responsible for everything from massive political mobilisations to the mass commercial phenomenon of pop music. So there. And in the latter category, thankfully Irish radio has a couple of voices capable of enunciating the role of music with due love and occasional seriousness.
One of them, John Kelly, was in a noontime slot this week. Amusingly self-conscious about his sudden, temporary incarnation as a daytime DJ, he joked that next week on the evening show "it'll be back to half-hour-long 12-inch remixes of John Coltrane". (Is that a promise, John?) It was a small joy to be hearing, in broad daylight, someone who simply by playing good records reflects the depths of our recent musical heritage, not to mention someone who'd also be capable of reflecting intelligently on this week's sad death of a great soul artist, Curtis Mayfield. (I didn't actually hear Kelly do that, but I know he'd be capable.)
There in Kelly's 8 p.m. slot was another invaluable popmeister, Joe Jackson, wrapping up his year-long apotheosis and/or smashing of 50-or-so musical icons, People Get Ready (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday). This week, Presley, Sinatra and Dylan got the treatment.
To my sorrow, People Get Ready was on Fridays all year, and when one's Weekend radio review is rolling off the presses on a Friday night, one tends - I admit it - to watch telly. The artists I've heard him do have tended to be ones I know a bit about, so no great new discoveries; however, this has meant I've been able to place Jackson's intelligent, if occasionally OTT mix of musicology, sociology and scandal-mongering in a critical context: where do Jackson's often original insights stand beside the works of other writers - Marcus, Guralnick, Goldman etc?
Jackson is brilliant at deconstructing a character such as Sinatra by reading the life and work together. When it's the likes of John Lennon, who deconstructed himself for all to see in the post-Beatles records, Jackson's insights can sound like a litany of sex 'n' drugs revelations/speculations, laced through with Freud.
And when you're dealing with a cultural synthesiser like Jackson, there's not, quite, any telling if you're entirely on solid ground. When he quotes, approvingly, someone expressing the opinion that Bob Dylan is "a Jewish mystic in the Hasidic tradition", you're not sure whether to put the thinking yamulke on (at a rakish angle, of course) or simply to say "Say it ain't so, Joe" - suspecting that Joe can't say one way or the other.
Then again, he's usually quite convincing, and never more so than in the exegesis of Presley's mother love and spiritual longing. He even gets the best quotes, like from Jordanaire Gordon Stoker, summing up black spiritual music and its relation to Elvis's work: ". . . a form of hand-clapping, repetitive music that relates a story over and over again in order to build to a fervour. But even though it may be only one phrase repeated, it has a different voicing each time, a different beat, harmony, which makes it more exciting as it builds, bringing you closer and closer to a sense of ecstasy." Then suddenly, Elvis: "You ain't nuthin' but a hound dog. . ." Perfect, Joe, perfect.
Religion kept turning up this week, whether it was a theologian telling Marian about the millennium as seen by the early Christians, or Larry Mullen from U2 walking the Joe-Jackson road and playing Elvis's How Great Thou Art for Joe Duffy. Or, most beautifully, there was Paul Durcan on Monday's A Giant at My Shoulder (RTE Radio 1), talking about John XXIII, the smiling, "feminine" (not "effeminate", Durcan insisted, just feminine) pope who tried to replace power with affection as the cement of human relations. (To be sure, Durcan wasn't entirely wally: his characterisation of the behaviour of the Irish hierarchy at Vatican II was a little pearl of cutting polemic.)
Me, I put my faith in Travel FM, and where did it get me? Driving into central Dublin one day this week, I tuned into Dublin Corporation's temporary traffic station and, once the Tom Jones and Santana tunes were finished, heard scarifying, digitised reports on city car parks: "Stephen's Green - full. Jervis Street - full." Etc. But lo, "Thomas Street - 200 spaces". I dived westward, wove my way to said multi-storey and found - well, there may have been 200 spaces there all right, but they were behind tightly locked shutters.
I'm telling you, the new millennium can't come soon enough.