This is my response to a posting by the revered Mark Ramsey. I didn't post it in the comments, because I love having a job:
1989: "Shut up and play the hits,"
1999: "It's about the music,"
2009: "Be a real human being,"
As long as I've been a jock, the value of a human on a microphone has been in question.
Through
all of these changes in the industry, humans on microphones continued
to bring the humanity anyway. We were told we were "just barking dogs"
but we kept being real humans anyway. We were told to keep it short
because PPLs made consultants nervous, and we continued to speak in
complete sentences and to finish our stories, crafted for listener satisfaction, anyway.
While I appreciate
such a unique posting that actually respects the craft rather than
throwing sales-manufactured bullet points at us yet again, I'd still
find it even more refreshing to read a comment about what jocks are
doing right. Right NOW. There are so many great air talents who don't need to be told how to be.
Since over a million people were jettisoned
from the industry over the last couple of decades, the people who got to stay
brought our very best game. We kept the industry alive
because you cannot take the human out of the human being. As often as
we were told to be something else, we continued to be real.
And we worked like Boxer to make it happen.
It's nice that our humanity is finally approved of,
but what Mark is doing here is demonstrating once again that the industry cannot accept humans as we are. He is saying once again, in a different guise, that we need to change to measure up to his radio.
In the guise of telling the humans to really be humans, he is telling the workhorses to REALLY BE HORSES.
