There’s a station around here called WCLS. It’s a classic hits station, playing Motown, Beach Boys, stuff like that. When my regular station has its sports show on, sometimes I turn on WCLS, since all I’m interested in hearing on the radio is music.
I love the songs they play on WCLS - most people in my generation don’t listen to a lot of Motown or oldies, so I find it enlightening to listen to Motown songs and hear the same rhythmic themes and bass lines that are now coming back into vogue with “indie” artists like Camera Obscura and Jens Lekman. I’ve always loved the Beach Boys, so I like that WCLS plays them a lot.
The problem with WCLS is that the DJ talks over the end of every song. And I don’t mean over the last few beats. I mean he begins talking twenty seconds before the song is supposed to end, and then the song fades out as he continues jabbering. The end result of this is that the songs are cut off before they’re over, and wind up sounding like sound bites instead of full songs.
Why does he do this? It seems really obnoxious to me, like the guy doesn’t respect the music enough to let it play through. I hate the feeling of having a song cut off before it’s supposed to be over. I almost want to barge right into the radio station and tell them to stop doing it. No other stations that I listen to have DJs that do this. Are there other people here who’ve listened to similar stations that do the same thing?
Yes, all DJs on all Top 40 stations did this over every record, from the 1950s until when the format died out in the '80s. Maybe it sounds unusual to you now because hardly anyone does it anymore, but that’s what disc jockeys used to do. Talk from the beginning up to the first vocal without leaving any space, and talk over the coda and right up to the vocal on the next record. It used to be a highly-valued skill for announcers to have.
Ugh. I had one back home who would talk all the way into the first line of the next song… let them sing a line… then say one more thing! ARGH!
We have XM radio at work, now, so there’s much less of that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t listen to the radio at all, and stick to hunting down new stuff on my own.
I was listening to a station out of Utica, NY sometime in the early 80s. They started playing the theme from Shaft. You know, the song that has no singing at all for the first two minutes. The DJ talked for the entire two minutes. He did the usual station promo stuff, and mentioned the song and artist, and upcoming songs, then some more “Hear the best hits right here on WURK!” stuff. And then, having exhausted the usual DJ chatter, he just kept on babbling about his lunch or something equally trivial–just a non-stop string of chatter over the music, right up to the first sung word. Then remaining 30 seconds of the song played without interruption, and they went to a commercial.
You guys are listing examples of egregious abuse of privilege, and even incompetence. I can’t imagine talking up to the vocal of “Shaft,” that’s just beyond the pale. Back when, the music director would time the intros to all the songs and write it on the labels of the records. For those records with what could be a long intro, they’d usually go by an even number of measures, to what is called a “post” in the song. The object was to give the DJ a clear indication of how many seconds he could talk over the intro. Only those with no sense of rhythm or timing would still be going when the vocal started.
If I were the program director, and one of my jocks talked over the vocal habitually, and kept going, he’d be instructed to get with the program, or go back to work in the sticks. Seriously, though, there were guys who were just masters of this artform. They could do it so well and so smoothly, they made it sound effortless. Many of them also operated the equipment while doing their speaking, pushing buttons and turning knobs and executing perfect crossfades between records.
Remember also that music is what they put on the radio in order to make you listen long enough to hear the next commercial break. In other words, the spots make the money, and the music is all but inconsequential. That’s why they’d hire guys with personality and humor, to keep you entertained so you’d stick around and be exposed to the ads.
You’d think they’d hire more professionals. More than once I’ve heard DJ’s start to talk over the fade-out in Ana Ng by TMBG – the wrong fade-out, of course. Bwahahahaha - comedy gold!
A friend of mine once worked at a station in Hartford consulted by Mike Joseph. They were required to talk over the end.
If you let some of the instrumental play at the end before you started talking you were told that you had “wasted” some of the talk-out time.
And I recall Wolfman Jack once talking up the ramp to Richie Havens “Here Comes the Sun.” All…two…and…a…half…minutes!
One more reason I will never listen to terrestrial radio again. Even FM stations do this these days. Nope, if I can’t have my XM radio, I’ll listen to the tunes in my head instead.
Probably that was the reason back in the days of Top 40 AM radio, which fishbicycle speaks of. I remember a couple of my own friends back in the early 70s putting a microphone next to the transistor radio speaker in an effort to get their favourite song on tape. The reproduction was pretty crappy by today’s standards, but in those days, your choices to get a copy of your favourite song were severely limited: unless you were willing to use the method my friends did, you had to buy the record or tape from a store.
Now, there are many more sources of music and the technology has improved a great deal. While you can still buy CDs from a store, satellite radio and MP3s you can buy and download in the comfort of your own home (neither of which have DJ patter over song intros and outros) would seem to me to kill the idea that talking over the music discourages home recording from the local commercial radio station.