Source : Globe & Mail

I have been listening to CBC Radio in the afternoons lately, trying to decode a message hidden beneath the Sarah McLachlan tracks and the chit-chat about hot websites and guys who collect air-sickness bags or handcuffs. Is Freestyle, Radio One's new afternoon show of music and talk, a force for good in this world -- or is it a force for evil? Is it, as CBC management calmly contends, a necessary attempt to make Radio One more relevant to listeners, or is it, as its outraged critics allege, the first step down the path to vacuous commercialization?

Listening to hosts Kelly Ryan and Cameron Phillips burbling away from their Vancouver studio, it's rather hard to cast them as either demons or saviours in the battle for public broadcasting, because Freestyle is so patently inoffensive. The music is MOR with lots of Cancon, the talk is pleasant enough and the criticisms I might make -- Ryan uses the word "cool" far too often; I couldn't care less about the playful habits of dolphins -- are no less banal.

"You aren't going to defend it, are you?" one colleague demanded. Well, no, except to point out that radio programs are an evolutionary art form, and Freestyle's critics might want to give it some time. Ryan and Phillips often sound disengaged from the little interviews they are conducting, which probably just means the show is so new that they are worrying about what's coming next instead of listening to what's going on now.

No, I'm not going to the wall for Freestyle, but what does have to be defended is the principle that CBC Radio must change to win new audiences, a recommendation confirmed by a study the broadcaster commissioned last summer about the role arts and culture should play on the radio network. Meanwhile, what is indefensible is the argument that the public broadcaster shouldn't play popular music. And what is important is that CBC Radio, an organization that is forever second-guessing itself in the face of vociferously conservative audiences and much political scrutiny, not give in to critics with a fossilized view of what kind of programming is appropriate.

First, the CBC does need to reach a younger audience and a more diverse audience, which are really the same thing, since the younger Canadian generation is more ethnically mixed. Depending on the program and the time of day, the average CBC radio listener is a senior citizen -- when CBC Radio managers want to convince newspaper columnists of the need to revamp certain programs, they take them out to lunch and whisper "Average listener is 65" in their ears and then stand back to watch the reaction.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with drawing older listeners -- CBC Radio is not a commercial station trying to sell 18-to-34s to advertisers, and those seniors pay taxes too -- but a publicly funded broadcaster does have to try to be all things to all people, or at least many things to many people. The CBC is not fulfilling its mandate to Canadians if whole sectors of the population can simply write it off as somebody else's niche. It's one thing to wind up narrowcasting to certain psychographics -- CBC Radio is, for example, the listening choice of the university-educated -- but quite another to abandon entire demographics.

And that leads us to the issue of popular music, because if Freestyle does attract a broader audience it will be by playing contemporary pop. Critics of Freestyle ask why we need to hear songs on CBC Radio that we can always hear on commercial radio. (Yup, they did play Madonna the other day.) But to get dragged into music's obsession with defining genres is to miss the point: Within its mandate of remaining distinctively Canadian, the CBC should be permitted to play any kind of music it believes its listeners might wish to hear.

To limit the public broadcaster to only those forms that cannot be sustained commercially is to fall into the trap of free-market ideologues who wish to limit all public activity to areas the market has vacated, thereby relegating many public institutions to irrelevance. On CBC Radio, this approach would mean a steady diet of Schoenberg and R. Murray Schafer because commercial radio has got not only Madonna covered but Mozart too.

The distinction between the commercial and the publicly funded, or between high art and popular entertainment, is never quite as clear as either side in that debate maintains: In Canada, publishing, film, television and even popular music itself are government-subsidized cultural industries, while the big performing-arts institutions are non-profits run on commercial models. CBC Radio needs to be different from commercial radio, but that should make it more inclusive of genres and less concerned with the ever-narrower musical definitions -- hip-hop, new country, smooth jazz, sadcore, emo -- that are more important to marketing music than appreciating it.

Of course, what Freestyle's critics really fear is that the move to play some contemporary pop on Radio One is the thin edge of the wedge, and that the classical programming on Radio Two, the CBC's main and increasingly eclectic music service, is also due for some creative renewal, or whatever they are calling it these days.

"We are concerned that this is a sign of things to come from CBC Radio," says Stopcbcpop.ca, an anti-Freestyle site that got its start as a discussion group on the Two New Hours website. Two New Hours is a Radio Two program devoted to new concert music, the kind of stuff written by contemporary Canadian composers -- the kind of stuff that there will be less of if the CBC is trying to be more accessible.

Personally, I think there should always be room for new Canadian music of any kind on CBC Radio One and Two. What I have never been able to figure out is what is distinctively Canadian about Bach and Beethoven. For years, Radio Two has played the music of dead Europeans. Why can't Radio One now play the music of living Americans and Britons?

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