SpokenWeb

ShortCuts

Shortcuts 5.3

ShortCuts Live! Listening to Wide-Screen Radio with Brian Fauteux

This ShortCuts presents one of the ShortCuts Live! conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us?

EPISODES NOTES

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.

Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod

Supervising Producer: Maia Harris

Sound Design: James Healey

Transcription: Yara Ajeeb

SHOW NOTES

Fauteux, Brian. Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015.

deWaard, Andrew, Fauteux, Brian, and Selman, Brianne. “Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians).” Popular Music and Society 45.3 (2022): 251 – 278. [open access]

(00:03)	ShortCuts Theme Music	[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]
(00:16)	Miranda Eastwood (Recording)	I’m like, maybe I should get sound effects from [overlap]
		This is fun. Like maybe footsteps or something. Get whatever the name of this building is and like where we are located since we will be hearing the space and people will naturally –
(00:17)	Kate Moffatt	Is it the old arts building?
(00:23)	Brian Fauteux	Yeah, that’s kind of the Arts and Convocation Hall. But because we have a fine arts building, a lot of people call this the old arts building.
(00:27)	Kate Moffatt	Okay. [laughs] I might let you say that, actually. [laughs]
(00:46)	Katherine McLeod	[Voiceover] Welcome to Shortcuts. This month, we’re back with another shortcut live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short-cut of audio. Many of these conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.
(01:08)	Kate Moffatt	[Back to audio recorded on-site.] Uh, hello and welcome to Shortcuts Live. We are live at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta. My name is Kate Moffitt, and I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb Podcast. Stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. I’m sitting here with Brian Fauteux today.
(01:16)	Brian Fauteux	Yeah. My name is Brian Fauteux. I’m an associate professor of Popular Music and Media Studies here at the University of Alberta, and I work in this building.
(01:24)	Kate Moffatt	Amazing. Yeah. That echo that the listeners, that you’re hearing right now. It is because we are sitting in the arts and convocation hall building –
(01:49)	Brian Fauteux	In the lobby, just outside Convocation Hall where we have a big old pipe organ, and we have music that takes place and sometimes I teach, back in the day, I used to teach, not that long ago, [Kate laughs], a couple years ago, I would teach big intro to popular music classes there before the upper balcony was deemed unsafe. So I’ve been moved elsewhere, and I think they want to renovate it and make it a little bit more “state of the art” in there. It’s very beautiful.
(01:56)	Kate Moffatt	Interesting. It is. It’s absolutely stunning. Okay, amazing. Well, we’re gonna listen to something. Do you wanna play that for us?
(01:57)	Brian Fauteux	Sure. Let’s play.
(03:11)	Audio Recording	[Distorted Audio Of Paul Mccartney’s mid-nineties radio show called “Oobu Joobu” plays in the background.]
(03:12)	Brian Fauteux	[Audio ends.] That’s probably enough.
(03:23)	Kate Moffatt	Incredible [Brian laughs]. Thank you so much. Yeah. Miranda is also here, and we’re both sitting here and our heads just started [laughs].
		Please tell us what we just listened to.
(04:25)	Brian Fauteux	This is a radio program that Paul McCartney did in the mid-nineties called “Oobu Joobu.” That was kind of a weird sort of experimental radio program that, I think aired on an American network for about 15 shows. And it’s a collection of, as you heard, different songs, audio clips.
		I think he was sort of playing around on a guitar there as well as he introduced it. And I think in 97 parts of this, 1997, parts of this was packaged with his “Flaming Pie” CD release. I think it mainly circulates as sort of bootlegs now or as this recorded version that was kind of sold at Best Buy. It was like a compendium of some of the shows, but I don’t know if the full complete package has ever resurfaced. But what I find interesting about it is it sometimes airs on the Beatles channel on Sirius XM Radio, which is sort of subscriber-based radio.
(05:16)	Brian Fauteux	And it’s something I’ve been researching for the last little while, and I’m writing a book on now, and I’ve kind of been drawn to these places where celebrity clash with kind of weirdness and experimentation, but in a very kind of gated commercial subscription setting.
		So it’s like people kind of paying for access to a radio service that kind of digs around and finds these oddities and packages them on these channels that are all about bands like “The Beatles” or “Tom Petty” or “Bruce Springsteen.” I also like in this clip, and the reason I chose this one, it was probably hard to hear from the laptop into the recorder, but early on, it emphasizes that it’s widescreen radio. And I think that the development of satellite radio kind of piggybacks on satellite television.
(05:18)	Kate Moffatt	I was gonna ask, widescreen TVs [laughs].
(05:25)	Brian Fauteux	Exactly. So it’s this idea of, we aren’t just your, you know, grandpa’s old radio. This is sort of –
(05:25)	Kate Moffatt	Oh wow [laughs].
(05:51)	Brian Fauteux	You know what I mean? It’s like; it’s trying to introduce radio as being new, even though it’s still embedded in longermhistories of institutions like commercial radio broadcasting has used satellites for long periods of time. So it gives it a sheen of newness. Some things are kind of new about it, but I think it’s an interesting way of thinking or complicating ideas around new media, particularly around the turn of the millennium.
(06:30)	Kate Moffatt	Well, I’m really fascinated by how, I would love to talk about the listening, like the actual sound, sound of what we just listened to, ’cause that was so delightful.
		The first thing I thought was mid-nineties television that I grew up with. It was kind of like the sound that I got from that.
		But I’m really, I have to ask, as like a book historian myself, about the materiality that you’re kind of engaging with as you’re following its trajectory and thinking about how people are engaging with it.
		I don’t know. Can you speak to that at all? Thinking about the ways in which it’s becoming available, or how, I guess literally, the material of the media is informing it.
		Isn’t there a famous quote about that? The media is the –
(06:30)	Brian Fauteux	Message.
(06:33)	Kate Moffatt	Yeah. That’s the one [laughs].
(07:53)	Brian Fauteux	I mean, to even talk about McLuhan a little bit too, I think, thinking through about finding these oddities or these sonic traces of satellite broadcasting from the earlier days and this isn’t being played earlier. The Beatles channel comes in, I think, around 2015, if I’m not mistaken, but it’s very limited when something airs. Some of it is archived, some of it is kept online for maybe four weeks.
		You can access it on demand, but then it goes away, or it’s kept in this place, this company, this publicly traded, massive media conglomerate now SiriusXM is owned by Liberty Media, which has stakes in like Live Nation and Ticketmaster and all these things. So researching that is different from some of my work on campus radio history where you can track stuff down. It’s still kind of scattered, but people are willing to give it to you. And now they’re not.
		So, McLuhan also writes a bit about acoustic space and cyberspace coming together and how it’s like all around and you sort of dig around and look for these things. So that’s kind of where I end up finding a lot of this stuff is through spending time on the internet and seeing who’s put something somewhere online that you can listen to.
(08:26)	Kate Moffatt	Right. I was gonna ask next about listening. The role of listening in both, I guess, how you were finding it and listening to it, but also how you see this kind of… not elite, that’s not the right word.
		Exclusive, exclusivity that’s applied to something that was experimental and odd. Yeah, I don’t know. Something about the, yeah I guess just a bigger kind of broader question about the role of listening in the work that you’re doing and what that, how that interacts with what you, what you do and how you do it.
(09:36)	Brian Fauteux	That’s a good question because part of what I’m looking at is the reasons why media institutions develop in the ways they do. And you can read annual reports and a lot of it is going through tons of trade press stuff over the years and seeing who’s talking about these companies as they develop. But then you wanna find stuff to listen to as well. And it’s not all perfectly available.
		Even most research paths people take, that’s never the case. But part of it ends up being, like listening a lot of the time to different satellite stations, satellite radio stations, or channels.
		There’s only one station now I guess, but they have a variety of channels. And then trying to find things like this and thinking about is this available elsewhere? And in the cases where it’s maybe the work of a major celebrity, like I’ve written a bit on Bob Dylan’s theme time radio hour, which is kind of like this, where it’s, you know, somebody using their time on the radio who has like the star power but wants to use that time to showcase all these old quote unquote forgotten songs or songs that haven’t really entered the canon, so to speak, but have been massively influential.
(10:16)	Brian Fauteux	That’s a big part of what that radio, that radio show is doing. When you have people like that, you do have hardcore fans, too, who have recorded all of this and put it online. So stuff like that you can find. And then when you find that, I just listen to as much of it as I can. So there were about a hundred and so a hundred plus episodes of theme time, radio hour, and for, you know, a month or so, I just listened to every single episode to see what is not only what is he playing but how is he talking about it? What’s he introducing, what’s it like, and how does his voice seem to connect with these subscription radio listeners? And, you know, really spending time with the stuff I can find.
(10:35)	Kate Moffatt	And do you almost get a sense of his listening?
		In terms of thinking about what they’re finding and putting together, and there’s a curatorial aspect to it.
		Do you kind of start to get a sense you can start to become familiar with yourself?
		Oh, I bet so and so, put this one together.
(11:18)	Brian Fauteux	You also, I mean, you kind of become like held captive slash hostage to this sort of weird way of doing radio. Like, especially with the Dylan voice, and I’m gonna play a bit of it on the Friday morning radio panel that we’re doing as part of the SpokenWeb Institute.
		But you do get a sense of his own relationship to these songs. But then, through digging a little bit as well, you find that he’s crafted as the curator or the person who has all these shows. It turns out it was a major TV producer responsible for massive commercial television productions. Oh, wow. Over the years, that has the music collection that Dylan’s kind of borrowing from. So you have these other connections –
(11:21)	Kate Moffatt	There’s layers of curations.
(12:07)	Brian Fauteux	Yeah, there’s layers, totally.
		That they’re working in. And he makes it sound like he’s, you know, he constructs this whole world where he is broadcasting out of this historical Abernathy building, but really he does a lot of it on tour and from his house and, you know, it creates this radio world, but it is kind of an entryway into a different side of these massive celebrities and their personalities that people will pay for.
		And these satellite radio companies kind of know that. So, you know, know, part of what I’m interested in is before we even get to your Spotifys and Apple musics, this radio company was kind of setting the stage for that idea of exclusivity or, you know, giving big name performers, big talent contracts to then entice subscribers to say, I’m gonna pay like $16 or $20 a month to have access to this stuff –
(12:12)	Kate Moffatt	Which we’re now so familiar with. Like, it’s just so all the time that’s everything.
(12:15)	Brian Fauteux	Everything’s a subscription.
(12:33)	Kate Moffatt	Wow. Yeah. Wild. Okay. Well I think one last question which is, I’d love to know what you’re listening to now. Like you know, either in your research currently, like maybe something like this, but anything else that’s fun or even just more generally, like what are you listening to right now that really excites you?
(13:10)	Brian Fauteux	Sure. I am listening to a lot of music from around the early two thousands when Sirius XM came out for the purpose of this research, but also kind of unrelated but also sort of related to this.
		A colleague of mine and myself just started a campus radio show here. So every week we’re kind of listening a lot to a radio show based on a theme or a topic each week. So I’m kind of constantly thinking about what would be good to put on this week’s show. And a lot of that is Canadian. We have, you know, Canadian content regulations and these sorts of things. So that’s been a lot of fun and that, I know that’s not really answering anything specific, but –
(13:11)	Kate Moffatt	No, I think that’s great actually [laughs].
(13:41)	Brian Fauteux	And then, at the same time I’m among the jury for the Polaris Music Prize here in Canada. And the long list voting for that just opened. So I’m just listening to a ton of Canadian music right now that’s been recommended on Google Group listserv. Things that I haven’t listened to. A new album that I quite like a lot out of Edmonton is by a band called Home Front, and that’s been an album I’ve been playing a lot to give sort of one precise thing.
(13:52)	Kate Moffatt	I’m actually really curious, you were talking about the campus radio stuff that you’re doing. Do you feel like a little bit like you’re kind of doing the stuff that you research? Like are you Yeah, for sure. You’re taking that curatorial role almost –
(14:16)	Brian Fauteux	A little bit like that, but also before this I wrote a book on campus radio and stepped back from, like when I was an undergrad, I did a little bit of, of campus radio production work, but then when I was researching it, I stepped back and wanted to have more of an arm’s length relationship to it. And I’ve been meeting since I’ve, I moved here and came here to get back into it.
		And I kind of just took, you know, another person to be here too and be like, let’s do it together. And that it makes it more social and more fun. And it has been a lot of fun.
(14:26)	Kate Moffatt	Fantastic connection to the conversation we just had with Jennifer. Waits. Jennifer was talking about how important community is to campus radio, that it’s so inherent to kind of getting it going and keeping it going–
(14:34)	Brian Fauteux	Yeah. We were both just on a panel in Washington DC a few days ago talking about campus college radio. Incredible. So we, we have a lot of overlaps in what we are interested in.
(14:34)	Music	[Music begins playing in the background].
(14:40)	Kate Moffatt	That’s so fantastic. Okay. Was there anything else that you wanted to share? Should we call it there?
(14:41)	Brian Fauteux	That sounds good.
(14:50)	Kate Moffatt	Okay. Thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at the end of a very long day and a very long couple of days.
		But this was just such a fun way for us to wrap this day up.
(14:50)	Brian Fauteux	That’s great. Thank you for having me.
(14:52)	Kate Moffatt	Amazing. Thanks.
(14:52)	Music	[Music ends].

SPECIAL GUESTS

Brian Fauteux is Associate Professor of Popular Music and Media Studies. He holds a PhD in Communication from Concordia (Montreal) and has completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies music industries and music radio, often from the interrelated perspectives of cultural studies, history, and policy and is currently a co-investigator on a SSHRC-funded research project that investigates copyright and cultural labour in the digital music industries. His book, Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), explores the history of Canadian campus radio, highlighting the factors that have shaped its close relationship with local music and culture. The book traces how campus radio practitioners have expanded stations from campus borders to surrounding musical and cultural communities by acquiring FM licenses and establishing community-based mandates.

Kate Moffatt (interviewer) is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include British Romanticism, women’s authorship, walking and pedestrianism, and print culture. She is the former supervising producer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, and she is the current co-host of The WPHP Monthly Mercury podcast.

PRODUCER

Katherine McLeod is an Assistant Professor, Limited Term Appointment, in the Department of English at Concordia University. She is the principal investigator for her SSHRC-funded IDG project “Literary Radio: Developing New Methods of Audio Research.” She has co-edited with Jason Camlot the most recent special issue of English Studies in Canada, “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies” – and, among her publications on CanLit, archives and sound, she recently wrote about SpokenWeb as a DH project in the book, Future Horizons: Canadian Digital Humanities. She produces the series ShortCuts for The SpokenWeb Podcast.

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ShortCuts Live! Listening to Wide-Screen Radio with Brian Fauteux

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Shortcuts 5.3

ShortCuts Live! Listening to Wide-Screen Radio with Brian Fauteux

March 18, 2024

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