"How is American beer like making love in a canoe?", the Australian joke of the 1980's asks. Because it's fucking close to water. It used to be that we really had something to be ashamed of over here: our beer truly sucked. Now, as long as one has the sense not to buy the swill advertised during the World Cup, we have nothing to hide. American "micro" brew ales kick the Germans' any-flavour-you-like-so-long-as-it's-Pilsener ass.
But even then, back in the bad old days, we always had an easy comeback. In many areas in the United States, there has long been quite decent radio available. NPR is available in some villes that don't even appear on a map, and any town with a college has a shot at getting avant-garde music, unless, as in San José CA, the college station decides to act as a training ground for the disingenuous pap of commercial radio. German radio on the other hand, made even US commercial stations look really good.
I just got back from Germany, and I am pleased to announce that I found a station that is not only worthwhile to listen to, but positively indicative of what Europe can become.
I stumbled across a Spanish language talk show near Bremen in 2004. I stuck with the station, though it changed languages after that one show. The station announced itself as "Radio Multi-Kulti", an interesting slang for "multicultural"[see Gerhard Seyfried comic, attached]. The daytime playlist included a lot of Latin-American stuff, stuff from all over, and Michael Franti, from Northern California, a favourite in my Berkeley household, whom I first saw at my student co-op fronting the band Beat Nigs.
2 years later on my next Germany spree I immediately got to work locating the station on the dial. I had not noted the frequencies but located them quickly enough. 96.7 in Bremen, 103.3 in Koeln; now I know. I made every effort to listen to Radio Multi-Kulti/ Funkhaus Europa in the car, at home [ to the distress of my elderly mother in law's ears] and on an Ipod sized "transistor" radio. Musical fare included, besides predictable amounts of Brazilian music, Indian pop, African styles, and, most exquisitely, male French rap interspersed with female Arabic soul-style singing. This is the style critiqued in US/monolingual form by Consolidated in "This is Fascism". There was also mind-bending music with opaque Alpine German dialect lyrics, and lots and lots of Turkish pop. Only now did I twig to the fact that there are no ads on the station!
The chrystalising moment for me was when I left the Bremen train station on a bike [multi-modal transpo!] headed for the university library. The general environment of culture shock with the heightened situation of attempting to figure out Germany's Byzantine traffic culture on a physically vulnerable bicycle is bad enough. Wearing headphones dampens the audio channel of awareness, and the eyes and neck crane to compensate. This all created a Nervenkostuem, a psychic state, which I would liken to pouring vodka on the rocks over the brainstem.
Turkish pop was the perfect accompaniment to this! It supplied just the right almost-there quality, Germany being almost-there to Turkey. The texts supplied a finger-grasping almost-there understanding to my semi-Turkish-speaking brain. I understood all the grammar of the songs, but none of the vocabulary. This was much preferable, for my craven purposes, to the Klartext, the open understandableness of German. Also, it was finger-snappin' good.
The station's format is on the German model. It is neither a news station nor a music station, but both. Perhaps the best parallel is Pacifica in the US. Mid mornings are most fruitful for music, and the evening hours are taken up with news shows in about ten different languages, starting at about 4 p.m. with news from the Beeb [BBC], cycling through French, and Italian, and ending up about 4 hours later with Russian, which, oddly comes some time after Serbo-Croatian. The daytime music shows have some information interspersed—I actually learned something about Bangladesh's war of independence after a George Harrison track. At night the station plays world beat shows from all over including our very own Afropop Worldwide from PRI, and Polish, Turkish and Francophone shows. I thought the station was Nederlands free, but it turns out that, to paraphrase the Whodini song of the early 80's*, the Dutch come out at night.
Now comes my plug for flag-wavin' Europhlia. If you, like me, have just read Jeremy Rifkin's "European Dream" or the somewhat more poppy "United States of Europe" by T.R Reid, then this station fits right into the hope of a Pan-European paradigm. Much of the informational content, the evening new shows, is tuned toward other European languages, intra-European immigrant languages. The musical content invites native and immigrant alike freely to cross borders and to enjoy what can be found there, regardless of the linguistic content of the songs. Best of all are the overnight shows, where the listener is not really expected to be able to speak the language of the DJ, but to let it just wash over him until the next song. Klartext is not a priority. Radio Multi-Kulti is pretty much Europe in a box.
After I returned from Europe I found the stations on the web. It turns out Funkhaus Europa is in the one in Koeln, and Radio Multi Kulti is in Berlin. The station[s] can be heard in those 2 cities, and in Bremen, perhaps the Berkeley of Germany. That's a simple map for you of where it might be bearable to live in Germany, if you are hip or of colour, though smaller Heidelberg is pretty OK too. Anywhere else, you can hear the stations online.
Google "Funkhaus Europa" and it comes right up at the top of the list. This one is a bit fiddly to listen to, as it plays in a browser window, and, irksomely, turns off after a while until you refresh it. "Radio Multi-Kulti" needs an additional browser term like "RBB", the parent station. Multi-Kulti only plays in Real Player, which I regard as evil, but if you quit Real Player while listening to Multi-Kulti, then it stays tuned for next time. This makes Real Player my player for listening only to this one station. [Reject all attempts by Real Player to register you, whatever that means!]
Something else about the Funkhaus Europa that ties in with the internet is that they feature particular artists pretty intensively, announcing concerts, playing their interviews in rotation, and writing up their albums. The freaky Alpine quasi-Germanophone, Hubert von Goisern [Austrian, it turns out] is featured. Balkan Beatbox was on while I was there. I would like to see who is on next.
It's not WFMU New Jersey or KFJC Los Altos Hills, but it's interesting, you can learn something, and it provides a hopeful window on all that is not German in Germany.
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