Down the Middle of the Road

It was that great philosopher, Mr. Miyagi who once said it was OK to walk down one side of the road, and it was OK to walk down the other. It was not however, OK to walk down the middle of the road because something would eventually come along and you would go SPLAT!

So the middle of the road in another world, another perspective isn't always about moderation and compromise. Coming from a cool college and finding oneself working in a cool record store following college, one was expected to dislike anything that smelled of the mainstream. The belief was that if something was popular with the masses it lacked any type of artistic integrity. There is some wisdom to that view of culture. Part of the role of good art is to challenge preconceived notions, making us feel the unfamiliar as well as seeing the familiar in a different way. Much of our best works of popular culture come from the fringe elements, the types of writers and artists by their very work will never appeal to a mass audience. Yet at the same time, to dismiss a piece of work because a lot of somebody elses like it, is downright silly.

All this comes to mind this week after the news that the Twin Cities, which didn't have a lot to begin with, lost two of its alternative voices, TheReader and REV 105. The buyout of both media outlets continues a disturbing trend of fewer and fewer owning more and more of the sources from which we get our news and entertainment. If there is one area in which we do not want monopolies involved it is the area in which we get our information. The more sources we have, the better our democracy works.

I've never been much of a radio listener, depending more on my own collection of music whether at home or in my car. The little I listen to the radio usually is to get my news either from talk radio or MPR. So losing REV 105 probably won't have much affect on my day to day life. Yet I know there are people in this company, and among the regulars who shop at our stores that cherished REV 105. I saw a discussion on the Internet about the loss of the radio station and someone commented that the station's demographic didn't count its income by monetary figures but rather by how many CDs they had bought used from Cheapo. It is sad to lose that alternative, the one station in town that had the audacity to play Sinatra, Dylan and Liz Phair back to back to back especially in a city that has 19,000 country music stations.

For me, the loss of The Reader cuts a bit deeper. We are one of the few metropolitan areas lucky enough to still have two competing major daily newspapers. That said, the news in the Pioneer Press seldom varies from the news you'll find in the Star Tribune. There certainly are better alternative newspapers than The Reader and the City Pages. Yet both have established themselves as capable of looking at stories that you would not find in either one of our dailies. The voices, the perspectives that appeared in those pages were great reminders of the ideals I learned while studying journalism, and the need for those out of the mainstream to be able to have an outlet to use to speak out. We all are bettered, more informed when that level of dialogue is allowed to exist.

The town of course will survive the loss of both REV 105 and The Reader. Perhaps in time replacements will appear to take their places. Until then it is our duty to disregard Mr. Miyagi's words of wisdom every now and then because once in a while it's worth the risk to step from the side and risk walking down that dangerous and oh so lonesome middle. It takes an occasional SPLAT to wake us up. Often we require that SPLAT in order to ask the right questions to get the right answers. Only now it will be that much harder to find it.