The Conservation of a Gender Fantasy: Women and Top 40 Radio in Montreal

By Christine Maki Art History and Communication Studies Department McGill University, Montreal September, 2008

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts.

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1*1 Canada Abstract

This work examines today's Anglophone Top 40 radio in Montreal in terms of gender. Looking at the history of commercial radio, and the historical relationship between radio and women, it argues that these radio stations have always programmed based on an imagined rather than actual understanding of their target audience. Programmers today continue to hold a conservative understanding of their female audience and their interests, and to program using a stereotypical understanding of gender.

Cette these fait l'analyse de la radio anglophone « Top 40 » a Montreal, en mettant l'accent sur la sexospecificite des animateurs et des auditeurs. En etudiant l'histoire de la radio commerciale, et les liens entre la radio et les femmes, ce travail demontre que les postes de radio ne faisaient pas plus que maintenant une programmation basee sur une comprehension reelle de leurs auditeurs, mais plutot sur une idee virtuelle de leur auditoire-cible. Ceci traduit une maniere conservatrice d'imaginer un auditoire feminin et une programmation qui ne respecte pas reellement les vrais interets des femmes.

2 Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my supervisor Carrie Rentschler for her advice and encouragement, Jordan Himelfarb for his extensive editorial aid as well as buttressing, and my family for all of their help. I would also like to acknowledge additional advice from professors Jonathan Sterne and Will Straw. Table of Contents

Chapter One - Women and Top 40 Radio: An Introduction Introduction Commercial Versus Public: Radio's Early Days and the Development of Top 40 The Beginning of Narrowcasting - Gender and Radio - On Air o Gender and Musical Taste o Gender and Language o Gender and Humour

Chapter 2 - Top 40 Radio and the Conservation of Traditional Ideas of Gender The Gendered Commodity Audience o Housewives at Home: How Radio Understood and Programmed for its Female Audience - Top 40 after the 1950s: Fragmentation, FM and MTV The Return of Top 40, with a New Female Audience o The Feminization of Music and Music Radio o The Masculinization of Talk Radio - Top 40 Since the 1980s - Post-Feminist Radio

Chapter 3 - Women and Top 40 Radio in Montreal - Top 40 Radio in Montreal o Montreal Top 40's Form o Montreal Top 40's Gendered Structure of Talk o Top 40's Gendered and "Popular" Playlist o Transforming Montreal Top 40's Commodity Audience Into a "Public" o Gendered Talk on Montreal Top 40

Conclusion

Works Cited

4 Chapter One - Women and Radio: An Introduction Top 40 radio has been around for more than a half a century, and yet has received little focused attention from audiences or scholars. Its ability to remain in the background is one reason why the format has been allowed to change little throughout that period. This type of music format radio developed in the 1950s according to a commercial media structure. The Top 40 industry's gendered structure also developed in those early days with little space for women on the air. However, an idea of femininity has long been important to the ways in which radio programmed for its commodity audience. As I will argue throughout this work, an idea of the Top 40 audience (and its gendered interests), rather than an actual understanding of that audience has long been the basis for the format's programming. These stations' relationship with their audiences explains why it has changed so little over the years, and why, even after Top 40 shifted its focus in the 1980s towards targeting a female audience, these stations continued to program according to the same traditionally gendered ideas and programming strategies. In the 1980s and 1990s, Top 40 underwent slight changes, adopting discourses known as post-feminism as well as an idea of radio's publicness (adopted from talk radio). Through these slight updates, today's Top 40 radio in Montreal is able to justify programming in the same traditionally gendered ways as it always did. In this work, I will study the history of the genre, as well as analyze the modern day equivalent of Top 40 radio in Montreal to demonstrate the conservative nature of these stations' programming. From its initial development in the 1920s, there was a tension over the public and commercial roles of Canadian radio. While the majority of radio in this country eventually came to operate according to a commercial commodity audience system, overtones of publicness remain in the ways these stations market themselves. This kind of marketing first became common on radio with the talk stations of the 1980s, which gained ratings through selling themselves as a form of public sphere for male listeners to put forth their right-wing perspective. Talk radio was also the location for the reinforcement of linguistic agility as a masculine trait (an idea that grew out of radio's early days, and was confirmed by the language-based joking of talk radio's "bad boys"). Today's Top 40 radio in Montreal operates according to the commercial system, wherein

5 the station must attract, or appear to attract, a coherent commodity audience in order to sell that audience to advertisers. However, these stations have also adopted a discourse of "publicness" as a commercial strategy to further increase their ratings, and to allow them to claim that their target audience chooses to listen to them (though no such choice may be being made). Historically, there have been few women on the air. This has to do with women's perceived lack of skill in the specific areas relating to radio, as well as their perceived lack of skill in the associated fields of music, comedy, and linguistic agility. The lack of women's voices on air is also a result of the ways in which programmers have imagined their audiences. Historically, women were viewed as homemakers, while men were at work, and therefore it was men who were given jobs working on air. Early ratings systems were based on these ideas regarding a gendered division of labour and from the start, created biased gendered portraits of the audience. These biased ratings, as well as programmers' lack of interest in better understanding their audiences led to programming that continued to reflect a traditionally gendered understanding of the listenership (which tended to devalue women's tastes), despite social change. In the 1980s, partially as a result of the feminist movement, Top 40 stations "discovered" that it was feasible to target a female commodity audience, and switched their focus to women. Rather than feminism causing a re-evaluation of their understanding of the gendered audience, programmers instead adopted a set of discourses called "post-feminism," which allows them to justify their continuing practice of portraying gender in traditional ways (and in combination with this idea, described above, that audiences "choose" the programming on these stations, allows them to evade criticism). My analysis of Montreal Top 40 radio will examine the form, structure, music and talk on Top 40 to demonstrate how these stations have not fundamentally changed their gendered ideas and programming strategies. The rhythm of stations' programming structure is based on a structure previously used to target housewives, in that it is designed to be listened to in the background to fit in with the presumed lifestyles, routines and spaces of women's lives. The hosting structure of these stations continues to be male-biased, with women occupying roles lacking in authority. These stations' musical programming, designed to win a predominantly female audience, demonstrates a

6 continuing idea that women lack musical taste, and that they relate to music through their emotions. Just as in Top 40's early days, the musical programming and the talk also allow the station to claim that they program what the public wants to hear-a marketing strategy that is not fully in line with the stations' commercial imperative. The hosts' talk demonstrates the continuing idea that women are not funny, nor can they manipulate language in order to create comedy. Finally, the hosts' focus on gender difference and on prescribing the boundaries of typical femininity and masculinity demonstrate a continuing traditional understanding of gender. By employing post-feminist discourses, these stations can at once maintain their traditional portrayals of gender, but through fun and flirty speech, imply that feminism has succeeded and is no longer useful. How do Top 40 stations get away with programming according to an arguably out-dated idea of gender? Throughout their talk, and particularly their gender talk, hosts employ irony. As a result, they can say things that are borderline sexist and out-of-date without necessarily appearing to mean them. The female hosts' presence and role on the air also facilitates this project. Female hosts occupy a contradictory and typically post- feminist position: they must at once embody femininity, while also proving themselves in this masculine role through using typically masculine speaking strategies (and without ever acknowledging the difficulty of occupying this role). As a result, female hosts tend to be the ones making the most outrageous comments about women, further preventing the station from drawing criticism because these comments are not only tongue-in-cheek, but are also uttered by a woman. By drawing on post-feminist discourses, these stations find a way to continue to program in traditionally gendered ways, and to create fun and playful gender-based comedy, without seeming out of touch with or offensive to their audiences. By drawing on discourses of 'publicness,' these stations make the claim that their female audiences choose to listen to this kind of traditionally gendered programming, a choice, I argue, that is not actually made. However, these stations do have a mandated responsibility to their actual listening public, which they must agree to fulfill in order to gain a broadcast license, and which, I argue, their programming does not accomplish. There has been very little written about today's Top 40 radio. This is likely because scholars are less inclined to take an interest in the commercial aspects of the

7 cultural world. In this thesis, I will bring together existing research regarding Top 40 radio and gender, as well as other works which inform the study of Top 40 radio in Canada. I will draw on trade magazines to gain an insider's perspective on the industry. Finally, I will use the morning radio shows on two Montreal radio stations as my primary source of analysis. In this work, I will begin by examining the history of radio in North America, and how it sets up certain of the themes I will be exploring, including the tensions between the public and the commercial over the airwaves, and the gendering of radio, music, language and humour. Next, I will look at the development of gendered and inaccurate ratings systems and gendered ways of programming for the audience. This will be followed by an analysis of the development of format music radio, and certain key changes in this industry. These include Top 40's switch to targeting a female audience in the 1980s, the success of the related talk radio format, an increasing gendering in music and radio targeting strategies generally, and the adoption of post- feminist discourses that continue in the host talk today. Finally, I will examine the programming on Montreal's equivalent to Top 40 radio, to examine the ways in which these stations' content broadcasts a traditional and post-feminist perspective on gender that likely has a destructive impact on the actual listening audience. In this way, I will attempt to provide insight into an oft-ignored medium. Commercial Versus Public: Radio's Early Days and the Development of Top 40

Top 40 commercial music radio, in its original form, was the product of various historical peculiarities. Specifically, the earliest incarnation of the radio format can be viewed as the result of several policy decisions, as well as the evolution of popularly held ideas regarding radio as a mass and commercialized medium, and as a public service tool. Top 40 also developed as a result of certain key industrial, historical and technological events, such as the advent of television, the increasing prevalence of recorded music, and programmers' changing views of the audience, which manifested itself in the beginning of narrowcasting, and an increasing interest in the youth audience. As will be argued throughout this work, several of these key developments in Top 40's past had a lasting impact on what it would eventually become today. In radio's very early days as a medium, there was some debate over the model that was most appropriate for the emergent broadcasting system. In Canada, these

8 debates occurred after the British and American systems were already becoming established, and so must be understood in an international context. In the 1920s, the U.S. and the U.K. developed diametrically opposed models for radio broadcasting: publicly funded non-profit radio in the U.K. and commercially funded, profit-driven commercial radio sponsored by advertising dollars and run by two major networks in the U.S. These became the two major archetypes for the radio industry generally (McChesney "Graham" 178), and were the two possible models for the Canadian system. In the end, Canada's commercial system came to more closely resemble the American system (with the exception of the public radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which started in 1936-a subject which falls outside the scope of this thesis)(Smythe Dependency 171). Despite Canada's adoption of a commercial system, as will be discussed throughout this thesis, this early understanding of radio as linked to the public had, and continues to have an impact on the way radio is thought of and programmed today. This thesis will examine key moments in the development of the American private radio industry, to demonstrate how, though in the end the medium became commercialized, the series of events that led up to this outcome could also have led to another, more public-oriented result. I will then examine in detail the development of the commercialized Canadian industry to see how this laid the groundwork for today's commercial Top 40 radio in Montreal. After the very first broadcasts in the U.S., it took only a few short years before the broadcasting industry was defined according to a commercial model. However, as Robert McChesney argues, this outcome was far from a foregone conclusion. In fact, during the limbo years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was a period of heated debate between those who believed in a public and those who believed in a commercial model for radio, each trying to make their case regarding radio's proper role (Rich Media 189). In the early 1920s, most stations were set up by educational corporations, or were non-profit, though sponsored by private companies-and these were the groups pursuing a publicly-modeled system (McChesney Rich Media 191). With no money being made, and no one in charge, the industry was unstable, until regulations were created to normalize it. In 1927, the Radio Act created the FRC (the Federal Radio Commission), a pro-consumer organization which was authorized to allow those stations that best served

9 the "public interest, convenience, or necessity" to broadcast (McChesney Rich Media 192). In 1928, the FRC demonstrated how loose that definition was, enacting a massive reallocation of frequencies and allowances that heavily favoured private network stations CBS and NBC. This allowed these chains to effectively create a near monopoly on radio stations, and the commercialized radio system to grow. The FRC explained that they could not support non-profit educational stations because these stations might spread propaganda. For them, advertising was the only form of material support that would not be ideologically influenced. In addition, in the American free-market context, this idea of publicness was used as a form of ideological justification for the CBS and NBC industry dominance: radio's private monopoly was viewed as a system befitting a democratic, free country (McChesney Rich Media 218). As a result, many university and educational stations eventually shut down (McChesney Rich Media 193). Though non-profit educational organizations lobbied for an overhaul of the system, requesting a scheme similar to the British model (including a ban on advertising), (McChesney Rich Media 202-204), it was difficult to achieve change because commercial radio stations gave free air time to the politicians who might have made the difference (thereby undermining the idea that commercial stations would not broadcast propaganda). Because of the popularity of radio, elected officials were not eager to shun this form of free advertising. The disorganization of these non-profit education groups, as well as their inability to compete with corporate dollars or to make strong links with those involved with the British system who might have stepped in on their behalf also contributed to their lack of success. Seven years later, the 1934 Communications Act restated almost verbatim the declarations of the earlier radio act, changing only the name of the FRC to the FCC (the Federal Communications Commission), and crystallizing the structure of the system from then onwards. Specifically, that structure included a competition for licenses through "promises of performance." Those stations deemed best able to "serve the public interest" would have their licenses renewed. Because of the public service element of this structure, several rules were established, including that licenses could not be sold, programs could not be censored, and airtime had to be provided to candidates of all parties. This model of a commercial system with public overtones was eventually adopted by Canadian broadcasters (Smythe Dependency 162).

10 After the Communications Act was passed, Congress lost interest in the issue and any debate over the radio system died out (McChesney Rich Media 205-218). This look at American radio's past demonstrates how the medium came to have a commercial, rather than public structure. Despite its commercial basis, this idea of "publicness"-which grew both from early ideas regarding the medium, as well as the inherent properties of broadcasting (as will be discussed next)-continues to permeate contemporary ideas about radio, and radio programming strategies. This brief history demonstrates that major change in the industry was possible in those early days, and stands in contrast to the lack of change in the industry for much of the period after Top 40 was established. Just before this, and paralleling these debates between proponents of the public and commercial systems, there was also debate more closely centred on the nature of the radio medium itself and what this might mean for the ways of imagining the radio audience. In American radio's early days, the medium was conceived of, by public and private enterprises alike, as a faulty telephone service rather than a broadcasting device (Peters 124). Most private companies were hoping to tinker with radio receiver technology to improve radio's point-to-point transmission capabilities, with only a few individuals, such as David Sarnoff (who would soon become head of the NBC), viewing radio's potential broadcasting abilities as a virtue of the medium (Peters 125). In 1920, the debate over radio's particular form of communication came to a head. The case was put before the Interstate Commerce Commission: Should radio's wireless technology be considered a "broadcaster" or a "common carrier"? The former term is used to define communication whose transmission and content is controlled by private industries, with some public regulation, and whose message is public and not guaranteed to reach any particular individual. The latter category, defined as the "transmission of intelligence by wire or wireless," deals with messages whose transmission and reception are publicly regulated, with privacy of content ensured (Peters 126-7). Since there was no guarantee that the radio message would be received by the intended party, the commission ruled that wireless technology could not be governed according to the rules of common carriage, and therefore fell outside the bounds of the ICC's jurisdiction. It was therefore considered as broadcasting, and formalized thus in the 1934 Communications Act (Peters 126-7). Peters argues that formally defining radio as a broadcasting medium,

11 acknowledged and gave the medium a sense of its inherent publicness (127), despite the fact that it came to operate according to a commercial system. Peters' analysis is useful not just in pointing out how the radio medium leant itself to associations of publicness, but also in providing a model for thinking about the relationship between senders and receivers of radio messages. In this thesis, I will argue that in the commercial radio system of the Montreal market, the messages broadcast are not necessarily created with the desires of an intended audience in mind, and the private industry that creates these messages is held largely unaccountable for making message and receiver match. If the privately regulated broadcast medium contains within it some idea of "publicness," then its audience becomes not merely a group of listeners, but instead constitutes something loftier as well. Rather than speak to their listeners as, for example, an undignified mass or a circus, from the medium's early days, radio programmers addressed their audiences as publics. In this way, "the technical difficulty of specifying an addressee with ether-borne signals... became retrofitted with a political vision of ancient vintage: open public address" (Peters 128). Just because radio programmers addressed their audiences using discourses of publicness, this does not mean that publics were created through their programming, nor that the programming created to serve that. public's interest actually did so: "broadcasting as a legal term refers not to the empirical practices of the airwaves (since format radio and niche marketing, for example, could be criticized for not addressing 'the public') but to an idealized configuration among speakers and audiences" (Peters 127). In this thesis, I will argue that an idea of publicness-which grew out of early debates regarding radio, as well as the properties of the medium-continues to be employed on Montreal Top 40 radio. However, rather than actually attempting to program in order to serve the audience-public's needs, stations instead view their audiences as a commodity, and use publicness as a marketing tool. In Canada during this period, there was a similar struggle between proponents of commercial and public radio over control of the new medium. In the early 1920s, advocates for a public system seemed at the forefront, with the Canadian government the most involved in overseeing radio broadcasting. This was because only one-third of Canadian households had a radio receiver at the time, and private industry had yet to take a large interest in the medium. During this initial period, the government collected fees

12 from those households that owned radio sets, with the idea of dividing these funds amongst the private stations that had been set up to pay for the cost of broadcasting and to ensure its continuation (Vipond "Who" 169-70). However, the fees were never distributed to the private radio stations since the Canadian government's Marine Department (Smythe Dependency 163) felt uncomfortable handing over public money to private institutions, and since radio broadcasting companies seemed content to carry on footing the bill (Vipond "Who" 169-70). This arrangement was temporary, while the federal government began working on a policy to establish regulations for the industry. In 1928, the Aird Commission released its report recommending that Canada's industry be structured as a combination of the BBC and German public broadcasting systems, rather than follow the American model (McChesney "Graham" 179). However, to implement the Aird Commissions's recommendations, various laws had to be passed in parliament. During the three years it took to make these changes, private industry grew and eventually won the bid to control the Canadian broadcasting industry. There were a number of factors that led to this outcome. During the late 1920s, the Canadian Pacific Railway made a push for privately funded stations. The alliances they made with various U.S. stations, as well as the growth of the U.S. broadcasting industry generally, caused the American system to become more influential in the Canadian context (McChesney "Graham" 180). As well, as Canadian radio during those intervening years continued to be funded privately through advertising dollars, Canadian advertisers and listeners came to better accept the American system, and to tolerate ads. In the early 1920s, most advertising was indirect: companies sponsored programs, as well as various elements of programming, naming the shows, musicians and even characters after their products. Programmers thought that listeners would not tolerate spot ads. Therefore station managers allowed only those most reputable of companies to play direct advertising on their stations (Vipond "Who" 171). However, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the major radio networks were formed in the U.S., advertisers and programmers started feeling more comfortable with advertising on the radio. They claimed that listeners also became more willing to listen to spot advertising and the amount of direct advertising increased (Vipond "Who" 172). By 1932 when the House of Commons Special Committee on broadcasting met to discuss advertising and the Aird

13 Commission's report, it was accepted that radio was an advertiser-sponsored and commercially funded broadcast medium. As Mary Vipond comments: In the context of a system in which stations had developed under private ownership, with listeners accustomed to 'free' radio shows, and to the American model, no other alternative seemed feasible by the time the first decade of broadcasting ended, whatever the consequences for quality of programming and equity in distribution. (Vipond "Who" 174) The American and Canadian broadcasting systems were forever linked by their shared vision of commercial broadcasting (though with hints of publicness). I will further explore this public/commercial radio duality in the rest of this work. In particular, I will demonstrate how programmers today sell their stations as public service tools through providing news and local information to a geographically bound audience, and through drawing on the successful public-oriented programming strategies of talk radio. However, though these stations may perform a sort of publicness, and may in fact provide a service to local listeners, this publicness is a commercial strategy that does not reflect an actual sense of public responsibility. This is particularly problematic considering these stations' limited and limiting portrayal of women on the radio. The Beginning of Narrowcasting Once a commercial radio model was established in North America, these stations could get started programming for the listening public. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, radio was the main form of mass entertainment available, broadcast nationally by a few networks. People tuned in to listen to variety, comedy, drama, music and news shows. Though this model of entertainment was successful during radio's early days, industry conflict, technological innovation, and changes in network scale made programmers re­ evaluate their understanding of the audience, and change their programming strategies. Born in the 1950s, one notable change took the form of Top 40 music radio, the first form of narrowcasting to hit the airwaves. The first Canadian Top 40 stations were based on a model developed in the United States-a model that developed slowly, after a series of stages described below. First, American radio had to make the shift to playing popular music. Music always featured heavily on the radio, but the music played then took a different form than it does

14 today. For the most part performed live (radio broadcasting had higher audio quality than records), music was chosen by the orchestra-leader or featured singer and usually consisted of the same Hollywood, big band or crooner classics, rather than what was considered popular with audiences at the time. This began to change in the early 1930s, when a few local networks began playing recorded music, chosen and introduced by early disc jockeys (Fink Business 129). Two shows also began playing popular music. The "Rudy Vallee Show," which began in 1929, was the first to broadcast only popular music (Fink Business 127). The show had a lead star in Vallee, and changing weekly celebrity guests. Rudy Vallee became America's heartthrob, causing major networks to re­ evaluate the nature and tastes of their audiences. In 1935, a forerunner of the Top 40 format called "Your Hit Parade" began. This was a weekly show playing the nation's ten most popular songs in ascending order, performed live by staff singers (Fink Business 129). These programs represented the first time recorded music was played in an attempt to cater to popular tastes, and the first time that personality played a role in the talk that surrounded the music. It is during this period that ratings systems first appeared. Since shows were now trying to tailor their content to popular tastes, programmers sought ways to, in some sense, measure those tastes (Sanjek 161), though, as will be discussed below, ratings systems were from the start biased. These shows and measurement systems were necessary precursors to Top 40, but several more industry changes were needed before programs playing only popular music would go to air.

Next, conflict in the music industry further helped stations make the switch to playing records. As a result of a conflict between the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and the networks and music publishers collection agency over fees given for recordings, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) was created (Barnard On Radio 95). This new organization licensed a much larger range of music than ASCAP, regulated all stations, rather than just networks, and gave fees for recorded as well as live performances of songs (Fink Industry 118). This meant that a wider variety of music was available for airplay, bringing country, and other regional styles of music (such as rock 'n' roll) to audiences for the first time, and influencing tastes in this direction (Barnard On Radio 95). When the American Federation of Musicians went on strike in 1942 against the broadcasting industry to protest the drop in the number of

15 instrumental musicians being hired, this resulted in an increase in the popularity of vocalists, and in the acceptance of records, as opposed to live performances, being aired (Fink Business 120). This series of events would set the stage for popular rock 'n' roll music records being played on the radio. During this period, there was not only an increase in recorded music being played on air. National networks also began to record shows rather than broadcasting them live several times a day to reach the various time zones (Sanjek 160). This tolerance of recorded music and programming was a necessary precursor to Top 40 format radio's development. This development, along with technological innovations (described below), and several other factors demonstrate that a series of events, including but not limited to shifting audience tastes, were responsible for the development of Top 40. The next stage in Top 40's development was its competition with television. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, television became popularized in North America with the number of American households who owned a TV jumping from 172 000 in 1948 to over 43 million in 1958 (Rothenbuhler and McCourt "Radio Redefines" 376). Radio had to redefine itself in the face of this threatening new technology. No longer occupying the privileged role of the entertainer of North America, programmers had to develop new strategies or be wiped out. Several other factors in that time period also helped to create problems for the radio industry, including the anti-communist climate in the US which resulted in loss of radio talent; federal investigations of monolithic network practices after the war which resulted in the disintegration of the large networks (Douglas 224-5); the Federal Communication Commission's decision to localize the medium by giving out non-metropolitan frequencies, further reducing large network driven radio (Keith Voices 2); as well as large networks' inability to keep up with rapidly changing post-war audience tastes (Fink Business 120-1). However, through Top 40 radio, the medium was able to bounce back. This was in part due to the FCC's decision to halt distribution of new TV station licenses between 1948-52, in order to study FM and AM radio and TV, thereby giving radio some time to redefine itself. It was also due to technological development during that time (and the radio industry's ability to capitalize on the changing technology), which, together, allowed audiences to change their listening patterns, and radio to begin

16 narrowcasting (that is, programming for a narrow segment of the actual population). In 1963, Bell Laboratories' invention of the miniaturized radio (due to new transistor technology) meant radios became portable. Because they were also cheaper than the old radios, many homes came to own more than one set (Rothenbuhler and McCourt "Radio Redefines" 378). As a result, listening patterns changed-listeners were mobile and they often listened in solitude, rather than as a family. This allowed "the family audience to disaggregate into individuals with distinct tastes and listening habits"(Rothenbuhler and McCourt "Radio Redefines" 378), each member of the family listening on-the-go to programs that interested them in particular. Radio programmers responded to these changing technologies (and to the increasing drop in listening time) by developing narrowcasting strategies (in other words, strategies designed to more specifically target subsections of the audience). These included: reconstructing the radio broadcasting day and putting more emphasis on the drive times of morning and night; creating programming that could be listened to as a secondary medium, in the background without missing anything (namely, this meant a focus on music; this concept of radio as a secondary medium will be further discussed later on, in relation to today's Top 40 flow); and trying to reach groups not represented by television viewers. Radio programmers who could isolate smaller, less heterogeneous audience segments and listening contexts would reduce the uncertainty of their programming decisions and attract advertisers seeking specific groups of consumers. Radio now produced (and reflected) a fragmented and pluralistic culture. (Rothenbuhler and McCourt "Radio Redefines" 379) Rather than try to program for everyone from age 5 to 55 as they had done previously, radio now focused on a strategy that might more reliably reach certain smaller segments of the population. Specifically, the new group that radio programmers focused on were teenagers. Teenagers had a disposable income and represented an increasingly large section of the American population. They also had a particular tendency to buy records and to enjoy rock 'n' roll music and other vocal-oriented or regional styles of music (Rothenbuhler and McCourt "Radio Redefines" 379). The advent of cheap 45s also helped. Young

17 people could afford to buy these singles (Keith Voices 4). Top 40, with its streamlined, deejay-led radio format, seemed to be able to successfully appeal to the newly mobile, young audience and their listening patterns (Fink Industry 121). This period of reprieve, as well as the new and cheap technology gave radio the chance to adjust to the changing media situation in North America, and led to the development of Top 40. It was in this context, and using this new strategy of narrowcasting for the teenage audience that Top 40 radio, in its original 1950s format, developed. Though at first it found success, as will be discussed in the next chapter, narrowcasting would eventually also spell trouble for Top 40. The specific conception of the Top 40 format is the stuff of legend. According to the story, Top 40 was invented by two young men, Todd Storz and Bill Stewart, sitting in a bar one evening in Omaha, Nebraska in 1955. They noticed that the waitress in the bar played the same forty jukebox songs over and over while she cleaned up. From this, they extrapolated that audiences wanted only to hear the forty most popular songs of the day repeated all day long, and applied this concept to radio programming (Keith Voices 2, Douglas 247). Though their reasoning left something to be desired, their idea worked: Storz and several other young innovators of the period started what became a highly successful chain of Top 40 radio stations, consistently beating out their competitors in the ARB and Hooper's ratings, the two largest radio ratings systems of the era (Denisoff 235). Though legend has it that Top 40 was born that night in an Omaha bar, a few changes had to occur before classic Top 40 radio as it is understood today was created. Namely, stations had to make the switch to rock 'n' roll music, and to programming according to "popular" tastes. During the early days of Top 40, radio stations played a lot of ballads, big band and boogie-woogie. Deejays of this period had a large influence on taste, creating the station's playlist. Although the top ten songs were played in heavy rotation, programming was still highly diversified due to different deejays' tastes (Fink Industry 122). As rock 'n' roll became big business, the U.S. Congress began looking more carefully at radio stations' involvement in the music industry, uncovering the widespread payola.(or pay-for-play bribing system)(in their defence, disc jockeys claimed they could not listen to the 200 singles per week flooding the market, in order to

18 decide which they liked best)(Denisoff 223). A congressional subcommittee began investigating this in 1959-60, bringing the scandals to public attention and widespread outrage (Fink Industry 123). As a result, radio stations experienced a shift in power with program managers replacing deejays in charge of music selection, exchanging old musical styles with newly popular rock 'n' roll, and programming according to the charts (Fink Industry 123, Barnard OnRadjo 95). Featuring teenager-oriented music, interspersed with deejay talk, the basic format of the Top 40 radio station was born. Besides music and talk, it also included canned ads, an upbeat style of delivery, promotions, contests, and a generally tight format with no dead air (Fink Industry 122-3). Musically, an hour of programming included records from the station's list of top hits of the week, an older hit that had recently fallen off the charts, a song considered to be multi-generational with broad appeal, a song gaining popular momentum, and a new release (Ganzert 56). These stations played narrow playlists featuring those 40 songs that sold best, and they followed a 24-hour clock that specified every element of programming and when it was to occur. According to Eric Rothenbuhler and Tom McCourt this "total station sound," as it was known, was designed to demand the least attention from the newly mobilized audience (Rothenbuhler and McCourt "Radio Redefines" 381). Within the new narrowcasting market, Top 40 stations had to find a way to distinguish themselves from their competitors. The term "format" in "format radio" refers both to the set list of content broadcast in a particular hour on these stations (including ads, certain phrases, weather, etc.) and to the type of programming a particular station broadcasts (though in Top 40's early days, these formats consisted of variations on rock and pop, later formats would become quite specific, for example, all jazz, or even all news, etc., see Berland "The Case" 107). The idea of the format was to create a formula that would allow a station to differentiate itself from others and to create a musical identity with which the listener in a particular specialized market could identify. The format was also a coherent identity used to market the station to its advertisers (Negus 104). The deejay, relieved of his role as music programmer, became the main way to differentiate between stations. He was the personality of the radio station, the link between the audience and the station and the manifestation of the station's understanding

19 of audience tastes. His job was to create a distinct but coherent station identity, in a sense to trademark the station's style (Fink Industry 130). As will be discussed later, he did this partly through marketing himself as the voice of the people. This explains why Top 40 deejays took on frenetic personalities in an attempt to stand out from the crowd and to attract a youthful following. These frenetic personalities then set the stage for the ironic banter and controversial comedic sty lings featured on today's Top 40 radio, as will be discussed in my analysis of contemporary radio in Montreal. With this new shift in power at radio stations, popular tastes were said to be driving musical choices. Thus, the Top 40 niche marketing strategy was also made possible through the development of ratings systems in that era. Since the 1930s, audience research and focus groups had become increasingly sophisticated, allowing advertisers and broadcasters to feel they had a better understanding of their audience's tastes and a better ability to target these tastes to their monetary advantage (Berland "Local Narratives" 181) (though, I will argue, these ratings were always biased). Today, music programmers consult several sources in order to compile station playlists: the Billboard and Cashbox charts; Top 40 tip sheets (purchasable lists of songs compiled from various record correspondents from around the United States); what other local stations and national stations of influence are playing; and local record sales and the amount of money and attention record producers are lavishing on a particular artist (Denisoff 255-8; Negus 106). Promoters draw music programmers' attention to chart activity, trade paper reviews and picks, demographic appeal, and their company's sales records in order to sell a song's popularity (Fink Industry 139). General information on target audiences is gained from weekly research conducted by a station or service to determine what the station should play. In addition, semi-annual surveys or "sweeps" can be purchased from private firms to determine the ratings of a station in a market, and the demographics of their market (age, sex, income), affecting the station's overall marketing approach (Fink Industry 137, 14.1). Finally, once a record is being played on air, it is monitored through passive means, by analyzing requests and call-ins, and actively through consultants and research agencies. These agencies conduct focus groups, distribute questionnaires at retail outlets, and conduct "call-out" research where reactions to songs played over the phone are obtained from random samples of listeners.

20 From all of this information on the audience and its tastes, programmers create the distinctive playlist designed to target that station's target audience (though, as will be discussed later, internal industry factors have often been considered more important than demographic information, when choosing a musical playlist). Top 40 radio, in its classic format was based on two central elements: talk and music. The deejay provided the chatter, acting as the personality and voice of the distinctive station, filling the air around the music with information and comedic stylings. The audience also provided the musical playlist, since, according to station programmers, the station's playlist reflected the tastes of their target audience (as relayed to them through increasingly sophisticated ratings procedures). This democratic element of Top 40 programming is reflected in the following quote, from an article from the May 1957 issue of the trade magazine Television, entitled "The Storz Bombshell," which argues that Storz's success with this new format was made possible because of the way audience tastes had coalesced at that time: The listener wants to hear his favourite numbers again and again. The programming of music is controlled entirely by the choice of the public. If the public suddenly showed a preference for Chinese music, we would play it. The growing universality of musical taste appears to make possible the application of a single programming standard to many individual markets. The disc jockey is not representative of the public. Because he is usually above the audience mentally and financially, his own preferences are a dangerous guide, (quoted in Rothenbuhler and McCourt "Radio Redefines" 382) This quote from an early radio programmer demonstrates a number of things. First, it provides a glimpse of the often condescending attitude held by programmers with regards to their audience, particularly in the way it situates the deejay as superior to his listeners. Second, it shows how programmers have, from the early days, consciously employed this language of publicness to explain their radio programming and why it works commercially. This idea that Top 40 plays what listeners want to hear is backed up by the fact that it plays music deemed "popular" through public taste. As 1 will demonstrate in chapter three, Montreal Top 40 stations, too, employ this concept of publicness in their

21 marketing, claiming they play what Montrealers want to hear. This despite the fact that, as Rothenbuhler and McCourt note: Of course, the claim that consumer preference determines programming is specious. There is no consumer demand for unheard songs; instead, public interest in new songs is created by radio airplay and other forms of media exposure. For example, the weekly "pick hit" would be played once an hour, twenty-four hours per day, for seven successive days. Storz and his imitators could even say they agreed with the critics of rock and roll but were bound [to play Top 40 music because of] the purported democracy of commercial radio. ("Radio Redefines" 382) Top 40 stations claim that the public chooses their station and the music it plays, when in fact the station has narrowed down the number of musical options (and in the always- small radio market, limited by available frequencies, there are also few options in terms of radio stations to select). As my analysis of today's Top 40 radio in Montreal will show, though these stations claim to have been chosen by public taste, these claims are best understood as a marketing tool. The newly advanced narrowcasting strategy, and radio programmers' ability to capitalize on various technological advancements is what allowed Top 40 to be born (and radio to make a comeback). Narrowcasting is a commercial strategy that involves creating programming that attracts the sub-segment of the population that will most profit the station. Through this idea of the democratized playlist, Top 40 programmers attempted to infuse this idea of radio's publicness into this new commercial strategy. Despite the increasing sophistication of ratings systems, and despite claims that these stations cater to audience tastes, station programmers then and now do not necessarily base their programming on an accurate picture of the listenership and its preferences. In chapter two, I will provide a more in-depth look at the history, development and accuracy of ratings systems, to argue that, over time, these systems developed significant biases that would call into question any public service claims made by today's Top 40 radio. The question of whether these stations' play lists and programming in general correspond to or create an audience's tastes is interesting. Despite those early station programmers' naive or misleading claims, their playlist strategies did for the most part

22 work, and so were in some sense able to capitalize on the tastes of the market in that era. Insofar as Mix 96 and Q 92 (the two stations I will analyze) continue to be on the air today, Montreal stations can be said to have done the same thing. However, because of inaccurate ratings systems, and the reality that in most markets (and especially in Canada), there are always a limited number of radio stations from which to choose, it is impossible to detangle what it is that actual audiences are listening for when they tune in. Because of that impossibility, a discussion of actual audiences and actual audience tastes falls outside the scope of this thesis. Instead, I will focus on those claims to publicness made by Top 40 stations to demonstrate that any potential public element of their programming would come into conflict with the commercial structure of the system. These claims are thus better understood as marketing, and can be analyzed in terms of the ways in which the station might be imagining and hoping to target a gendered audience. These stations' programming is particularly problematic because these stations portray women in limited ways, and because they also claim that female audiences choose to tune in to such programming. In the second chapter of this work, I will take up the history of Top 40 radio from the initial development of the genre to its contemporary equivalent, dealing with the increasing niche-marketing of radio towards the female audience, and the ways in which today's radio understanding of the female audience developed. In particular, I will examine certain essential changes to the genre in the 1980s, when Top 40 experienced a rebirth, a re-imagining of their audience, and picked up a new set of media discourses regarding that audience, called post-feminism. The next section of this chapter will set forth some of the other themes I will explore in this work with regards to gender and radio, notably the ways in which women have been absent from the air, and how this might tie into the host's on-air functions. I have chosen to examine Top 40 radio's history and gendering for two reasons. First, because there is little scholarly work on today's radio, it makes sense to look to past work for insight into the present cultural phenomenon. Second, I have drawn on past scholarship to demonstrate that contemporary Top 40 radio has changed little and remains fundamentally the same as it was in radio's early days, conserving the same programming strategies with a few slight alterations. An examination of radio's past

23 demonstrates how historical shifts in the industry might have caused any change in radio's structure, rather than those changes reflecting social evolution or audience demand during the same period. This is because, as I have and will argue throughout, radio is not programming for an actual audience, but for an idea of the audience that station programmers have created for themselves. Gender and Radio-On Air Scholars have long noted the lack of women on the radio. In this section, I will examine the historical trajectory of women's non-involvement in radio and the reasons used to explain their absence. I will also delve briefly into some associated reasons for the lack of women on air, such as women's perceived lack of musical taste, comedic skill and ability to manipulate language. This background will then set the stage for my examination of men and women on Montreal's Top 40 radio today. In radio's early days, women who were involved in the industry tended to work in radio's off-air positions doing pre-interviews, writing, researching and working clerical jobs, but rarely hosting (Cramer "More Things Change" 61-2). When women were on air, they tended to host female-oriented programming: in the 1920s and until the advent of format radio, they were the hosts of daytime homemaker shows, or reported on "society" events (Cramer "More things change" 61-62). In the 1970s, increased training for women, the introduction of National Public Radio and the rise of the women's movement meant more women became involved in the industry (mainly on the public broadcasting side). However, women remained in lower prestige positions, were paid less and continued to be sent to investigate "soft" human-interest issues rather than "hard" news stories featuring politics, business, economics, law and government (Cramer "Woman's Place" 219). Judith Cramer points out that this could be because few women have ascended to management positions at radio stations. In 2003, only 25.9% of management jobs in American radio were occupied by women. In 2004, the number of female station managers was at around 13% (Cramer "More Things Change" 64). Scholars have asked (mostly male) station managers and music programmers why women have been so long absent from the radio world. The same reasons have been, and continue to be offered over and over to explain this phenomenon. Women's voices are not low or authoritative enough for hosting and especially not for reading the news

24 (Cramer "Woman's Place" 215). Personal problems and emotional issues prevent women from furthering their radio careers. Women cannot handle serious reporting assignments. Radio's irregular hours are bad for women's lifestyles. They have difficulty with technical equipment (Cramer "Woman's Place" 216-7). Women are too pushy and gossipy. The microphone does not suit women's voices, since it was initially developed for a male vocal range (Barnard Studying Radio 177).1 These explanations show that traditional ideas regarding women's and men's abilities had (and as will be shown, continue to have) a major impact on women's involvement in the field. Many of these perceptions, cited as reasons for women's lack of involvement in the industry in the early days of radio, persist today (Cramer "Woman's Place" 222-3). Rosalind Gill asked male programmers and controllers and deejays at several stations about gender discrimination in the radio field of the early 1990s, and was told that audiences still do not like women's voices because women's voices are too shrill or otherwise wrong for radio, that women still do not have the requisite musical knowledge and personality, and that women still do not have the required technical and other associated skills necessary for radio (Gill "Justifying" 137-150). As a result, programmers and station managers say, women today do not tend to apply. This is why male hosts are the norm in music radio,2 and women deejays continue to have trouble finding work in the field (Gill "Justifying" 140). Gill points out that program controllers used a wide range of ever-shifting explanations to explain why women were not present in radio, without addressing sexism in particular. Their accounts were "flexible and sometimes contradictory," often deferring to audience tastes and explanations such as "surveys show" in order to deflect responsibility from themselves (and, I will argue, to continue to make the argument that Top 40 merely reflects rather than determines popular taste). She argues that the lack of convincing explanations .on the part of these programmers demonstrates how strong the ties are between traditional gender ideas and radio ("Justifying" 148). In this thesis, I will examine several of these explanations, including the

1 During this time, women's voices were routinely erased from taped interviews, replaced by on-air male voices (Cramer "Woman's Place" 216). 2 Though it is difficult to find statistics on the number of women on air, one example is telling. In their study of British commercial radio of the 1990s, Michaels and Mitchell found only 11.6% of hosts were female (Michaels and Mitchell 240).

25 gendering of language, music and humour (since these are realms of particular importance for a Top 40 radio host). I will use each of these categories as a lens to try to understand women's lack of involvement in radio today, and when present, to explain their role over the air. In chapter two, I will broaden the focus to look not only at women's lack of involvement in the industry, but to the ways in which radio stations both program and understand their audience in gendered ways. Gender and Musical Taste Top 40 music radio's main output and purported raison d'etre is the music it plays. A station's particular combination of musical selections is what distinguishes it from other stations in the local market. While deejays on commercial radio no longer choose the songs they play, they are occasionally required to speak about and around the music, and so that talk, as well as the musical selection, informs the ways in which the station relates to its audience and supposedly reflects their taste. In this section, I will look at ideas regarding the gendering of the music world and musical taste to examine how these ideas might have prevented women's involvement in radio, have affected the ways male and female deejays speak about music on the radio, and then had an impact on stations' conceptions of their female audience. Historically and culturally, there have been strong ties between masculinity and "good" music, to the exclusion of femininity. In their seminal essay "Rock and Sexuality" Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie claim that the sexes are socialized to enjoy different forms of music that are accompanied by value judgments. They explain that rock music is about sexual expression and youthful rebellion (369). Since women have traditionally represented convention and the suffocation attendant to marriage, home life and the routines that go along with that lifestyle, women thus come to be conceived of as inherently opposed to rock music's urge for freedom (Frith cited in Douglas 275). Young girls, and later women, are taught to enjoy another form of music: pop and teenybop. This musical style involves a more watered down version of male sexuality, featuring teen idols who sing as if to an intimate bedroom audience (Frith and McRobbie 375). When it is piped through female-dominated factories and offices, they argue that pop music's romantic connotations help women daydream their way through daily and monotonous work, and come to signify the "natural" link between women, fantasy and

26 the emotions (Frith and McRobbie 379). Frith points out that this distinction between rock and pop is not innocent, since rock music is considered to be more musically valid and authentic than pop music, which is seen to be less valid and more mass-oriented. This gendered taste distinction ties in with long-standing ideas dating back to the 19th century that position women as inferior and passive members of the mass audience (Huyssen 189). In today's musical marketplace, men become connoisseurs of the rock art object (where, in some cases, record collecting can be understood as a display of one's masculine power and knowledge), while women are thought to be gullible consumers, enjoying any music that is popular at the time (Straw "Sizing" 4). According to these musical discourses, there is a gendered dichotomy between those who have good taste, and those who like what's popular, which then comes to parallel the divide between those who produce and those who consume. These gendered musical distinctions explain why in the music industry, men tend to run things, and women tend to be members of the audience (Frith and McRobbie 373). Traditionally, those women who have been involved in rock musical production tend to be hard-rockers that come to be thought of as "one of the boys," while any women musicians have tended to work in the pop genre (Firth and McRobbie 377). While these ideas may appear somewhat dated, recent research by Sara Cohen, who studied the rock music scene in 1990s Liverpool, demonstrates that the masculinity of rock culture is actively produced by members of this community (while women participate in this culture through being members of the audience), indicating that such gendered distinctions may be a continuing and deep-seated feature of its musical discourses (Cohen 17). The active re-production and reaffirmation of a link between masculinity and good music can also explain why women are not thought to have the requisite music knowledge to speak on music radio (Barnard On Radio 128). According to Susan Douglas, these ideas regarding the gendering of music and musical appreciation were reinforced in the radio world during the 1970s, due to the rise of high-fidelity freeform radio and fidelity listening alongside the rising popularity of remasculinized rock music (274). As will be discussed in chapter two, this new form of anti-Top 40 radio featured longer songs, experimental music, and underground, rebellious (and male) deejays. During the 1970s, rock songs increasingly began to feature male virtuosity on and

27 mastery over the guitar. The conjunction of these two events solidified the relationship between masculinity, music and radio, allowing these stations and their male hosts to claim both rock music and fidelity listening as masculine practices, and to further strengthen the link between masculinity and musical appreciation (Douglas 275). The gendering of musical styles and appreciation means that female radio music deejays are less likely to be respected for their musical tastes and knowledge, while deejays discussing music will likely target their talk according to gendered understandings of the musical appreciation of their intended audience. It is no surprise then that historically (and currently), there have been few female music deejays. Many of the same reasons offered to explain the lack of women in radio in general are used to explain the lack of female music radio deejays specifically. Programmers say that audiences do not like women's voices, and that women do not have the required personality and knowledge of music. Scholars have also posited that women might be absent from the airwaves because of the maleness of the music world generally: club culture deejays tend to be male, and so women are less likely to learn deejay skills in the club, which could then be transferred to the world of radio. Because there are few formal routes for getting into broadcasting, the male world of music and radio does not favour the hiring of women through informal contacts (Michaels and Mitchell 238). Women are thought to have a hard time learning technical skills and since these skills (including complex digital skills) must be learned on the fly, women are even less likely to be given the opportunity to learn them (Michaels and Mitchell 245). As a result, women on music radio today usually occupy sidekick positions, acting as complement to male hosts, performing typically female roles, and occasionally asked to perform femininity itself (for example, putting on horny sex operator voices) (Michaels and Mitchell 238). Or, they are given slots at night, when there are few listeners (Gill "Justifying" 137). This gendered hosting structure on music radio is backed up by my analysis of today's Montreal Top 40. In this thesis, I will examine how the association of

3 This gendering of musical tastes follows women and men throughout their lives, both in the music and radio industries. As Barnard claims, "the traditional contemptuousness shown not only by producers but by media commentators and critics towards the tastes of female record buyers in their teens mirrors and anticipates that of radio gatekeepers towards women in general and housewives in particular" (Barnard On Radio 150). As will be discussed later in this work, because female listeners are not presumed to have advanced musical tastes, the talk surrounding music programming intended for them is minimized.

28 masculinity and music, particularly the defining of musical appreciation as male, might influence deejay speech and radio programmers' understanding of and programming strategies for their target female audience, within the context of a pop music station. Gender and Language Besides music, what Top 40 broadcasts is talk. There has been much written in the past regarding language and gender, revolving around the question of whether talk can be gendered. In this section, I will briefly explore previous scholarship on language and gender as well as current linguistic work in this field. This research will help illuminate the ways in which gender plays into the talk featured on Montreal Top 40 radio. It will also help to explain the role gender plays in Top 40 stations' linguistic- based comedy and its musical discussion. In the 1960s and 1970s, several of the seminal texts on language and gender were written. For the most part, these texts looked at the differences between men's and women's speech to argue that these both reflect and create inequality between genders. Authors such as Robin Lakoff and Dale Spender argued that there can be said to be a difference between "women's language" and "men's language," and that women and men are socialized to speak these coded languages, which relegate women to a subservient position in society (Lakoff 39-41). While these and other texts on language and gender have been criticized for their oversimplification, I will nevertheless briefly explore Lakoff s Language and Woman's Place in order to look at those linguistic tropes that she claims are "markers" of gender (and later to examine how these tropes are used for effect on today's radio). These markers include: a woman's linguistic politeness, her use of over-specific adjectives (e.g. mauve rather than purple), hedging words (e.g. "kind of), tag questions (e.g. endings to sentences such as, "John is, isn't he?"), as well as her willingness to be interrupted or taken off topic (West and Zimmerman quoted in Johnson 9), all of which render her speech less powerful and less authoritative than men's (Lakoff 78-81). Interestingly, Lakoff notes that women's language does not include telling jokes, and as a result, women are not thought to have a sense of humour (81). Though Lakoff s and others' research, much of it based on ethnographic and anecdotal findings, may have resulted in an over-simplistic and deterministic linking of speaker and speech, this work also speaks to the fact that these gender-marked words are part of our common sense and

29 pop culture discourses. Although, as will be discussed below, scholars have moved on to more nuanced perspectives on language and gender, I will argue that these tropes are still recognizable as markers of gender today, and are used to gendered effect on today's radio. Follow-up research regarding men's and women's language has found fault with some of the generalizations made in those early texts. For example, Roger Hewitt argues that while on the surface one can classify men's language as competitive and women's as co-operative, this does not take into account the subtle ways in which men's competitive conversation works to bond male friends, forming a functional conversational whole (Hewitt 44). Follow-up research showed that contrary to those earlier texts' claims, in certain contexts women do swear (e.g. while in boarding school, or to appear powerful, see De Klerk 157), and men do gossip (e.g. while watching televised sports, see Cameron 60). Deborah Cameron has argued that perhaps early research regarding men's and women's speech styles were the result of reading gender into their language rather than the other way around. The behaviour of men and women whatever its substance may happen to be in any specific instance, is invariably read through a more general discourse on gender difference itself. That discourse is subsequently invoked to explain the pattern of gender differentiation in people's behaviour; whereas it might be more enlightening to say the discourse constructs the differentiation, makes it visible as differentiation. (Cameron 48) This concept of reading gender into a social phenomenon will be revisited when discussing the ways in which ratings systems and radio programmers have, from the beginning, counted and understood the radio audience in gendered terms. As I will argue further in the next chapter, just as scholars have read gender into language, media programmers have read gender into their audiences. Building on past scholarship in this field, current linguists have examined language and gender from a postmodern perspective, arguing, as Judith Butler has, that language does not so much reflect an innate gender identity, but rather indicates a performance or a "doing of gender" (cited in Cameron 49). According to this perspective, language is a tool: it can be taken up or used in different situations to

30 different extents, enabling a person to perform and construct different versions of their gendered selves to different effects (Bucholz and Hall 7). This does not mean that language, and gendered language has no implications for power relations between genders; instead, masculine speech is not innately powerful, but is constructed as such. Various studies have examined how language can be used in gendered ways, to create a position of power for the speaker. For example, Scott Kiesling studied men's language in fraternities, finding that men in the fraternity adopt various speaking stances, which allow them to negotiate between different sources of masculine authority (eg. the perspective of the eldest, or the most knowledgeable about sports). Depending on what was advantageous to the speaker in a given situation, they drew on these different sources in order to assert power (Kiesling 81). If we view language as a tool for the construction of identity, then it is possible for women, too, to create positions of power through the use of gendered language. In her "Lip Service on the Fantasy Lines," Kira Hall examines the language used by phone sex operators on the job. Phone sex workers must find a way to create a private sense of intimacy with a listener they have never met. To do so, they draw on public, normalized strategies for the creation of intimate feelings, such as male pornography tropes, in order to inspire erotic sensations in the listener (Bucholz and Hall 190). They also use marked feminine words to turn their listeners on (Bucholz and Hall 195). In this thesis, I will examine how men and women on Montreal Top 40 stations use language in gendered ways, in order to portray themselves as authorities in specific realms, in order to create different relationships with their audiences, according to the gendered ways in which these stations' programmers understand and target their audiences. Gender and Humour

As noted above, the Top 40 deejay creates the distinct identity of that station through his outrageous personality. Because radio is an aural medium, the deejay performs this central role through speech, specifically through humour and through shock value. These two are not unrelated-and as will be discussed below, as well as in relation to 1980's talk radio bad boys, much humour is created through playing on and linguistically dancing around the taboo. Radio comedy has long been gendered. This could be because of larger cultural tropes regarding humour. According to Kathleen

31 Rowe, traditionally popular culture and high art have tended to represent women as the objects rather than the subjects of comedy, the butt of the male joke (Rowe 3-6). Humour involves risk, and women, who have traditionally had less authority, might be less likely to make themselves vulnerable for comedic purposes (Rowe 3). It is also, as suggested above, related to the coding of women's speech as lacking in humour. In the radio world, this is another explanation for why women are not hired as deejays. Programmers assume that women's voices cannot handle humour, and that women do not have the ability to be funny (Barnard "Mother's" 135). In this section, I will briefly delve into the history of comedy on the radio, to explain how, within the context of this medium's history, comedy has become especially gendered. I will then use these ideas to explain the gendered comedy that can be heard on Montreal Top 40 today. Women have had little linguistic and comedic authority in radio's history. In her Listening In, Susan Douglas looks at radio comedy's heyday, exploring the role of language, voice and gender in creating humour. During the late 1930s in the United States, national radio networks were established, linking previously isolated areas together and allowing people across the country to hear dialects from other regions previously unheard on the air. This new form of communication created linguistic tension over the official language of the nation. Radio became a key location for "struggles over power, pecking order, and masculine authority" (Douglas 101). It was during this time that people were said to be "judged by vocal standards alone": since research of that era shows that listeners built assumptions about age, gender, personality, appearance, sincerity, and the intelligence of the speaker just by listening to their voice. Pronunciation became important, implicated as it was in power relations linked to class, ethnicity, race and gender (Douglas 102-3). I will argue below that this focus on different vocal sounds became ingrained in radio's comedic programming through jokes about sexual difference. It was in this context that ideas concerning the relative value of different voices and accents were developed, such as the superiority of formal English, North Western American accents and male voices. Radio comedy was based on a rebellion against the standard official English and often provided a venue for the poor, who were struggling in the depression-era economy, to find a sense of pride through rebellious jokes. It was because language was so closely linked to the power relations of

32 the developing nation that linguistic comedy became so popular and profitable on the radio (Douglas 103). During the U.S. depression of the 1930s there occurred a period of intense cultural stress (Douglas 105). According to Douglas, this was a particular issue for men. Job loss and poverty caused a crisis in masculinity; men felt a sense of failure and frustration because of their inability to fulfill their social and gendered roles. It is no surprise then that the linguistic duelling featured on radio comedy programs took on gendered overtones. Linguistic agility was used to express rebellious masculinity. Radio comedy became a place where men could make fun of the rich during a time when a large portion of the population was poor. Insults and fast repartee became an important means for men to puff up their deflated egos and to regain their pride during an economic crisis (Douglas 114). Listeners tuned in to hear jokes based on infantile characters breaking linguistic rules-to laugh at the characters while envying them their rebellion (Douglas 105). "While many of the jokes ridiculed masculine self-delusions, the pace, delivery, and tone of the humour reaffirmed verbal agility and quickness as a distinctly male trait" (Douglas 114). In accordance with Lakoff, the women in these skits tended to speak politely and in the Queen's English. It is here that we can find the roots of talk radio's bad boys, who display their immature masculinity through ironic and comedic talk and linguistic wordplay meant to in some sense speak the "voice of the people." From radio's early days, then, linguistic agility and humour came to be defined as masculine, which continues to impact the ways in which men and women speak and joke on Top 40 today.

These masculine displays of linguistic agility were not only forms of rebellion against cultural and economic strain within the context of the developing American nation. They must be considered within the larger context of that era's comedic obsession with sex and sexual difference. Matthew Murray has studied early radio comedy, arguing that its two central themes were "loose women and lavender men"- stereotypes that became the butt of many jokes (and continue to be today). He argues that: Sexual expression and sexuality were central to the processes of golden age radio comedy. Not only was sexuality pivotal to comedy programming, it was a recurring feature around which the institutional and cultural interactions between

33 networks, sponsors, audiences, performers, and regulators revolved. Sexual humour produced moments of excess and controversy, but it was also a regular and accepted ingredient of broadcast comedy. (Murray 135) This early radio comedy grew out of the vaudeville tradition, featuring risky double- entendres and other language play based around sexual difference that was intended to aurally titillate listeners, though programmers always worried about going too far (Murray 141). Sex-based jokes were another means for male comedians, both in radio's early days and in the 1980s talk radio era, to entertain listeners and show off their linguistic abilities by skating around risky subjects. The focus on the difference between women and men then originates in radio's early days, and, I will argue, continues to be important to the comedic and some might say risque programming on today's Top 40 radio. This linguistic and comedic focus on sexual difference is not surprising when one considers the properties of the aural medium. Different voices provide variety for the ears, and a focus on aural difference was a means of creating aural entertainment. In her Listening In, Susan Douglas argues that people tuned in to early comedy to hear the contrast between the voices of the "straight" male announcers, and the other guests, including women and members of various ethnic groups: It was the contrast between types of voices, with different timbres, accents, and affectations, that was key to radio's humor - the jokes lay as much between the sounds and pronunciations of different voices as they did within the voice of one character. And central to these jokes, insults, and linguistic rituals was a debate about the sanctity of male authority... (Douglas 110) It is this variety that led these comedic structures to become: "so ritualized and durable that they persist in varying forms to this day" (Douglas 110). And indeed, these early tropes of masculine linguistic agility can be seen in the early Top 40 era deejay's ability to create his unique personality: Using only his voice, a particular style and pace of talk, and certain trademark words and turns of phrase, the deejay worked to create a distinctive identity. Since this was an aural medium, the shrewd deejay developed endlessly repeated verbal 'identity marks' that the audience associated only with him. Successful

34 wordplay, an agility and deftness with the language, was once again crucial to masculine success on the airwaves as deejays devised their own updated version of linguistic slapstick... (Douglas 229-30) This link between linguistic agility and masculinity becomes ingrained in radio's comedic structures, and will inform my analysis of deejay talk on the radio today. In addition to this link, one can argue that a focus on sexual difference has also become a lasting trope of radio comedy, creating humour through'aural difference and through the contrast between men's and women's voices, speech patterns and the implied innate differences between the genders. In my analysis of radio talk today, I will look at how gender difference and sexual comedy continue to be the stalwart comedy tropes, employed in various ways by both male and female hosts and to differing effects. In particular, I will examine hosts' use of the linguistic tool of irony to play with gender, create humour and circumvent censure. Throughout this chapter, I have presented a history of the early days of radio through to the development of Top 40 programming. In this analysis, I have demonstrated that though radio is a commercial enterprise in Canada, at various points it has been thought of or marketed as something public. I have pointed to the various factors involved in Top 40's development to argue that this genre of radio cannot be considered to be, as its programmers might claim, purely a response to audience demand, but that audiences' tastes were but one in a complex array of historical and technological factors that led to the development of this format. In fact, the democratic claims of early Top 40 programmers ignore the fact that Top 40 represented the beginning of the narrowcasting trend-a commercial strategy that eliminates certain elements of the public from a target audience and a strategy that, as will be discussed in the following chapter, would later pose problems for Top 40. 1 have described the original basic format and concept of Top 40 radio-a format that demanded little attention from its target audience, and that had at its centre an outrageous (male) personality-the deejay. This structure has changed little in the intervening fifty years since its inception. With this in mind, I will argue that Top 40 radio is an essentially conservative medium, one that has not evolved alongside the audience it claims to serve. Throughout radio's early development, women were absent from the airwaves.

35 Whether this is because their language was considered not authoritative or humorous enough, or because women are not considered to be musical connoisseurs, women's gender has meant that they have not historically worked as deejays, and means that they continue to be outnumbered by men on the air today. Reasons to explain women's absence are varied, but persist over time, pointing to the deep-seated nature of this exclusion. Despite this, sexual difference has historically been, and I will argue, continues to be, an important element of radio's programming. Though women might rarely be on the air, they are thought to be listening. In the following chapter, I will look at the development of gendered ideas of the audience, and the ways in which this audience has been counted, packaged and sold, to argue that radio stations program based on an unfounded and gendered understanding of their target audience. I will then move on, in the final chapter, to an examination of Top 40 radio's programming in Montreal-to demonstrate how this historical gendering of radio programming continues to be audible on the air today.

36 Chapter Two - Top 40 Radio and the Conservation of Traditional Ideas of Gender The Top 40 radio format developed in the 1950s and has remained remarkably stable since then, employing essentially the same gendered programming strategies. However, two factors in the 1980s and 1990s caused station programmers to update those strategies slightly. As the first form of narrowcasting, Top 40 represented a growing trend towards specialization in the radio industry-a trend that would eventually cause trouble for the Top 40 genre. However, after a period of increasing fragmentation, particularly along gender lines, Top 40-or Contemporary Hit Radio, as it came to be called in the 1980s-was able to make a return through refocusing their targeting strategies on the female audience. Old gendered programming strategies were re-adapted and re-jigged to target this new female audience. The continuing use of old gendered structures was then justified by the adoption of a new set of discourses that became prevalent in the media during that time, known as post-feminism. These stations also drew on previously successful talk radio programming strategies, including the marketing of the station as a public service tool. In this chapter, I will examine these changes, before moving on in the third chapter to look at today's Top 40 radio in Montreal to see how these gendered programming strategies remain audible on the air today. In chapter one, I explored the ways in which the radio industry has long excluded women; I also discussed the larger discourses that work to exclude women from the related worlds of music, language and comedy. In this chapter, I will further examine the relationship between women and the radio, instead focusing on the other side of the equation: the listener. The audience for radio has long been understood by programmers in certain gendered ways, which have affected what segments of the audience were targeted and in what ways. These decisions were based on ratings systems which were themselves gender-biased. Despite women's long-standing commercial importance to the industry, radio programmers have disparaged their tastes. In the 1980s, alongside Top 40's "discovery" of the female audience, the radio and music industries became increasingly stratified along gender lines, resulting in music becoming increasingly female-friendly. However, despite the advent of the feminist movement, there is little evidence that feminist ideas made their way into the on-air programming, or into the ways in which programmers understood the female audience. Instead, radio

37 programmers have adopted many of the tenets of post-feminism, allowing them to merely update the traditional gendering of their programming strategies. Throughout this chapter, I will argue that Top 40 radio has programmed, and continues to program in gendered and conservative ways that do not correspond to actual audience tastes, but instead to the ways in which programmers read gender into their audiences. The Gendered Commodity Audience Top 40 stations were the first of many to employ a narrowcasting strategy. This strategy was made possible in part by the development of ratings systems which allowed programmers to create playlists that they claimed were based on audience, rather than deejay, taste. The Top 40 broadcasting genre was also made possible by the concept of the audience as a commodity. In this section, I will examine that concept, as well as the history of ratings systems, the kind of gendered understanding of the audience they helped to create, and what kind of an impact this whole gendered structure has had on the development of Top 40 radio. I will argue that ratings systems from the beginning were unreliable and biased, resulting in programming that was gender-biased according to a traditional understanding of gender. The resulting programming can be explained both by the commercial structure which underpins Top 40 radio, as well as station programmers' tendency, within that structure, to read a traditional idea of gender into their audiences. Despite the inaccuracy of ratings, these simplistic portraits of the audience continue to be used as a basis for programming because of institutional and practical timesaving reasons. From this point, I will then pick up the history of Top 40 radio as it regains popularity in the 1980s, and to the current context, to look at the ways in which that gendered notion of the audience remains fundamentally the same today. In the Canadian context, radio operates for free thanks to the advertising that pays for it. But what exactly are advertisers paying for? Scholars have used the term "commodity audience" to refer to a group brought together by radio or television programming, where what is paid for is not a message that might be embedded in media programming, but instead that audience's attention. This idea of the audience as commodity was first developed by Dallas Smythe: What [advertisers] buy are the services of audiences with predictable specifications which will pay attention in predictable numbers and at particular

38 times to particular means of communication (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, and third class mail) in particular market areas. As collectives, these audiences are commodities... the audience commodities bear specifications known in the business as "the demographics." The specifications for the audience commodities include age, sex, income level, family composition, urban or rural location, ethnic character, ownership of home, automobile, credit card status, [and] social class. (Dependency 27) Thus, any message included in this transaction becomes secondary- "merely the free lunch for people already assembled at a tavern" (Smythe Dependency 37). To put it another way: "The programming is merely a delivery vehicle, for efficiency it must appeal to the largest possible number" (Vipond "Who" 170). Importantly, Smythe emphasizes that advertisers pay for the predictability of the audience demographic's listening patterns. Since, as will be discussed below, the actual audience is difficult to measure (and, in fact, radio stations have demonstrated an aversion to acquiring an accurate picture of their audience), advertisers must buy an audience's time based on their best guess as to who will be tuning in and when. Station programmers must make a case to advertisers regarding the superiority (and loyalty) of their station's particular commodity audience using these available ratings. As a programming strategy, it also makes sense for programmers to try to appeal to a larger audience, using their "delivery vehicle" to reach the largest possible number of listeners, since by increasing their overall ratings share, they can then sell more advertising time. In the next chapter, I will demonstrate how this commercial structure causes Montreal Top 40 stations to at once program for their target audience and for the lowest common denominator, as well as to develop programming that creates the appearance that they have attracted both their target audience, and a larger population of listeners. Smythe's analysis of the capitalist nature of the broadcasting industry has important ramifications for understanding the structure of commercial radio programming. If an audience is a commodity, sold to advertisers, then what kinds of audiences do radio advertisers want to buy? Eileen Meehan has studied the audience ratings industry, arguing that advertisers are interested in purchasing only one kind of audience: a consuming one. However, due to the commercial nature of the ratings

39 industry, measuring and understanding the tastes of that consuming audience has not been simple. Ratings companies, whose original mission was to count the audience, became complicit in this industry structure. As a result, according to Meehan, ratings companies today do not provide a sociological snapshot of an audience, but instead provide a series of numbers designed to highlight the segments of the listening audience that are most profitable to advertisers. By focusing on a certain group or type of person within that audience, the ratings can make that group of listeners appear to be an even more lucrative commodity. The ratings company then makes a profit by selling this ratings construct to stations, which in turn sell their station's audience to advertisers (Meehan "Commodity" 387-8).4 The commercial bias of these stations means that programmers want mainly to attract the most profitable audience segment within the station's potential listenership. As a result, these stations' programming becomes an attempt to continue to capture the interest of the commodity audience whose tastes and attention were previously measured and highlighted in the biased ratings, with little incentive for media programmers to try to attract anyone outside of this lucrative demographic. The industry becomes a closed system of interaction between the rater, programmer and advertiser, all operating based on their constructed idea of that audience. Eventually and perversely, all three groups

How and why have these ratings systems and the commodity audiences they produce become manufactured? Companies that conduct ratings surveys are businesses themselves-as such, they have developed various strategies for counting and reporting audience numbers in order to negotiate between providing an accurate picture of the audience, and giving advertisers the information they want to hear (and thus keeping themselves afloat, see Meehan "Commodity" 387). Specifically, at different points in time, these ratings companies have categorized and packaged their information in such a way as to make the number of desirable listeners/viewers appear as large as possible: Economic self-interest restricts and reformulates measurement techniques, transforming these techniques from scientific measures into business practices, into corporate tactics in the struggle for market control, profitability, and low production costs. From this perspective, ratings do not count the viewers, but only the commodity audience which is saleable to national advertisers and networks. In fact, within the closed market where raters sell their commodities - the ratings - to national advertisers and networks, only the commodity audience counts. (Meehan "Don't Count" 118) Except insofar as, as mentioned above, these programmers might want to attract (or at least appear to attract) a larger population, in order to increase their overall ratings share and therefore their advertising dollars. Since the tastes of those who do not fit into these stations' lucrative commodity audiences are not measured in the ratings, they become understood in only the loosest sense. As I will further discuss below, insofar as stations use programming to attract the larger population, this does not interfere with their primary goal of attracting the lucrative commodity audience. Any resultant catch-all programming that is designed to increase overall ratings should be understood as programming intended to attract the lowest common denominator.

40 became more interested in ratings than in the actual audience and effectiveness of advertising. This cycle focuses on only one segment of the population, for the most part ignoring groups of people with less consuming power who might be watching. Those who are ignored by this programming must either turn off the TV or radio, or else select one of a series of "forced choices," between different programs, none of which are intended to target them (Meehan "Don't Count" 127). Meehan notes that this gradual bias in the ratings industry was not only the result of its economic structure. Over time, these ratings systems also developed systematic biases based on programmers' and raters' assumptions regarding the audience's consumption powers and tastes. Examples of such biased manipulations (which come partially from the need to "predict" an audience's attention) and the ways in which different segments of the audience were considered "desirable" at various times in radio's history will be discussed below. As I will argue later, recent scholarly research has found that these exclusions continue to break down along gender lines in the programming strategies on today's commercial radio. Meehan makes a convincing argument, showing how a system that was once designed to measure the success of programming came to be warped through its own, and the industry's, business practices, and eventually came to be an indication of another form of success. Her work demonstrates that there is need for skepticism when examining a station's ratings, and the numbers they use in order to program and in order to sell their programming to advertisers (this is why Barnard cautions that "one has to bear in mind that the publication of research data is in part a public relations exercise, designed to inspire confidence in the station" (On Radio 136)). As will be discussed below, because of the commodity audience structure of the media industry, and the bias of media ratings, stations do not necessarily need to find programming that would attract their specific commodity audience and its tastes. Instead, as long as these stations maintain the same overall number of listeners in the ratings, and are able to convince advertisers that they reach that lucrative audience (often using programming that clearly seems to target a certain subsection of the audience), they can find sponsors. The imperfect ratings are relevant, then, only insofar as they reflect an overall number of listeners. Programmers are charged with creating programming that attracts a certain

41 number of listeners of any kind (which further explains their need to program for the lowest common denominator), and that seems to attract the commodity audience the station wishes to claim (allowing these stations to claim to advertisers that they reach a lucrative subsection of the audience that they may not in fact have attracted). Meehan's work shows, as I will argue further in the next chapter, that a station's claims that they provide a public service tool to the local audience do not mesh well with their need to make money. As Barnard argues, though they make claims to represent a local area, radio stations do not program in order to serve all those in the local community, but in fact create programming to attract and to seem to have attracted those in the nearby area who are part of that station's commodity audience: "The straightforward concept of treating the local radio audience as a geographically defined homogeneous community was therefore distorted in practice" (Barnard Studying 96). Thus by claiming to be the voice of the people in a certain geographic area, as these stations do, they are merely employing another marketing tool. Though many in the local audience, and many of those who fall within the bounds of a station's target audience may in fact be listening, due to the aforementioned lack of and inaccuracy of ratings, it is difficult to verify this.6 The task of analyzing how radio might serve and reflect an actual listening audience therefore falls outside the scope of this work. I am interested instead in looking at how Montreal Top 40 stations' programming might reflect these stations' attempts to create, attract and prove the existence of a commodity audience, an audience that I will argue they have assigned a particularly gendered personality and set of tastes. In the next chapter, I will discuss the ratings presented by these stations, using these as a guide to understanding their programming and how it might be designed to fit with the commodity audience the station is hoping to attract, and to sell to its advertisers (as well as how this programming might be designed to attract and seem to attract a broader population, and to create the illusion of a listener-public). I will demonstrate that the audience construct these programmers have created represents an evolution rather than a break from the way audiences were understood and programmed for in Top 40's early

6 Specifically, the overall ratings share, or number of listeners tuning in may vary depending on the stations' measurement means. However, the overall number of listeners is likely more accurate than any specific demographic data regarding a station's listeners and their tastes, since this information is shaped by ratings companies in order to emphasize the most desirable and lucrative elements within the composite audience picture.

42 days. This partially results from the fact that programming designed to target the commodity audience is created using a biased and incomplete picture of the target audience and that audience's tastes, leaving programmers to program for an at least partially imagined audience. Besides the economic structure of the broadcasting industry, which to a certain extent excludes actual listeners' opinions and tastes from the commodity loop, there are also institutional and practical reasons why radio stations would find it more feasible to operate based on a poorly defined, probably inaccurate picture of the audience. Eric Rothenbuhler, looking at commercial radio as a form of communication, argues that actual social scientific snapshots of the audience, such as psychographic profiles of an audience and other types of lifestyle research currently used in product development and marketing, are available. However, because radio's 24-hour-a-day output is enormous, making decisions based on such precise data is inefficient. This explains why format radio stations are often reluctant to update their formats, since these provide a conveniently consistent and efficient structure, limiting the programming decisions that need to constantly be made. Because programmers' job is to maintain an audience that currently listens to the station, detailed information regarding their audience's tastes, or of the potential audience in a station's market, are not worth the investment. In fact, his research shows that programmers are more interested in following each other's work, and in hearing feedback from those in the industry, than in hearing feedback from their audience (Rothenbuhler "Communication" 126). As a result, in radio programmers' eyes, the commodity audience remains:

nothing but a distribution of probabilities. The typifications are not only all they have, but given the system, typifications are all they could have. There is no more concrete reality out there but the aggregate patterns resulting from the coming and going of type - because that is exactly how people are invoked into the system. Audience adaptation is usually, then, to crude typifications of large categories of people. "Women aged 25 to 34 don't want to hear heavy metal," for instance. ("Communication" 134) Ratings systems are biased in the way they count their audiences. Radio stations, then, do not seek out any further information regarding their audience's tastes (nor regarding

43 the potential audience in their market), because it does not make commercial sense to do so. As a result, Rothenbuhler argues that commercial radio cannot be analyzed as "a form of communication" because communicating a message is not the main purpose of the programming. If communicating an idea were the station's goal, then, for example, all newscasts would not occupy the same length. Instead, the main purpose of the station is to create the appearance of a listening audience, in order to sell advertising time: "Although there might not always be something to say that needs saying, there are always people within the reach of the signal who may be converted into a commercial audience" (Rothenbuhler "Communication" 136). The industry is structured so that programmers need not take an interest in their listeners' particular tastes. Instead, they must continue to program in a way that results in the same or higher ratings results for the station, and generally work to create the appearance that they attract a lucrative commodity audience, understood in the loosest demographic terms. In other words, it is more important for programmers to sell the fact that this audience listens to their programming to advertisers, than that programmers work to better understand and serve their audience, and the local listening public.7 Importantly, then, they must work to create the sense of an audience with a coherent and easily understood personality (understood in terms of the predictable "aggregate patterns" described above), so advertisers at once know who is listening. The results of this structure are audible on Top 40 radio in Montreal today, in the ways in which these stations continue to claim to be providing a public service to their listeners, while at the same time designing programming for advertisers' benefit that demonstrates that they attract an easily understood commodity audience within that public. This lack of knowledge regarding the actual audience explains how Top 40 radio can continue to program conservatively, using the same essential programming strategies as they did in the 1950s, and understanding their audience in basically the same ways, hoping only to maintain a respectable ratings share.

7 To put this in terms of Durham Peters' sender-receiver model-radio stations have no interest in understanding who will be receiving the message. Rather than sending a message out to the mass public, this message is not intended for any particular listener, but instead it is primarily intended for an advertiser audience. After this, it is intended to reach the ears of the target audience, and thirdly, it is intended for anyone else who might be listening and could help increase ratings and the sense that the radio station does form a part of the local public sphere.

44 Advertisers want to reach those who will buy their products; therefore they want to attract those with buying power. But specifically who do they believe has that power, and should be included in the commodity audience that they target? In what way and to what extent does the media program to capture that audience's attention? Because radio stations do not operate based on accurate numbers, and an accurate picture of their audience, their programming instead reflects the ways in which they have imagined their commodity audience, as well as how they understand advertisers' idea of their audience. In this section, I will look at the resulting biases that have come to be a part of the ratings and commodity audience systems regarding who was worth including, and how these biases translated into biased programming on the radio. From the beginning, ratings disproportionately counted men. Raters wanted to count those with purchasing power, or wages, and so early on this group was thought to be male. As will be discussed below, programming was targeted accordingly. Later, in the 1960s, television networks convinced raters that it was more valuable to focus on the younger set (and, at the same time, Top 40 radio stations switched their targeting focus toward a teen audience), and raters changed their focus to tracking those groups. During the daytime raters considered women to be the main audience, and at night, men aged 18- 34 were. Only if programmers could not attract those audiences would they ask raters to provide information regarding a niche audience. At no point in those early days were other audiences, such as working women, men at home, or other groups counted in the ratings systems because from the very beginning they were not thought of as prime consumers, and so were not considered of interest to raters, and advertisers. As Eileen Meehan argues, despite second-wave feminism and changes in the economic situation of men and women, and the acknowledgement even by raters in the 1980s that there was a category of women who worked, the most highly valued and tracked audience for television programmers remained upscale men aged 18-34 (Meehan "Gendering" 213- 220), and so a fully accurate picture of the female listening audience was never developed, and likely does not exist today. As will be discussed below, the situation was slightly different in the radio world. In the 1980s, a change in Top 40 radio's rating measurement techniques led to the "discovery" of a viable female target audience (though, as I will argue, this audience may very well have been listening before this

45 "discovery"). However, these ratings, and the ways they were interpreted by programmers continued to inaccurately reflect women's and men's actual tastes, and instead were read through a lens of what both of these should be. Because no accurate picture of the audience is available'(and because programmers show a lack of interest in pursuing one), Top 40's gendered programming reflects, not an actual audience, but a combination of programmers' uninformed understandings of their audience, and stations' ideas about advertisers' perceptions of what a lucrative audience would want to listen to. The gendered preferences built into the ratings and commodity audience systems led to the creation of gendered programming, a gendered daily schedule of programming, and a gender-based set of ideas regarding the quality of that programming. Early television programming developed with primetime television intended for the audience, understood to be an audience of men, watching in the evening (Meehan "Gendering" 216). Daytime television targeted a valuable niche: women in the home, with programming based heavily around advertising and with rhythms targeted to her presumed lifestyle (as will be discussed further in chapter three). This daytime programming (which tended to feature heavy advertising since women were thought to be more tolerant/interested in the commercial realm) came to be viewed as mindlessly commercial, while evening television became thought of as the home for more high- minded and public-oriented (in other words male-targeted) television (Wang "The Case" 3.63). These programming strategies make manifest the set of gendered assumptions held by raters, advertisers and programmers in those early days, regarding a division of labour, women and men's locations and activities throughout the day, women and men's interests and the relative value of these. In radio's early days, its programmers too, created distinctions between daytime and primetime programming and their respective audiences through gendered targeting, re-creating the same value distinctions as in the television world. In the morning and afternoon, the airwaves were packed with programs such as serials, chat shows, and homemaking programs sponsored by large manufactures in order to target housewives. At night, programming was high-minded, serious, and often expensive, designed for "a critical audience of public decision makers"(Wang "The Case" 349). Jennifer Hyland Wang argues that in this way women's shows became at once commercially profitable

46 and culturally disparaged. Radio broadcasters kept these programs low-profile to prevent the commercial-heavy programming from drawing attention from social critics and FCC commissioners. This allowed them to keep their images clean, while using the advertising they drew to sponsor the expensive primetime shows. This gendered division was a successful self-preservation tactic for these radio stations, and for early television stations as well (Wang "The Case" 349). As radio and television came to find their media niches, this distinction between male and female programming also came to parallel a distinction between different media audiences: Radio became the site for commercial female programming targeted at a lower-to middle-class serial listener, and nighttime television became the place for prestige, quality programming. (Wang "The Case" 349) The radio medium thus comes to be associated with femininity, not because there are women on the air, but because of its increasingly female, commercially targeted audience. I will argue below that the idea of women having commercial (and therefore less prestigious) tastes never leaves the ways in which radio understands and programs for women, even when women eventually come to play a more important role in the commodity audience system. This gendered division of programming within media also reflected deep-seated ideas linking femininity, irrationality and passivity that continue to infuse the ways in which Top 40 programmers today view their female audiences.8 As these gendered media developments demonstrate, social ideas regarding the nature and interests of different audiences at different times of day, as well as the structure of the commodity audience system both influenced the ways in which audiences were counted and media was programmed. The resulting gender-based programming then had the further effect of ingraining value-judgments regarding different media and programming times into media programming, and also made this gendered dichotomy a part of the business models of media's private enterprises. As Meehan points out in her examination of raters' changing focus on counting different groups at different points in time:

Scholars examining the talk surrounding radio in its early days have argued that from the beginning the emerging medium was associated with femininity, and with negative ideas regarding the new mass audience. Lynn Spigel points out that in radio's early days, critics worried that the new broadcasting medium would encourage passivity, consumption and escape, and was, in a sense, emasculating (Logics 86).

47 this periodic narrowing of the audience... suggests that non-economic assumptions undergird beliefs about what sorts of people ought to be the audience and that those assumptions follow familiar patters of discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, social status, sexual orientation, and age. (Meehan "Gendering" 217) This idea of who ought to be counted and programmed for continues to be read into audiences in today's radio context, with programmers continuing to draw on these increasingly out-dated discourses regarding gender in their programming strategies (even when these discourses are not good for business). In particular, I will examine the ways in which men are understood as actjve wage-earners and tastemakers, while women, instead, are positioned as passive and tasteless housewives. I will argue, below, that though women have come to play a critical role in the media industry-as both representatives and targets of commercial discourses, their perceived tastes continue to be devalued on today's Top 40 radio. Housewives at Home: How Radio Understood and Programmed for its Female Audience Though it was not until the 1980s that Top 40 specifically adopted a female target audience, from its early days, the medium's programming came to be associated with femininity, particularly during the day. In this section, I will examine some of the strategies used by programmers in those early days to target and program for women, to later demonstrate how little those strategies have changed in the intervening years, now that they are used on Top 40 radio. These early strategies were based on stereotypical ideas of the female audience as a group of lonely, serial-listening housewives (Wang "The Case" Hilmes 359). These stations featured homemaker programs that emphasized women's role in relation to the home and family, and stressed the importance of her housework (Barnard "Mother's" 126). Dorothy Hobson points out that such programming, especially when it features call-in programs, shows members of the audience that other women are listening while working at home, creating a housewife public that normalizes each woman's isolated position irt the home (Hobson 113). This idea of representing the audience to itself will be important in the next chapter when discussing strategies for selling the "publicness" of the station to advertisers and

48 specifically female audiences. When politics were discussed on daytime radio, they were linked back to women's presumed main interest: the family (Barnard "Mother's" 126). These programmers also made assumptions regarding the sexual and emotional fantasies shared by women at home. According to musical stereotypes explored previously, female listeners were presumed to relate to music and the radio emotionally. Deejays selected music from the "gentler end of the Top 40 spectrum" (Barnard Studying Radio 96), and tried to associate it with feelings of nostalgia, linking it to women's personal histories and with special events in their lives such as a first kiss or a summer romance. Dedications, call-in requests and horoscopes all served to link the music and the radio station with the romantic lives of women listeners (Barnard "Mother's" 131). Sexual desire, attraction and love were the chief themes of music selected for daytime radio, as well as of deejay chatter (Barnard "Mother's" 134). Female listeners were also presumed to relate to deejays in sexual terms, viewing them as sexual company and as husband surrogates (Hobson 112). Because of the presumed fantasies of the female audience, only male deejays could be used.9 Female deejays would contradict the image of the housewife and alienate the audience (Barnard "Mother's" 134). "From this idea, both BBC and commercial radio DJs built up a culture where it seemed the art of presentation was to flirt with the female listener" (Mitchell and Michaels 238). The gendered division of labour that was the social norm in radio's early days manifested itself in a gendered industry structure where women work at home, passively consuming media, and men go to work, some of them in the radio industry, where their jobs include keeping female audiences company. These ideas, and the resultant gendered radio structure, have been ingrained in radio's programming practices and can still be heard on the air today.1

9 Kate Lacey, who studied radio in Germany, argues that early discourses surrounding the medium built on the previously discussed dichotomies linking women to consumption and passivity, and men to production and action. In those early days, German radio was understood as: a public, masculine medium directed into the private, feminine sphere, a process of dissemination and reception, of penetration and invasion, of expertise versus amateurism, activity versus passivity, power versus powerlessness, speech versus silence. (147) Thus, a much broader set of deep-seated notions regarding gender can be shown to feed into this idea that male hosts were required to speak to female listeners. 10 This structure is so ingrained that to explain why women are not on the air in 1980s British radio, Barnard caustically notes, "there is an unspoken fear, too, that the placing of a woman in radio prime time might create expectations among the female audience" (Barnard "Mother's" 134).

49 However, women were not only, as early radio programmers believed, passive consumers of media. They were also the consumers in the family. Therefore, this notion of the female radio listener as housewife did not merely grow out of social ideas regarding women's earlier social role, or from her role as non-wage-earner in the commodity audience structure. The lonely housewife-who passively tolerates heavy advertising, and, as some programmers and advertisers believed, irrationally follows the ads' orders-thus also became important to radio's commercial structure. As Meehan has pointed out: in the patriarchal division of domestic labour, woman's work included shopping for the household's general needs, for her own needs, and for the man's needs. The idealized version of that division of labour sent men outside the home to work for fees and women to spend those wages by shopping... if advertisers wanted to reach spenders, then they needed to target that category of people socially designated as spenders: women. Could advertisers have been blinded by sexism? ("Gendering" 218) Meehan has hit upon a contradiction-ratings did not count women because they did not earn wages, and yet, they were important to the commodity audience system because they were the ones spending the money. While she argues sexism was at work, I argue that the bias is subtler than that. While women were not being counted, and programmers did not feel it was worth their money to invest in understanding their tastes, advertisers and programmers were targeting women during the day with less prestigious, but more lucrative ad-heavy programming. There is also evidence that those in the emerging television industry increasingly began to recognize the importance of the "irrational" female spender." Alongside this growing realization of the importance of the female audience, came a certain anxiety. As Michele Hilmes describes:

11 Wang notes that when television first developed, there was much anxiety in both radio and television industries regarding whether listeners would turn to watchers, and whether both media would suffer. Most importantly, would American housewives decide to make the switch? This anxiety centred mainly on understanding the behaviours of female shoppers, since television's proponents believed that "the ability to attract American housewives and to contain their commercial power determined the life or death of a mass medium" ("The Case" 364). Examining advertising documents during this postwar period, Wang argues that there was perhaps more at stake during this time of demographic and media change than merely money: "[these works] thus [document] the anxieties of postwar advertising men during this industrial transition and the extent to which definitions of masculinity and sexual power were inextricably tied to their understanding of female consumers" (Wang "The Case" 344).

50 women became at once the most desired and feared in the structure of broadcasting: desired because their participation was central to the basic functioning of the institution, especially as it was colonized by the program production departments of major advertising agencies, yet feared because they occupied a discursive space linked to threatening concepts of the irrational, passive, emotional, and culturally suspect 'masses.' (Michele Hilmes "Desired and Feared" quoted in Wang "The Case" 352) Though women are not thought of as wage-earners, their traditional role as household shopper gave them a crucial role in the commercial strategies of these stations. However, the same discourses that prevent women from being on the air, and that are used to justify creating less prestigious programming for a female audience continue to be employed, now used to position women as a threat to the station's commercial viability. The newfound awareness of women's important commercial role does not, as might be expected, lead to an increased interest or respect on the part of programmers for women's tastes. As I will argue below, this lack of interest continues despite the feminist movement and Top 40 radio's "discovery" of the viability of a female commodity audience. Instead, an understanding of the female audience as housewives becomes ingrained in the programming structure of the industry. Station programmers' gendered bias is revealed in the ways in which they continue not to try to understand or value women's tastes, or to find strategies to target these tastes. Instead, radio programmers continue to hold many of the same gendered, often contradictory and anxious ideas regarding women's interests today as they did in radio's early days, and use these as the basis for their female-targeting strategies.

As discussed in chapter one, radio programmers cited many reasons for women's lack of involvement in the world of radio, many of them based on traditional notions of gender that were often read into the industry to explain the situation. As I have argued in this section, gendered ideas are also read into the audience by the industry, and then incorporated into the early programming strategies on these stations. These gendered ideas, along with all of their implied assumptions still resonate in radio programming for wdmen today, though in a slightly updated, post-feminist form. It is important to note that any changes in the way women are understood by programmers do not necessarily

51 correspond to changes in actual audiences, due to the bias in ratings systems, and radio stations' disinterest in obtaining more accurate information. This lack of an accurate picture of the radio audience and the imagined audience that replaces it in programmers' minds then comes to be incorporated into radio's programming strategies. Next, I will examine what happened to Top 40 radio between its initial development and today, to see how despite a new female-specific focus and the adoption of post-feminist discourses, these stations' programming strategies have changed little. Top 40 after the 1950s: Fragmentation, FM and MTV Various technological, policy and targeting strategy changes have continued to affect the prevalence of Top 40 radio since its original development in the 1950s. Specifically, these include the fragmentation of the industry, the popularization of FM radio and the arrival of music television. These factors led to changes in the way the radio and music industries worked, and particularly the ways in which those industries thought of and programmed for their audiences. As previously shown, gender was an important way for radio stations to imagine and distinguish between different audiences. During this period radio stations developed an increasingly narrower focus, using gender as a means of creating a coherent commodity audience. Despite these slight adjustments, as I will continue to argue throughout this thesis, continuity rather than change best characterizes the evolution of Top 40 radio's gendered understanding of and strategies for relating to its target audience. After its inception, it did not take long for some radio programmers to feel constrained by the repetitiveness and tight format of Top 40 radio. As the teenage population increased during the 1960s, Top 40 radio increased its dominance, and station programmers focused even more on maintaining winning and tightly regulated formats (Barnes 11). In the late 1960s, a station programmer named Bill Drake tightened the format further, by playing the "powers" (the most popular eight songs) in even heavier rotation than other songs on the Top 40 list (Barnes 12). Although this innovation was a success, it also led other programmers to rebel by experimenting with wider formats, in order to attract those who might not be satisfied by just the eight most popular songs of a given moment (Barnes 15). In the mid-to-late 1960's, as a reaction against Top 40 radio's "toxic patter and yalp," Tom Donahue and Larry Miller established "freeform" or

52 progressive radio: non-commercial radio without jingles, hosted by deejays with distinct personalities (or at least personalities that progressive radio programmers considered to be more distinct than those on Top 40, see "Keith Voices 1, 23). These stations had more creative freedom, playing longer songs and anti-establishment music targeting what they thought of as disenfranchised youth (which for programmers of the era, translated to young men). Freeform radio emerged in conjunction with changes in the music industry: rock music was coming to the forefront, albums and longer songs becoming popular, and alongside this, FM radio was growing-all of these factors then led to freeform's successful attempt to tap into a previously "undiscovered" young male market (Denisoff 244-5; Keith Voices 20). Freeform became the first of many even narrower-casting stations to develop at this time, based on the growing idea that it was possible to target a specific subsection of the audience (defined by the demographic characteristics most interesting and easily marketable to advertisers, which increasingly meant gender), and still find success (Rothenbuhler and McCourt "Radio Redefines" 384). Next came FM radio. While FM technology had been available for many years, it was thought of as radio for eggheads and nerds who built their own sets, and was typically associated with young men who tinkered with the technology in their basements. During the late 1940s, because FM was not yet popular, despite its superior sound quality, only those FM stations which were simulcast (broadcast using the same programming) on both FM and sister AM stations were financially feasible. However, in 1961 the American Federal Communications Commission disallowed that tactic. They ruled that no more than 50% of an AM station could be simultaneously broadcast over its sister FM station, causing simulcasting AM stations to scramble to put something different on the air. In Canada, a similar rule, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's policy requiring that FM stations play less than 50% non-hit music (Leblanc 2), also led to the increasing fragmentation and specialization of the FM radio market north of the border. Despite its early claims, the purported early freedom of freeform radio was soon reigned in. Thinking the potential listenership was too valuable to leave to unreliable and rebellious deejays, radio programmers' reaction to freeform radio's early success was, in the 1970s, to reformat it, firing many of the early deejays, and standardizing the form. As

53 Barnes cynically explains: "lengthy deejay raps were trimmed, although pains were still taken to sound as countercultural, hip, mellow, and un-Top 40 as possible. The result was hit radio with a different universe of hits" (16).12 However, the success of the freeform radio niche marketing strategy (and its ability to successfully target and demonstrate the viability of a young male audience) had a lasting impact. This new format, as well as the availability of the FM dial led to an explosion of highly specialized stations corresponding to various segmented audiences springing up on the FM dial (Barnes 17, Douglas 274). Each of these stations used the same hit music format radio model applied to all talk, all news, all jazz as well as non-commercial campus station formats. Each of these new subgenres created its own specialized identity around its genre of music, reinstating the format within the genre, and it worked (Barnes 13).13 Radio programmers learned from this experience that it paid to target smaller segments of the population using the basic Top 40 format (and in particular, as will be discussed below, using gender-based targeting strategies). This look at history shows that other factors, including changes in technology, policy, and audience-shaping tactics, rather than, as programmers would have us believe, changes in taste, led to the development of new kinds of radio (that were in fact strikingly similar to the old). The audience segmentation begun with the establishment of Top 40 continued with FM radio, and would eventually create trouble for the original. As a result of these new marketing and formatting strategies, FM radio continued to grow. In Canada, FM music radio listening increased steadily through the 1970s, and in the late 1980s claimed over 40% of Canadian listeners, and 60% of young Canadians'

12 The fact that new FM specialty stations chose to reinstate the traditional Top 40 format demonstrates programmers' tendency to conserve and return to the same formats, rather than trying to, or permitting radio to be innovative. 13 Importantly, this does not necessarily mean there was an actual shift towards specialization in listeners' tastes. Jody Berland argues that formats have become increasingly specialized because research methods for studying the audience have become more sophisticated: "listeners' loyalties are an effect, as much as cause, of this specialization process" ("The Case" 107). 14 Biased ratings and a lack of choice mean it is impossible to verify whether or not any specific audience was listening, and what led to their tuning in. Conversely, these stations' success can also be explained by their ability to appear to attract a coherent audience, which meant they were better able to attract advertising dollars. I will further argue below that the increasing gender stratification of radio audiences during this period was a useful tactic in order to give a station's commodity audience a personality that could be easily understood by advertisers, thus leading to more sponsorship. These stations' success is better attributed to a general ability to capitalize on the radio market of that period using certain programming techniques, which cannot be directly linked to any one segment of the population's tastes.

54 radio time (Berland "The Case" 106). For my purposes, two subgenres of FM radio are of particular interest: AOR radio, or album-oriented rock and AC, or Adult Contemporary, both radio niches which to a certain degree, competed for Top 40's listener base. At first, despite the opposition established between Top 40 and freeform radio, freeform did not significantly take away Top 40's audience share. This is because freeform's main market were young males, while Top 40 had a more general focus, targeting teens as well as those young adults (and sponsored by advertisers "who favoured adult consumers who bought into the "high-ticket consumer ethic," see Barnes 16). When freeform radio stations turned into the more reined-in AOR stations, they managed to increase their same young male audience base, thus taking away some of Top 40's younger listeners (Barnes 16-17). Another new niche that sprang up in the mid 1970s began taking away its older ones. Adult Contemporary stations were developed to primarily target adults who grew up listening to rock 'n' roll. These stations provided their target audience with an alternative to the hard rock of the AORs, with programmers playing music with the aggressive edge toned down (Barnes 18). From an advertiser's perspective, the best part of the AC music formula was that these stations targeted the prime advertiser demographic: 25-54 year olds, who were more settled and prosperous than both AOR and Top 40 listeners (Barnes 18). This type of format was so attractive that many stations converted from Top 40, the previous champion, to AC, which remained the most popular type of station in most markets in North America throughout the 1980s (Barnes 19). By the mid-1970s, and carrying on today, narrowcasting had fragmented the market into one where ACs, AORs, Top 40, and other stations competed for occasionally overlapping segments of the music radio listening population. As will be discussed later in this chapter, other formats, most notably talk radio, also had a role to play in shaping the way in which the listener pie was and is now divided amongst the stations. This brief look at changes and fragmentation in the radio industry in Top 40 radio's early days demonstrates how station formats are a product of both advertisers'' hunt for the best commodity audience, as well as programmers' often stereotypical understanding of the best way to attract or seem to attract a certain audience (based on little information, and inaccurate ratings). The examples above show how the same audiences can be reshaped and re-imagined by station programmers, to be served in

55 sometimes seemingly contradictory ways. Changes in radio programming are rarely major breaks with past successful strategies, and can be explained by changes in policies and technologies, rather than in audience demand. This is because radio programming itself is more a product of ideas regarding audiences and their interests than an actual understanding and attempt to serve that audience.15 During this period, as I will continue to argue below, there is an increasing tendency to segregate audiences, particularly along gender lines (a continuation of radio's early tendency to divide the day up into gendered segments). In the next section, I will examine how Top 40 made a comeback, drawing on these gender-segregated targeting strategies to focus on women. What was happening to Top 40 radio while FM stations and specific genres popped up and took over the airwaves? The old format lost listeners to the new bandwidth, and began to flounder. A structural conflict between the radio and record industries contributed to Top 40's problems. As the number of AC stations increased, and because AC stations, as well as the new AOR stations tended to play older music, the radio industry in general was doing less to push new music, and therefore the turnover rate for singles slowed down. This conflict was partly exacerbated by advertisers, who encouraged the increase in AC stations because they wanted radio to pursue older audiences, who were less likely to buy records, but who have buying patterns that made them attractive to a greater number of advertisers (Straw "Popular Music" 5). All of this meant that less pop music was being created, less distributed, and less bought, and therefore that Top 40 stations, which specialized in new music and repetitively broadcast hits, held less appeal for audiences. Throughout the 1970s AM stations began losing audiences to FM, and eventually became no longer financially viable, except for those that switched to a talk radio format (Keith Talking 133).16 However, a combination of new technology, changes in the music and radio industries, and radio's new gender- stratified way of imagining and targeting its audience meant that radio would get a second chance on the FM dial in the 1980s.

1 It is important to remain skeptical regarding whether or not these stations actually attracted a particular target audience. It seems more appropriate to say that their programming was able to find success through capitalizing on the radio market of that era (which to a certain extent relies on attracting an audience, but not necessarily the one they claim to have attracted, and not necessarily for the reasons they claim), rather than an ability to reach one particular group of listeners. 16 By 1980, FM audiences had exceeded AM audiences in several large American cities (Fink Industry 124).

56 The Return of Top 40, with a New Female Audience In the early 1980s, Top 40 reattained commercial viability once again, at least in American markets,17 causing Barnes to call 1983-5 "a new golden age of hit radio"(25). This format of radio was able to return due to several factors, including, the creation of a new pop music mainstream, which was, in turn, helped along by Top 40's resurgence and its mainstream chart-based playlist (Straw "Popular Music" 4), the advent of MTV, and most importantly, the "discovery" of a new female target commodity audience. With the re-emergence of Top 40 came changes in the gendering of the music and radio industries, which went along with the new gender-stratification trend in imagining radio and music audiences. In this next section, I will explore the period of Top 40's reincarnation up to the present day. I will argue that these stations continue to program along fundamentally the same lines, and according to the same gendered understandings of the audience, as when Top 40 began, despite social change in the intervening years. Changes in the music and radio industries, and the way these two interacted during the time period between Top 40's early days and its resurgence, contributed to bringing the genre back. Specifically, the increasing fragmentation of radio formats and audiences, subtle shifts in the music industry and in the public's musical tastes, and the structural conflict between the radio and music industries-all factors which originally led to a drop in Top 40 listener shares-later worked to make room for Top 40 on the radio dial. In the 1980s, Adult Contemporary radio became increasingly conservative, playing more and more oldies, leaving room for Top 40 to play newer songs that were being released. At the same time, AOR stations increasingly realized that they were unable to attract any audiences other than 18-24-year-old males, and since this audience was largely intolerant of any music outside the hard rock genre, they were forced to stick with their narrower playlists, again leaving room for poppier stations. As a result AOR stations also had a hard time attracting new advertisers, who were more interested in stations that could target lucrative older and female audiences, and so did not experience any new growth. Finally, urban contemporary music, which privileged singles over

Ratings from the period demonstrate that Top 40 radio bounced back, becoming the top rated station format in several US cities in 1984 ("Radio 1984" 49), and remaining a strong second behind AC throughout the rest of the 1980s ("Contemporary hit a hit" 45; "The top 10 stations in the top 50 markets" 35; "A tale of the top 500" 88). As will be discussed below, Top 40 returned later to the Canadian airwaves.

57 albums, grew in popularity, leading to an increase in the musical turnover rate. All of this meant that there was a space in the music and radio industries for the same kind of young, popular hit music that had originally made Top 40 a successful radio concept. The return of a pop mainstream meant that Top 40, playing a selection of urban contemporary dance hits, rock songs, and new music, was able, in tandem with MTV, to again gain wide appeal.18 This new pop mainstream also indirectly set the stage for Top 40's return by convincing radio and music industry decision-makers that it was feasible to target a new commodity audience: (young) women19 (and as will be discussed later, several new discourses present on MTV and elsewhere in the music industry demonstrate these decision-makers' attempts to shape musical practices in particularly feminine ways, though the actual presence and interest of a large young female audience is not necessarily proven). Top 40 radio returned, and along with it, the wacky Top 40 deejay. John Lander and Scott Shannon of WHTZ in New York City invented what they called the "morning zoo"-morning shows featuring wacky characters and satire that were widely imitated (Barnes 23-25). This programming development, as well as the 1980s talk radio tradition which will be discussed later in this chapter, paved the way for the talk heard today on Top 40 radio. As the above examples demonstrate, shifts in advertisers' focus, the music industry, and audience taste all combined to allow the Top 40 format to fail and then succeed, with very little change occurring in the structure of the format itself, since these stations' programming was never created with an accurate portrait of an actual audience in mind. Finally, the ways in which the radio industry, and Top 40 stations in particular, imagined and shaped their audience was the last factor allowing these stations to again regain popularity. During this period, thirty years after advertisers recognized the

18 The advent of music television also helped set the stage for Top 40's return. The new genre programmed for their target demographic of males aged 12-34 by playing a blend of rock and Top 40-style pop music. This, as well as the new AOR stations, put rock music into the mainstream. But since AOR audiences would not tolerate pop, Top 40 was able to reap the rewards, attracting many of AOR's fringe listeners through also playing a mix of pop and rock (Straw "Popular Music" 5) (Barnes 24). MTV's national scale also sped up the turnaround of new music, and contributed to the resurgence of a mainstream pop music culture (Straw "Popular Music" 8). 19 As Will Straw notes: "the emergent mainstream of 1982-4 had as its principal original demographic basis a radio audience (that of teenage girls) long regarded within radio broadcasting as insignificant...This re- enfranchisement of younger teenagers, and especially adolescent girls, as radio listeners and record buyers should be seen as a crucial factor in the emergence of certain kinds of para-musical practices around the new musical mainstream" (Straw "Popular Music" 6).

58 importance of the female shopper, Top 40 stations began targeting women. Before I discuss the details of these programmers' "discovery," I will place it within the context of an overall shift towards targeting women in the media more generally. This shift likely came about in part as a reaction to social change and the women's movement, which made women's increasing buying power more evident. As more women began working outside the home, and thus were more likely to have their own spending money (and because despite social changes, they remained the primary shoppers of the family), advertisers became increasingly interested in this demographic. As a result, in the television world, programmers' idea of the (male) audience diminished, and began to include women (Lotz 107). As I will further discuss below, during this period feminism's demonstration of female buying power contributed to women's attractiveness as a commodity for radio stations as well. However, this did not mean that feminist ideas caused a change in programmers' traditional understanding or valuing of female tastes. The increasingly female-friendly musical and radio practices of this era reflect advertisers' and stations' attempts to target this now-thought-to-be-viable commodity audience based on a continued traditional understanding of gender, rather than an attempt to understand and accurately target women's actual and current tastes. Though both radio and television stations during this period began shifting their focus towards a now-thought-to-be-lucrative female audience, this did not result in a change in their often condescending strategies for targeting women, or in increased attempts to research or understand this group. As Meehan notes, from an advertiser's perspective, though women were increasingly proving to be viable audiences, not all women were considered equally desirable. Advertisers were most interested in white, middle-class women (Lotz 107), and changes in television ratings counting systems, though adjusted slightly to begin counting women, only counted certain women at certain times (Meehan "Gendering" 217). During this period, television programming changed to accommodate those women who had been counted by the raters. For example, some television programming in primetime began to use subtexts meant to appeal to women, without alienating men (e.g. a romantic twist in an action film) and while still maintaining a daytime focus on women (Meehan "Gendering" 217). Lauren Rabinovitz argues that during this period programmers thought that liberal and feminist discourses

59 would be a good way to attract "new career women," and began incorporating them into television programming: A generic address of" feminism' became an important strategy because it served the needs of American television executives who could cultivate programming that could be identified with target audiences whom they wanted to measure and deliver to advertising agencies, (cited in Lotz 107) Media programming changed during this period to at least seem to be speaking to an increasingly lucrative female audience. However, women's actual tastes continued to not be understood, and, as I will argue below, remain denigrated. In addition, my research shows that in radio, feminist ideas did not necessarily make their way on the air, but rather, that in today's radio context, programmers and hosts operate based on post- feminist ideas regarding women and women's tastes. The feminist movement's demonstration of the viability of a female commodity audience, as well as programmers' adoption of new female-focussed ratings tactics, explain why during this era Top 40 programmers "discovered" and began to program for a female target audience. While the feminist movement may have led TV programmers to start paying attention to the female audience in general (and, as will be discussed below, also likely led to the feminization of musical practices during this time), it was a specific female audience that led radio programmers to make this shift in their thinking and targetting. Straw notes that in the early 1980s, certain pop radio stations in competitive American markets noticed that young women were responding quickly to musical innovation. Because they were increasingly buying singles, they contributed to this growing pop mainstream, and thus were becoming an important buying force in the record industry. As a result, Top 40 stations decided it was "feasible to target audiences encompassing disproportionate numbers of teens and females, rather than compete for a small segment of the traditionally more attractive audience of young male adults" (a group now being served by MTV, see Straw "Popular Music" 5). This "discovery" in select markets of the young female audience was accompanied by a shift in Top 40 station research, and a resultant change in the way these stations understood their audience. During the 1970s and late 1980s, rather than the traditional focus on music sales, a mode of studying audience tastes that excludes those who do not buy music, these

60 stations turned to phone research (Barnes 21). This mode of research involved playing part of a song over the phone and asking for an opinion, a survey style that results in findings that favour the familiar over the new, and lead to a general conservatism of taste on radio (Barnes 22). Through this research, Top 40 stations realized that there are two kinds of listeners: active listeners (e.g. those who follow music, follow artists' careers, call in to request songs, are considered to "care about music," etc.), and passive listeners (e.g. those who listen, but do not engage in other ways with the station's programming, do not buy records or go to see music live, and who view music as background entertainment). Realizing, through this new technique, that the majority of the potential listening audience were "passive listeners," Top 40 stations decided to focus their programming only on this subsection of, it turns out, mostly female listeners (Barnes 21).20 As per my previous discussion of the link between gender and musical practices, this distinction between passive and active listeners clearly breaks down along gender lines (and demonstrates these stations' tendency to conserve the same gendered paradigms for understanding their audiences over time). Through this research, and the success of certain markets targeting young women, these stations came to the decision that it was financially viable to target "passive," female fans, and to ignore "active" male ones. Importantly, it is quite possible that the female Top 40 audience already existed; however, due to the bias of ratings systems, and the long-held belief that women were not as valuable a commodity audience (particularly in the music world), this audience and its marketability had not yet been "discovered" (it is also unlikely that this shift in research methods allowed stations to significantly increase their understanding of their (now female) audience's tastes). A series of factors, including the feminist movement, changes in research methods, and shifts in industry targeting patterns convinced advertisers and stations to target female audiences. However, despite feminism and the shift towards a female audience, programmers continued to understand the female audience according to

Trade magazines confirm that during this era, Top 40 shifted its focus towards women. Radio consultant Bob Elliot explains that with CHR "You have to be cognizant that the real target appeal is women, ages 18- 24." Another Top 40 programmer described young females as the station's "bread and butter" group (and explained that they targeted this group through a "softer" sound) (quoted in "Special report: The sound of radio" 35). As will be discussed below, though these stations began by targeting teen female audiences, they soon broadened to targeting women of older ages as well (Silberman 63).

61 the same traditionally gendered ideas, ignoring feminist arguments, and instead, as I will argue later, adopting a set of discourses known as post-feminism. Throughout this section I have contended that industry fragmentation, policy, technological and social change as well a shift in audience targeting rather than simply a change in audience demand, led to the resurgence of Top 40 radio. These stations' decision to target female listeners was both a response to and a reflection of a general gender-stratification of media audiences and specifically a feminization of musical practices more generally, the proven success of a female-targeting model in select markets, the feminist movement's ability to highlight women's growing buying power, and finally, changes in the stations' own internal researching mechanisms. The successful return of Top 40 at that moment in history demonstrates that these stations were able to shape their audiences, in the context of the 1980s radio market, in order to find success with this particular product. It does not demonstrate a change in audience taste, or these stations' ability to understand a female audience's tastes. It is entirely possible that a feasible female target audience existed before but was not "discovered" by these stations because of biases in these previous research strategies, not to mention a demonstrated lack of interest in discovering it. Top 40's return, alongside feminism, does not signal a feminist turn in Top 40 programming or programmers' understanding of their female audiences, but merely the social movement's ability to influence the radio industry's commercial strategies. A traditional gendered understanding of women's tastes continues, to this day, to form the basis for Top 40's programming strategies. In fact, many of the same strategies employed to program for housewives have been neatly transposed to the Top 40 all-day format. However, feminism's impact on today's Top 40 radio can be seen in its adoption of a series of discourses known as post-feminism, allowing them to return to a traditional understanding of femininity, without ignoring feminism, the update being that the female audience member is now a flirty housewife; she is still interested in shopping, but with an ironic twist. In the next section, I will explore the gender-stratification of the music and radio industries in the 1980s, as well as provide an explanation of post-feminism and my usage of the term, before turning in the last chapter to a demonstration of how such discourses are present on female-targeting Montreal Top 40 radio.

62 The Feminization of Music and Music Radio As a result of these various radio and music industry shifts, and Top 40 radio's re- imagining of their audience as a female one, the genre experienced a rebirth. The feminist movement's demonstration of the viability of a female commodity audience likely led to this shift in Top 40 radio's strategy, as well as to a general feminization of the music and radio industries. Both industries were able to successfully capitalize on this new market, each helping the other to promote music as an increasingly feminine interest (though drawing on traditional discourses in order to market it as such, rather than by disassociating music from its traditional link with masculinity). During this same period, talk became more closely associated with masculinity. Top 40's shift was part of a general gender-stratification of music and radio that happened in that era, as demonstrated by the concurrent growth of another form of radio in the same era: talk radio. The feminization that occurred during that period included two elements. First, during this era the discourses surrounding musical appreciation shifted to allow more women to become music fans. During the 1980s, new music was being released at a faster rate. This meant that fewer people had an in-depth knowledge of musicians or music at any given point in time. A particular song was not necessarily interpreted in the context of a performer's body of work, and a fan needed less musical knowledge in order to engage in the discourse surrounding songs. Compare this to the 1970s, when few record labels were releasing singles, so radio stations played older songs by a small set of artists in order to fill up their time blocks, and music fans had a lot of musical history to learn before being considered competent and knowledgeable. To replace this kind of in- depth fan discourse, during this period, there was an increase in celebrity culture surrounding the music industry, with a focus on Hollywood film, fashion and gossip (Straw "Popular Music" 11). It is through the lens of celebrity culture, traditionally part of the female domain, that music and musicians came to be understood. In addition, music itself in the 1980s was becoming increasingly standardized,21 which again led to less analysis according to taste than had the previously popular and more experimental

21 New mainstream releases in that era tended to be 3-5 minute pop songs with a certain stylistic coherence. Just like in Top 40's early days, there was once again a recognizable pop sound (Straw "Popular Music" 6).

63 album-rock of the 1970s (Straw "Popular Music" 7). As described in the previous chapter, music fandom and knowledge has been traditionally associated with masculinity, and has served as a means of proving one's masculine identity. These changes in the requirements for music fandom made it easier for women to be considered fans, and thus likely encouraged their participation and interest in the worlds of music and radio. MTV also contributed to the feminization of the music and radio industries. First, because the network played videos of music singles without providing background information about the artists, MTV contributed to the unlinking of performer persona and song, thus fostering the trend of celebrity fandom. Second, the fledgling medium led to more female musicians creating a niche within the music industry, and resulted in an increase in "female hits" -music by "all-female groups" or "female artists" (terms which themselves demonstrate the music industry's limiting perspective on female musicians and artists). This could be because the visual medium early on developed a form of strong female-address and representation (Lewis 129). Music videos' focus on lipsync and on the lead singer also helped, giving female members of groups, who were traditionally lead vocalists, a higher profile (Lewis 131). The fact that music videos were available on cable television, located firmly in the realm of the private home life, made the experience of watching/listening to them domestic and more available to women, and worked in contrast to the traditionally male-oriented arena-rock listening experience (Lewis 134). Music fandom was thus made more accessible to women through MTV,

Another shift in radio audiences, the fact that the core record-buying audience-the babyboomers-were moving out of record-buying age also made musical knowledge less necessary in order to be considered a fan. This new, younger listenership lacked the years of musical knowledge that informed the older generation's (Straw "Popular Music" 7). Popularized by female artists of the time, such as Cyndi Lauper and Pat Benatar, a style of video emerged which challenged traditional male visual narratives and created new forms of visuality that addressed female lived experiences. MTV was created to target a 12-34-year-old audience, with the idea of the teenager in mind. As Barbara Hudson points out, the traditional concept of the rebellious teen is based on assumptions of masculine experience, activity and desire (cited in Lewis 135). At first, the new medium of the music video followed the masculine musical tradition in its visual imagery, focusing on signs of the street, as a form of retreat from parents and the home, on masculine aggression and sexual desire, and positioning women as objects of male desire (Lewis 135). But Lauper, Madonna and other early female musicians re-appropriated these cultural texts to offer representations that resonated with female experiences of adolescence (Lewis 136). They did this by visually taking over male space, demanding parity with male privilege, challenging gender distinctions, as well as by referencing and celebrating female modes of cultural expression and experience (Lewis 137). For example, in these videos, women often take control of city streets, spaces traditionally portrayed as a space of danger for young women. They also engage in various other traditionally male delinquent activities (and not just sexual delinquency, a female specialty), such as vandalism (Lewis 138).

64 and female-targeting Top 40 radio. This, in combination with the increased visibility of female musicians led to women's greater involvement in music culture24 (in 1982, an all- girl group got a number one hit for the first time, as did other well-known artists such as Cyndi Lauper and Madonna-musicians that fit into the pop music genre that was the bread and butter of the reborn Top 40 station, see Lewis 130). Top 40 stations, with their new female focus, likely helped to create this general feminization of musical practices, as well as profiting from it. In all of these ways, the music industry and music television increased young women's access to music fandom and music generally, and worked in conjunction with the newly female-targeting Top 40 radio stations to increase the association of femininity with music and the radio. After feminism demonstrated the viability of a female audience, the music and music radio industries likely made a conscious effort to make music more female-friendly in order to capitalize on this new market-for example by creating merchandise such as posters and t-shirts to encourage celebrity gossip and pin-up culture, based on their limited understanding of the female audience and their tastes. In the radio world, it might have achieved results-Top 40 was able to successfully make a comeback, and did so in part through attracting female listeners. However, Top 40 stations' shift toward female-targeting in this time period should not be interpreted as a response to the listening public's changing tastes, but rather an attempt to in some sense capture and capitalize on broad cultural and demographic trends and then to perpetuate those trends in order to maintain that success. How much could these stations have truly understood about their audience and its interests when they were, and continue to be uninterested in funding detailed and accurate research on their listenership? These increasingly feminized musical and radio practices represent a response to feminism's demonstration of a viable commodity audience, rather than an attempt to serve an actual audience and its changing tastes. The ways in which these stations target female audiences illustrate that feminism had little impact on the way programmers imagine their female audience. As will be demonstrated further below, the ways in which these stations tried to capitalize on their new female market reveals a continuing understanding

There is evidence that as a result, female musicians of this era were more willing to go on concert tours, knowing they would draw audiences that were increasingly made up of women (Lewis 134).

65 of female interests according to traditional gendered paradigms. Even as Top 40's targeting strategies shifted towards women, in order to capitalize on a new demographic reality, which was at least partially shaped by the radio and music industries, their methods for targeting women continued to reflect an imagined rather than actual portrait of this audience's tastes. In the next section, I will examine Top 40 radio's brother genre to look at how, during this period, radio, and its programming strategies became increasingly gender-stratified according to traditional gendered ideas-a trend that harkens back to radio's early days and then-programmers' obsession with sexual difference. This also shows that feminism likely did not cause radio programming to update its traditional portrayals of women and men. I will also examine talk radio's successful programming strategies, to show how they have been adapted for the female audience on today's Top 40. The Masculinization of Talk Radio The other major form of radio that took over the airwaves in the 1980s was talk radio. While Top 40 came back due to its new focus on female listeners, talk radio stations became successful through programming for men. The residue of these talk radio stations, with their public-oriented programming strategies, can be heard in a modified form on today's Top 40. The new talk radio format was the fate of those free form radio stations of the 1970s that did not morph into AOR stations. According to Susan Douglas, radio producers wanted to capitalize on those listeners who might be used to the controversy and irreverence of freeform, who lacked patience with the poor quality of music offered on other stations, as well as with mainstream news media generally and who felt that there was a lack of any discernible American public sphere (Douglas 283). The all-talk and all-news format shaped these feelings of dissatisfaction with the current state of the media, creating talk shows that marketed themselves as providers of "real news," for civic-minded people, and by emphasizing the radio station's role in public broadcasting. Hosts of these shows discussed and helped to interpret daily events for the audience, relaying the news from a particularly right-wing perspective (Douglas 285). The advent of wireless phone technology, which allowed listeners to call in from their cars while tuning in on the way to work, greatly increased talk radio's populism and popularity

66 (Douglas 287). Such radio, in contrast to music radio, at least appeared to address listeners as citizens rather than as consumers. Together, these speaking and programming strategies came to represent an idea of "publicness," that was associated with talk radio stations. It is this understanding of radio "publicness," defined as the idea that a station could bring its civic-minded citizens together to share their perspectives, while at the same time providing them with relevant information, that I will use in the rest of this work, in relation to the discourses that are used to sell Top 40 radio today. Just like Top 40, talk radio was created in order to sell audiences to advertisers. However, talk radio was out to capture a different demographic, that of men of a certain age and income bracket. Talk radio's programmers did this by programming according to traditionally male interests, and particularly suburban male interests. They created the appearance of an on-air discussion place that appeared to be both a form of public sphere, and a place where it was okay for participants to espouse a right-wing gendered agenda. They also mimicked public debate, creating controversy by hiring hosts that were at once rebellious and deeply conservative (though one can also argue that these stations feature controlled controversy rather than actual discussion and debate of matters of public importance). Their programs were "unpredictable, incendiary and participatory" (Douglas 288), with hosts often trying to rile audiences in order to get ratings, while at the same time flattering their listeners into thinking they were smarter than other people who were being manipulated by mainstream news (Douglas 316). Based on traditional ideas regarding men's interests, programmers felt the best way to attract male listeners was by creating a form of "public" on the radio. Within that public, talk radio stations also explicitly favoured a male perspective. They marketed the station as a place where men could say what they think, even if it was not politically correct, with hosts "insisting there was a place - an important place - for disobedience, hedonism, disrespect, bad taste and emotionalism" (Douglas 292). Talk radio hosts espoused a deeply conservative and anti-feminist perspective, using these shows to challenge feminism, middle-class "politically correct" masculinity, and what they saw as the "sensitive new-age guy" in order to restore men's "traditional" rights to

25 It is easy to see how talk radio might have constructed itself as Top 40's opposite, pitting itself against the sister station's female-focus and what talk radio listeners might call its "poor quality music playlist" and its consumer rather than citizenship orientation.

67 where they were before the women's movement (Douglas 289). Language was a particularly important component of talk radio's programming strategy: the cadre of hosts that included such personalities as Howard Stern became known as "radio's bad boys" for their locker room language, using this kind of talk to perform a sort of adolescent masculinity, as well as to argue for their regressive political positions. Stern played the role of class troublemaker-immature and obsessed with sex, his jokes made fun of women, government decision-making and black people. In an echo of early radio comedy, his draw was that listeners never knew if he would go too far and say something taboo-he was, as Douglas says, "a linguistic stripper" (Douglas 302-3). This portrayal of verbal humour and agility as masculine, and the construction of the radio as public sphere were both elements of programming that date back to the medium's early days. In the 1980s, these components of radio were re-vamped and remarketed on talk radio in order to attract a right-wing male demographic, as well as to appear to advertisers as if they were attracting that audience. Today's Top 40 radio draws on these successful strategies, though adapted for the female audience, in their programming. These talk radio strategies, which harken back to radio's early days, worked well with emerging post- feminist discourses that argued for a return to traditional gender difference, and espoused the use of ironic and anti-politically correct language. In the next section, I will examine what happened after Top 40's rebirth and re-feminization in the 1980s, to explore how these talk radio and post-feminist discourses might allow today's radio stations to program in ways that are fundamentally the same as in Top 40's and radio's early days. Top 40 Since the 1980s - Post-Feminist Radio What happened next for Top 40 radio? After its boom in the early-to-mid-1980s, CHR in the United States went into another decline, the broad-based hits format again losing ground to increasing fragmentation (Barnes 25). Programmers reacted by focusing on an older audience. Some CHR stations found success by switching to Adult Contemporary formats, or to adult-oriented country and classic rock formats. Other CHRs started to integrate these "older" audience-targeting genres of music into their playlists (Bunzel 48). Here's how one trade magazine explained changes in the radio market: The CHR demo is growing up," said [consultant Ed Shane, Shane Media

68 Services], "People who have been programming CHR are finding that their niche is shrinking." In simplest terms former CHR listeners still want to hear CHR, but not the new version of it. Thus the growth of "mix" and "hot adult contemporary" formats - CHR without the teenage edge. (Lobo 75) North of the border, Top 40 stations experienced a boom a little later, at the end of the 1990s. By that time, because of the previously-mentioned restrictive CRTC regulations,26 and the decline of AM, Canadian Top 40 had all but disappeared. Besides a few exceptional stations in Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal, Top 40-style music could only be found on Much Music television. However, in 1997, the CRTC redefined their non-hit rules to encourage Top 40-style music on the FM band. As a result, there occurred "a rebirth of the top 40 format in Canadian radio" (Leblanc and Ross 1), with these Canadian Top 40 stations also adopting a broader and older targeting focus. Particularly popular in Canada was the mixed CHR/AC station (often called "Hot AC"): Brad Phillips, [general manager] of CHUM and CHUM-FM, argues that Canadian top 40 is grayer than its American counterpart. "I don't think there's any top 40 in Canada as focused on 12-34 [demographics] as CKZZ or Power 92 were four to five years ago," he says. "Those were more traditional CHR radio stations. Now everybody's doing a kind of grown-up CHR." (LeBlanc and Ross 2) After making a comeback in the 1980s when women were shown to represent a viable commodity audience, then floundering a little because of industry fragmentation, Canadian Top 40 found a relatively stable position on the dial, targeting (mostly older) women. Hot AC stations, with their target female audiences, continue to be popular

These regulations required that FM stations play 51% "non-hit" music (defined as any song that had not yet reached No. 40 or higher on a recognized trade chart), rotate their hits no more than 18 times a week, and air a significant amount of non-music programming. Though the idea was to protect AM stations, by the mid-90's it was clear this strategy had not worked (LeBlanc and Ross 2). 27 Larry LeBlanc and Sean Ross specifically cite the station I will analyze, Mix 96, as one of the stations that contributed to a growth in Top 40-style music in the late 1990s (1). Historically, Mix followed the same general trends of the North American commercial radio industry, moving from a pop/rock station in the 1970s, to a soft AC station, and then to its current format in the mid-1980s (http://www.standardradio.com/node/368332. accessed Nov 24, 2006). Despite the fact that Mix continues to advertise as a Hot AC, its format is perhaps closer to a CHR, which can explain why it has been listed as such (for example in the 1999 issue of the trade journal Broadcaster magazine (Broadcaster 1999). Q 92, (or CFQR-FM) also made changes in the 1980s and 1990s, switching gradually from a Beautiful Music format to an easy listening one (Fishbane and Vipond "Family Politics"). Both these stations then changed from more general and masculine targeting strategies to female-oriented CHR/AC and AC programming in the 1980s when the female audience was shown to be a feasible demographic. today in the United States and Canada (Silberman 27; Taylor "Flavour" 57). The two stations whose programming will be analyzed in the next chapter feature the Hot AC and a similar, but more traditionally adult-targeting strategy, called "Lite."28 Because there are few pure CHR stations in Canada (and none in Montreal), and therefore Top 40-style music can be found mainly on Hot AC and Lite stations, in this work, I will use "Top 40 radio" as an umbrella term to refer to those stations that evolved out of the traditional Top 40 format and can be considered to be today's equivalent. Despite Top 40's shift towards a female target audience, and a general feminization of musical practices, likely caused in part by the commercial repercussions of the feminist movement, there is no evidence that the ideas behind the social movement caused any significant accompanying change in the way Top 40 programmers understand and program for their new female audience. From the beginning of Top 40 radio, through its "discovery" of the female audience in the 1980s, to today's context, programmers have maintained essentially the same traditionally gendered ways of imagining and serving their audiences, though with a few slight revisions. This conservatism was made possible by the fact that these stations were always programmed based on an idea rather than an actual understanding of the audience. When Top 40 began targeting a female audience, these stations could simply transfer the old ways of imagining and programming for a female housewife, developed to target a daytime audience of women, to Top 40's all-day format (in particular, as I will demonstrate, in the next chapter, maintaining the same rhythms). This was easy to do, since these stations' pop music play lists were a natural fit with radio's traditional understanding of women's indistinct musical tastes. This conservatism was also made possible by the adoption of two small updates. First, as will be discussed further in chapter three, Top 40 stations adopted talk radio's successful use of discourses of "publicness." By employing this strategy, programmers could claim that their traditionally gendered take on audience tastes and ideas was merely a reflection of what the audience wanted to hear. Second, Top 40 stations adopted a set of discourses regarding women that were emerging in the

A trade magazine describes the "Lite" radio format as follows: [The 'Lite' format] bases its sound on 'familiar' pop contemporary artists such as Neil Diamond and Johnny Mathis. It is primarily geared for a 35-to-49-year-old female audience. ("Everything Old" 56)

70 media more generally at that time: post-feminism. As will be discussed below, post- feminism involves an ironic update of traditional ideas regarding femininity, and is a way to at once acknowledge and dismiss many of feminism's arguments. By adopting these two sets of discourses, Top 40, which never did program for an actual audience and its tastes, could continue to program using the same essential gendered understanding of and strategies for targeting their audience, without appearing out-of-touch (which could then impact these stations' ratings and advertising revenue). During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, feminist theorists detected a change in the ways in which feminism and women were represented in the media. The term "post-feminism" first appeared in a 1982 New York Times article (Holmlund 116). In 1987, Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Stacey were the first to define the term academically, as "an emerging culture and ideology that simultaneously incorporates, revises, and depoliticizes many of the fundamental issues advanced by second-wave feminism" (quoted in Orr 34). Since that useful first definition, the term post-feminism has been employed to mean many different things, becoming embroiled in a complex, many-layered discourse within academia, and also taking on its own meanings within media industries and pop culture. Sarah Projansky has identified five interrelated categories within post-feminist discourses-including the historical, the celebratory and the feminist backlash (67). In this section, I will articulate the ways in which I will be using the term for the purposes of this work. To return to that original definition, the pre-fix "post" implies that this movement comes after feminism. What happens next is the emergence of a contradictory set of discourses that at once celebrates the goals of feminism while at the same time undercutting their value and implying that they are no longer relevant. The overriding argument is that feminism is no longer needed because the feminist war has been won. As a result, it becomes okay to relax the rules, and for men and women to do what they want. According to these post-feminist representations, those who have been through the feminist movement: now want a break from the rigors of being 'politically correct.' .. .the articulation of new traditionalism and post-feminism is attractive and tenacious: in part [post- feminism's] appeal lies in the way it holds out the idea of a bit of comfort after a

71 long hard fight. Like the famous advertising slogan for Virginia slims cigarettes, 'you've come a long way baby,' it is a complicitous discourse. It says, we know you are a feminist but, hey, chill out and have a smoke. (Probyn 286) Post-feminist discourses say that we can now relax, and go back to thinking about and speaking about gender in traditional ways. More than that, these discourses are often used to justify and defend traditional ways of thinking and talking about gender against political interference. Some scholars have argued that these discourses lead to a general stifling of all gender discussion, the term becoming a codeword meaning '"Let's not talk any more about women'" (Showalter quoted in Probyn 286). The reward for those who have fought the feminist war is comfort-when women no longer feel the pressure to "have it all," men and women can return to comfortable gender roles and to knowing where one stands. In fact, post-feminism portrays women as choosing to go further than that-scholars have noted that these media representations repeatedly depict competent, adult women as having the abilities and maturity level of young girls, calling this "girling" of femininity a strategy for limiting female power (Probyn 109). This return to traditional gender roles explains why according to post-feminism it is okay for women to play the part of shopper or cook, where the feminist movement had discouraged the adoption of those traditionally female roles (Tasker and Negra 107).29 The easy marketability and ability to quickly communicate this idea of a now apparently "inherent' femininity explains why Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra call post-feminism a commodified version of femininity (Tasker and Negra 108). A discourse that started out as a Utopian idea regarding equal gender relations has come to be used as a means of reinforcing limiting gendered discourses, by focusing on the easy and traditional differences between men and women. By adopting this post-feminist discourse, Top 40

As Tasker and Negra note: "crudely, freedom is construed [in postfeminist discourses] as the freedom to shop (and to cook), albeit... with the option of an ironic mode" (Tasker and Negra 107). Alongside comfort, post-feminism is a discourse of fun and playfulness, caused by the fact that one no longer has to worry about using politically correct language, or avoiding gendered stereotypes. As will be discussed later, post-feminism's irony, in combination with talk radio's linguistic sarcasm, contributes to Top 40's hosts' ability to continue to employ traditional (and often humourously intended) ways of speaking about and representing gender, without worry of offending. As I will argue later, this explains why such discourses might be employed by radio stations: they represent an easy way to depict and give personality to their target female audience, in order to better sell this audience to advertisers. stations can continue to imagine, represent and program for a female audience according to traditional gendered ideas of femininity, without appearing to ignore feminism. An important component of post-feminism is the element of choice. According to this perspective, feminists won women the right to choose. However, media representations repeatedly use this discourse of choice to show women opting for traditional gendered identities and roles. As Tasker and Negra note: one of the most persistent themes in post-feminist representation is that of 'retreatism' or 'downsizing.' In the retreatist scenario, a well-educated white female professional displays her 'empowerment' and caring nature by withdrawing from the workforce (and symbolically from the public sphere) to devote herself to husband and family. (Tasker and Negra 108) This discourse thus becomes another means to justify our no longer thinking critically about women's position in society. Post-feminism's discourse of choice's power lies in its ability to make it appear as though women have chosen to adopt a traditionally feminine identity, disguising the fact that in many cases, other options were not available, and so this discourse of choice is in fact an illusion. As Elsbeth Probyn, who studies these discourses within popular cultural representations describes it: within the discourse of choice we are confronted with images that wink at us, saying, you think you're choosing this (nod, no - nudge, nudge - wink, wink), but actually we know the choice is already made - [to quote an ad from a Good Housekeeping women's magazine] 'what's fundamental hasn't changed.' (285) In this way, this discourse masks any existing social or economic inequalities that might exist in women's lives, putting the responsibility on individual women, rather than on larger social trends (Projansky 68). Because it is up to women to choose, these discourses position women as complicit in their own subjugation. Probyn uses the term "choiceoisie" to refer to this post-feminist discourse of choice, which masks the fact that in many cases there is none to be made (Probyn 286). One of the choices women increasingly opt for in the post-feminist era is a greater sexualization and commodification of their bodies. According to Rosalind Gill, in the 1990s, this new form of sexualization should be viewed as a response to a contradiction contained in emerging popular cultural portrayals of femininity at that time: namely, that

73 women's bodies were being increasingly and overtly objectified, while the victories of the feminist movement and "girl power" were being touted. Women therefore concluded that they were making a personal choice to sexualize their own bodies: I want to suggest that what we are seeing is not just a harking back to a bygone, or mythical age when 'men were men and women were women,' .. .what is novel and striking about contemporary sexualized representations of women in popular culture is that they do not (as in the past) depict women as passive objects but as knowing, active, and desiring sexual subjects. We are witnessing, I want to argue, a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification in constructions of femininity in the media and popular culture. ("Sexual" 102-3) This sexual "choice" is again biased towards a certain kind of women, excluding those who do not fit with contemporary beauty norms, revealing that it too is an illusion (Gill "Sexual" 104). Post-feminist's discourse of choicoisie, present in pop culture in the 1980s and 1990s, meant that women and their bodies were at least positioned as internally, as well as externally, policed (Gill "Sexual" 104). While there may be a positive side to post-feminism, in this work, I will use the term as short-hand for a set of discourses that on the whole, represent women in limiting ways. Post-feminism's power lies in its ability to acknowledge and then dismiss the tenets of feminism by claiming they are no longer relevant. As a result, women and men are "free to relax" into traditional gender roles and to talk matter-of-factly about gender difference, without critically examining their assumptions. More than this, according to post-feminism, if women do follow traditional life paths, this is represented as their choice, obscuring the fact that in many cases other choices were not available, and that women today do not necessarily have all options open to them. Post-feminism provides justification for understanding gender according to the same traditional paradigms as existed prior to the feminist movement, only slightly updated with the appearance of having incorporated the results of that movement. Such representations make it difficult for real women, juggling the difficulties and inequalities of life in contemporary Canadian society: these discourses reinforce limiting traditional gender stereotypes, while at the same time preventing people from being able to critically examine them.

74 Post-feminism works particularly well on the radio, allowing the traditionally conservative medium to maintain its gendered perspective and programming strategies. Programmers can continue to view their female audiences as interested in shopping, the family, and ruled by emotion. They can continue to understand their audiences' lifestyles in traditional ways, programming using strategies developed to attract housewives. Post- feminism also works well in combination with some of the discourses that were proven to be commercially useful in talk radio, including the idea of radio's "publicness," and the use of ironic talk. By employing both discourses of choice and "publicness," Top 40 can claim it programs in this way because this is what women want, and are choosing to hear. By employing an anti-PC stance, and drawing on the masculine tradition of linguistic irony, these stations also prevent any potential criticism of their representation of women. These programming strategies allow deejays to say sexual and potentially sexist things, creating light and racy controversy without getting into trouble. The masculinity of the talk tradition poses particular problems for female deejays on these stations, who are now faced with the "choice" to perform this masculine role, through self-mocking and self- sexualizing chatter. In this thesis, I use post-feminism's discourses as a framework for understanding today's Top 40 stations' gendered programming. The limitations of post- feminism are one reason why it is important to critically examine the understudied area of women and radio. Though Top 40 radio has changed its focus slightly since its inception, picking up a new female audience in the 1980s, and along with it, a set of post-feminist, ironic, and "public" discourses, Top 40 programmers' traditionally gendered idea of the audience, and of how best to program for that audience has not changed significantly since radio and Top 40 's early days. Scholarly research and trade magazines show that in the 1980s and afterwards Top 40 radio programmers continued to program in essentially gendered ways, though with a post-feminist update. In the next section, I will examine British research regarding programmers' construction of the female audience as a group of sexualized housewives, trade magazines' descriptions of what they see as inferior female musical tastes compared to the more refined preferences of male listeners, as well as American research which demonstrates that programmers' gendered ideas of the audience continue to lead to traditionally gendered talk on the radio, and to gendered programming strategies that

75 exclude certain parts of the (potential) listening audience. Through this exploration of the literature surrounding gendered programming on today's Top 40,1 will lay the groundwork for chapter three's analysis of the gendered programming on Top 40 radio in Montreal, an analysis which will show that these stations' programming and understanding of their relationship with the audience remain essentially conservative. Several scholars have noted that in Britain, in the 1980s, programmers continued to understand the female audience as composed of housewives, though their idea of the "housewife" was more sexual than in days of old. In what Barnard calls a "superficially more contemporary version of the old stereotype," programmers felt that women in the audience were "riot only inherently domestic but romantically inclined to the point of obsessiveness" (Barnard "Mother's" 131). Deejay chatter in British radio of the 1980s continued to enforce women's status as homemaker, drawing on song lyrics and stories to idealize this version of feminine domesticity, and reinforcing a sexual division of labour (Hobson 112-3). At the same time, male deejays became increasingly flirty (Hobson 112).31 There is evidence to show that, just as in North America, these programming strategies were based on programmers' ideas of their audiences, rather than an actual understanding of that audience. A study conducted in the 1980s showed that only 5% of British women were in fact homemakers in the traditional sense, and that daytime audiences were comprised of relatively equal numbers of men and women (Barnard "Mother's" 129). Despite this fact (which programmers no doubt could have had access to), programmers continued to create shows that they thought would entertain women while they did their-nonexistent, it turns out-housework (Barnard"Mother's" 127). As Barnard argues: "It is clear that, for radio stations, maintaining such a limited perception of the daytime audience is a matter not just of tradition or convenience but of deliberate

jl However, as Barnard describes, these male-hosts continued to employ the same condescending means of addressing the female audience: the daytime presenter is in the front line of the maintenance of radio's domestic ideology and the sexism at work in the patter of 1970s and 80s disc jockey's ... has passed into legend. Many of the presenters who found their way into commercial radio at this time [were trained].... in the art of speaking to a captive, mainly female audience -jollying them along, reassuring them of the value of their work, making great play of being a male in an all-female world. (Barnard Studying Radio 228)

76 policy" (Barnard On Radio 144).32 Though this research was done in Britain, and focused on a daytime music audience, it is likely that these same attitudes infused the way Top 40 programmers in North America thought about their new female audiences during this period of development and rebirth, particularly since these ideas grew out of radio's traditionally gendered understanding of its audience, rather than out of an accurate perception of that audience's tastes. The emergent post-feminist discourses are reflected in programmers' updated, flirtier and more sexual understanding of the traditional housewife audience. My analysis of Montreal Top 40 today demonstrates that station programmers continue to imagine their female audiences as domestic, particularly in the ways in which they structure the rhythm of the programming, though this programming also includes a significant amount of sexual talk in order to titillate and attract listeners. Trade magazines from the 1980s and onwards demonstrate that programmers continue to understand women's tastes in essentially the same, disparaging ways. The only change is that now that women are proven to be a viable commodity audience, this audience's under-developed and passive tastes are recast as convenient for Top 40's programming purposes. Programmers quoted in these magazines claimed that women are more homogeneous in their tastes than men, so it is easier to program for them (Ross 1).

To further support this claim that the perception of the audience as housewives is a matter of policy, Barnard quotes a submission from the British station Capital Radio's 1973 request for permission to start an 1LR (Independent Local Radio) station in London: In constructing programmes to appeal to women (and to a large extent women as housewives) two things have been borne in mind. The first is that there is a very wide area of overlap between programmes that might be called 'general interest' and subjects that are also of deep interest to some men, but not of automatic interest to all men... lively programming in these areas ought to mean that not only would the housewife not turn off the programme - assuming she could rid her hands of flour quickly enough - but that a man punching the buttons of his car radio might find his attention caught... the second thing is that there are certain fundamentals that women enjoy. Women are sentimental, or they care deeply about emotions... they are escapists, or they are not sufficiently cold-blooded to enjoy drama which, if taken seriously, would represent alarm and despondency. (Barnard On Radio 143) The same gendered and condescending understanding of women and their lifestyles continues in the policies of British radio of the 1980s. As will be discussed below, these ideas (including a reluctance to give up the male audience) are also present in the North American context. j3 In the rest of this thesis, I will refer mainly to examples from radio and music industry trade magazines. As sites for the collection and circulation of industry discourse, trade magazines are a good resource to understand the logic behind radio programming. They demonstrate the inexact nature of programmers' understanding of their audiences, and the gendering that results from their need to imagine those audiences' tastes.

77 In opposition, men are a "pickier" audience, and, as Paul Cannon, program director at American station WKSE, adds: men are more fickle... they're not as loyal as female listeners. Also, women will tolerate more things than men will. Women are more apt to put up with a rock song on Top 40 than men are to listen to a dance track on an album rock station, (quoted in Ross 1 )34 Women were called "PI listeners" because they had a tendency to "camp out" at one place on the dial (Carter 83), another convenient behaviour for radio programmers. Rather than take an interest in this new and profitable audience's musical tastes, male programmers tended to emphasize their roles as gatekeepers, maintaining the perception that women have unsophisticated tastes. For example, Roger Gaither, a program director at the American station WKQB was quoted as saying: Bon Jovi and Def Leppard do test well with upper-demographic females because they're a little more polished. You'd have to be a pretty perceptive 30-year-old female to be into Guns N Roses, but they've been exposed to Bon Jovi for 2 years. A year from now Guns N Roses might be in that category if they mature, (quoted in Ross 1) Though the shift, in the 1980s, to a female focus makes life easier for programmers (since women are thought to have simpler and more loyal tastes), it is not accompanied by an increased interest in or valuing of women's actual tastes. The above trade magazine quotes show that women continue to be understood according to typical ideas of femininity, not unlike the aggregate types mentioned by Rothenbuhler. Despite the fact that women had been, and were increasingly important to the commercial structure of Top 40 radio stations, programmers continued to hold a condescending view of their audience's tastes. In contrast, these programmers continue to view the male audience as more prestigious. This dynamic is evident from programmers' trade magazines explanations

34 Programmers' claims that men are a pickier audience are interesting in light of the fact that historically, Top 40's renewed success was partially made possible because of AOR stations' inability to program any music outside of the rock genre, because of their choosy male demographic. Considering the lack of research within the industry, and the fact, discussed below, that many programmers ceased to study men at all in the 1980s, it is likely that the pickiness of the male audience is at least to a certain extent a construct created by programmers. Even when it is not to their commercial advantage, programmers hold onto their gendered ideas of their audience, demonstrating the lasting power of these discourses within the industry.

78 for why, after beginning to target women, they decided to stop researching men's tastes. As Cat Thoma, the program director at KLUC in Las Vegas was quoted as saying: Although we are tightly focused on women, we do get a good chunk of males just by the music we play. As long as we please the women, we seem to get the guys anyhow. There's no need for us to spend the extra money researching men. Let's face it, women rule the world anyhow. When I get in the car with my wife, I stop having a choice of which radio station we listen to. (quoted in Carter 84) Though this quote could suggest that male listeners, too, have unsophisticated musical tastes (and that they might enjoy the same music as women), the male program director manages to reinforce a traditional gender divide, recasting the situation as one in which women tend to be controlling and men bear the brunt of it, while women's tastes continue to be ignored. Throughout trade magazines of the era, program directors tended to defend a "typical" male perspective even though they were programming to attract women. As radio consultant Alan Burns argues: The main way top 40 gets men is by getting their girlfriends, would-be girlfriends, and wives. But the format can also get men when the rock stations are weak.. .or when you've got a great morning show, including 'guys' the men can identify with and women that fascinate them as either a sex object or as a representative of all the women in their lives whom they don't quite understand. [Top 40 can attract men by being] aggressive and hip promotionally. Guys want to be where things are happening, (quoted in Carter 85) Despite the female focus of these stations, these programmers seemed reluctant to give up the "hip" male audience, arguing, for example, that stations should play music to target women but "attitudinally" target men through an "irony-laden, self-deprecating on-air style" (Carter 85). This is a style that, though thought to appeal to male listeners, as I will argue below, has been adapted on these stations so as to also speak to women's presumed experiences. These examples from trade magazines give a sense of programmers' continuing' generalized understanding of female and male tastes according to traditional ideas of gender. This is likely attributable to their lack of interest in understanding the actual audience; these stations' decision not to study half the population again confirms this lack of interest. Despite a newfound focus on female

79 audiences, no change in the gendered structure of attracting and programming for this audience occurred. Looking at trade magazines from the past ten years, programmers' attitudes still have not changed. Programmers' description of the new Hot AC format demonstrates their continuing gendered understanding of musical taste, where women's tastes are not as valued as men's. In an article subtitled "What a Mom Wants", assistant PD/music director of KIOI (Star 103) San Francisco James Baker explained that Hot AC stations are programmed to be upbeat enough for young people, but do not play hip hop or broadcast foul language so as not to alienate soccer moms-their strategy assumed that this kind of music would attract young women and their mothers, who could then bond over these shared stations and their inoffensive musical style (Taylor 5). This "Mom"- targeting strategy-a continuation of the idea of female-audience-as-housewife-is not an innocent way of imagining the female audience. When describing a niche format targeting baby-boomers aged 45-55, Mike Betelli, programmer at Broadcast Programming was quoted as saying, "This format is specially created for Mom. It's the absolute opposite of hip" (Borzillo 116).35 Programmers' idea that women have unadventurous and easily offended musical tastes is advantageous for them: by targeting women, they simultaneously program not to offend a general audience, and therefore gain the largest possible listenership, including males. Trade magazines from the 1980s and beyond demonstrate that programmers continue to program based on a (stereotypical) idea of femininity and feminine interests, rather than an actual understanding of their audience. These ideas are however updated to reflect emergent post-feminist discourses. For example, the housewife audience is now viewed as flirty, and male programmers talk openly about women as sex objects. Programmers' unashamedly gendered claims demonstrate the prevalence of an anti-PC culture within the industry. As will be

j5 This devaluing of female tastes is in line with a more general gendered idea of female audiences, as demonstrated by a radio broadcasting textbook from the 1990s. As its author, David MacFarland explains, the radio industry had conducted a study to help understand radio audiences. This study revealed that: "men and women differ in their fantasies, with men more interested in risk-taking, and women more interested in caring and social acceptance" (MacFarland Contemporary 52), which supposedly explains why women, and specifically moms, would not enjoy music that takes risks. 36 However, as shown above, even when programmers' traditionally gendered understanding of the target audience is an impediment to stations' commercial success, they continue to maintain and reinforce this construct, demonstrating its tenacity. demonstrated below, these gendered ideas, and their post-feminist updates, are evident in the gendered programming on today's Top 40 radio. Two recent scholarly works have examined the gendering of American commercial radio stations, proving that programmers' traditionally gendered ideas of the audience lead to gendered programming on the radio. Elizabeth Wollman studied a commercial music station in New York City, called Q 104.3 FM. This station's programmers had decided that it was most profitable to target 18-35-year-old men because, according to their figures, this group had the highest disposable income on average and lowest brand loyalty. They programmed for their chosen commodity audience in three ways: by playing only music by male-fronted, hard rock bands; by hiring deejays that spoke in ways that they thought would attract young men; and by featuring ads that targeted males as consumers (Wollman 3). An analysis of deejay behaviour reveals the kind of talk that they felt would appeal to this demographic: though the team of deejays was half male and half female, their banter actively constructed all deejays as male or as in line with male fantasies. Female deejays were told to "think male," to either act "like the guys," or to act ditzy, to say little and to say nothing feminist (Wollman 11-14). As a result, these female deejays tended to make fun of other women, and to generally perform for the male listeners (Wollman 13). After Wollman had studied this station for some time, it was bought out by a new company, which shifted the format to one that targeted both women and men. The station's musical programming also changed, with an increased proportion of dance music and soft rock, because programmers assumed that this is what would attract a larger female audience. Female deejays who worked for the station felt freer to speak; however, their roles continued to be limited compared to those of the male hosts (Wollman 16). Lauren Goodlad also studied a male-targeting American commercial music station, comparing this alternative music station with a female-targeting station in the same Seattle market. The station that targeted young men featured young male deejays

As I will discuss, in relation to Montreal Top 40, obviously-gendered advertising works to not only pay for the station's programming, but also to attract that gendered target audience by showing potential listeners that this station is intended for them (a strategy which then becomes self-propelling, through increasing ratings, and therefore increasing advertising dollars).

81 who self-consciously performed a hard, juvenile and anti-PC form of masculine personality (Goodlad 141). Whereas: by contrast Kiss 106 [the female-targeting station] - garnering the lion's share of supermarket, diet-pill, and shopping-mall advertising - features a more pop- oriented play list, a pink web site, and a larger number of female and soft-edged alternative artists. (Goodlad 141)38 These stations used the same elements (music, advertising and talk) to target and reflect (for advertisers and potential listeners) their gendered target audience. This gendering of discourses on the radio presented a particular problem for aspiring female deejays. Goodlad found that on both types of station, the deejays hired to attract the gendered target audience were male. However, on Kiss 106, the deejays' personalities become softer and flirtier in order to attract women (Goodlad 142). The one exception to this rule is Kiss 106 deejay Kim Monroe-the only female deejay on either station, she "projects a tough, arguably 'post-feminist' persona that is both distinct from, and harmonious with, the antics of some of her male colleagues." Goodlad explains that, for example, Munroe will be the only host to criticize female nudity in a music video, but will also go along with the ridiculing of the Lillith Fair music tour's decision to hire only female back-up musicians (Goodlad 142). As I will argue in the next chapter, the situation is no different for female deejays on today's radio in Montreal, who must occupy this contradictory post-feminist role, embodying and performing femininity while acting the masculine role of deejay, proving they have a place on air by mocking their sex and without acknowledging that they have been placed in this difficult position. Both these studies demonstrate that programmers' gendered understanding of their audience leads to particular gendered strategies of programming. These works lay the groundwork for my analysis of Montreal Top 40, where I will examine the gendered programming on these stations to show how their portrayal of gender and gendered programming reflects an attempt to target a female audience, understood in traditional ways. I will argue that as a result, women's presence on the air and in the audience remains limited.

Goodlad adds that Kiss 106 plays a selection of subdued music from several genres, assuming that women want to hear soft music, irrespective of style (141).

82 Both of these recent scholarly works also highlight the fact that gendered programming is not just a strategy intended to attract a certain gendered audience, but is also a means of reflecting that audience to advertisers. In both works, the authors note that these stations intentionally ignore parts of their audience, because they want their programming to clearly demonstrate to advertisers that their station attracts a lucrative target audience in a way that is easy for advertisers to immediately grasp. Goodlad's Seattle station had reason to believe that many of their listeners were younger than the station's advertised 18-35 male demographic. However, the station continued to program for and claim to target older listeners because this demographic was more attractive to advertisers (Goodlad 140). Wollman notes that the NYC male-targeting station's programmers were aware that they had a significant number of female listeners (these women knew that the station targeted a male audience, and despite their irritations with the station, they tuned in because there were few stations in the area playing hard rock (5)). The station's programmers were also aware that their male listeners did not like all aspects of their obviously male-targeting strategy. For example, male audience members had complained that they would like to hear female-fronted bands and that they were irritated with the female deejays' ditzy banter. However, they continued with this obviously gendered programming (Wollman 16),39 likely because it is advantageous to radio stations to present a coherent audience construct to advertisers, in order to quickly convey a simple idea of the kind of person they attract. This explains why gender is so central to radio programming-it is an easy means of creating content that is recognizably targeted at a coherently defined audience, which radio stations can then claim to have attracted through their gendered programming. As Goodlad explains: "The fact is that for corporate broadcasters, demographic coherence is often more important than the actual number of listeners, making a sexually divided music culture an enhancement to profits" (141).

'9 Above, station programmers still valued the ability to attract a male audience though their primary goal was to attract women (and they did not seem concerned that this would make it more difficult to attract advertisers). However, when the situation is reversed, these programmers do not seem interested in attracting a female audience, or in broadening the audience generally, likely because this audience is not considered as prestigious. This could represent the continuation of the bias against the female commodity audience as described by Meehan earlier in this chapter.

83 Programmers' wilful ignorance of certain segments of the audience demonstrates that their claims to satisfy a public's tastes do not mesh well with their need to fund their programming, and provides another glimpse of the potentially significant disconnect between the commodity audience, and the actual listening population. This disconnect is often particularly problematic for female listeners, who have traditionally been the least valued segment of the population (a finding confirmed by the programmers quoted above). As a result, women become used to being ignored by commercial media, and have been trained to settle for programming that, even when designed to target them, might be viewed by some as condescending to women (Wollman 16). Both these scholarly works provide an overall picture of the way gender plays into modern radio programming, demonstrating that the ideas portrayed in the trade magazines regarding men's and women's tastes, interests and value as a commodity audience, are reflected in the stations' gendered programming strategies. Both works demonstrate that traditional ways of understanding and programming for a gendered audience continue to operate, though in slightly updated ways. Women are on the air, but still must perform in certain ways in order to be accepted in this masculine deejay role; they continue to be devalued as an audience. Though, in the next chapter, I do not offer the programmers' perspective on their programming, I argue that these scholarly works demonstrate that gender can be read off of a station's content, as a reflection of the'programmers' understanding of the audience they want to attract, and as a reflection of the audience they want to claim that they attract. In the next chapter, I will examine the gendered programming on Montreal Top 40 to see how it might reflect programmers' ideas regarding the gendered audience, and how gendering might be part of the stations' larger commercial strategy.

84 Chapter Three - Women and Top 40 Radio in Montreal Today's Top 40 commercial radio has evolved out of radio's almost century-long history into something that in many ways closely resembles its earliest incarnation. As I have argued in the previous chapters, this is because it is programmed according to many of the same gendered ideas as in radio's early days. Despite its recently discovered female focus, these stations have not updated their understanding of women's tastes. Instead, they have adopted two sets of discourses, which have allowed them to continue programming according to an increasingly outdated understanding of the gendered audience and of gender in general. Post-feminist discourses have allowed these stations to continue to understand and speak about gender in traditional ways, without ignoring feminism. The stations' hosts have adopted post-feminism's (and talk radio's) anti-PC and ironic language as a speaking strategy, to maintain anachronistic ideas while avoiding censure. Top 40 has also borrowed talk radio's marketing of itself as radio that responds to public tastes, in order to further evade criticism. In this chapter, through an analysis of Top 40 radio in Montreal, I will show how these traditional ideas regarding gender, of the gendered audience and how best to target that audience, manifest themselves in the programming. Format radio can be examined from various angles. In this work, I will look at its overall rhythmic structure, and its overall talk structure, before delving into the content of the programming, to look specifically at the music and talk. In particular, I will argue that these stations are structured to fit into the imagined lifestyles of an imaginary audience of housewives. Within this format, there is a gendered hosting structure where men continue to occupy positions of authority, and flirt with their female audience. Despite music being the stations' primary broadcast element, hosts work to put it in the background, according to a traditional understanding of women's interests. Just like in Top 40's early days, hosts also claim (although this is unproven and unlikely) that they play the music the public wants to hear. This is part of a larger discourse of "publicness" that allows them to mask their commercial motives. The rest of the station's talk focuses on gender difference, creating language-based comedy and shock value through establishing the same gendered stereotypes. Through ironic language, hosts can get away with saying potentially offensive things, without alienating their female audiences.

85 Because of the masculine nature of the host's role, female hosts occupy a contradictory position: in order to prove they belong on the air, they must both embody femininity and mock women who do not conform to its norms. Through a discourse of "publicness," these hosts can also claim that women have chosen to listen to the station's often limiting portrayals of gender, as if these portrayals are their preference. These strategies allow these stations to continue to program for and understand their audiences according to a traditional understanding of gender. Top 40 Radio in Montreal In this chapter, I will be analyzing today's equivalent of Top 40 radio in Montreal. Since there are no pure CHR stations in Montreal, I will study the two Montreal stations which come close: Mix 96 (CJFM), a combination CHR/Hot AC station40 and Q 92 (CFQR), a soft AC, or "Lite" station.41 According to statistics that were available on their website during the writing of this thesis, Mix 96's audience was composed of 56% women, evenly spread across their target age range (of 18-44-year-olds). Many were university educated and bilingual; a sizeable portion were professionals earning middle- class salaries. According to their website, Q 92 had an older, more predominantly female audience: 81% of Q 92's listeners were women, 80% were aged 25-54. More than half of Q 92's listeners were university-educated, lived in a house with a family, and almost half had an income of $75,000 or over. Mix 96 received 231,300 listeners weekly, where Q 92 received 145,000 unique listeners per month.42 BBM ratings from the era, not

40 More specifically, Mix 96 is described on their website as: "high energy, hit-oriented radio serving Montreal's 18-44-year-old Anglo audience. It plays Today's Best Music from today's hottest artists, a mix of the biggest songs from the HOT A/C and CHR charts." (http://www.standardradio.com/node/368332. accessed Aug 3, 2007) 41 Based in both Cornwall and Montreal, CHR station Hits 94.7 broadcasts to the western half of the island, along the St. Lawrence seaway to upstate New York. Since, for instance, my downtown apartment could not pick up the signal for Hits 94.7, it cannot be considered a true Top 40 alternative for urban Montrealers, and so will not be studied in this work. 42 Additional information about both stations includes: -Mix 96: the audience age breakdown is approximately the following - 20% of the audience fit into each of the small age group demographics 18-24, 24-34, 34-45, 45+, with 27% of the audience in the 25-34 age range. -65% had some university level education. -82% spoke both English and French. -Over 40% of their audience earned over $60,000 a year. -30% were professionals. (BBM SI 2006 quoted on http://www.standardradio.com/node/368332. accessed Nov. 24, 2006) Q 92: -33% of their audience were aged 18-34. -over half of listeners had completed university.

86 available on either of these stations' websites, demonstrate that Mix 96 had a 15.5% share of the Anglo Montreal market, while Q 92 had a 19.0% share (http://www.bbm.ca/en/BBM Canada_S4_2006_Top-line_Radio_Report_final.pdf, accessed April 8, 2008). The degree of validity of these stations' ratings and what these stations hope these numbers tell advertisers about their commodity audiences will be discussed below. Specifically, I analyze the morning shows on these stations. The most advertised element of these stations' programming, the morning show is always live and "off the cuff," and is thus both the most important show on the station (Barnard Studying Radio 189) and is the most interesting in terms of analysis. Mix's morning show is hosted by Cat, Lisa and "The Sheriff (whose real name is Murray Sheriffs) and runs from 5:30 to 10:00 AM every weekday morning. Q 92 FM's morning show is hosted by Aaron and Tasso and runs from 5:30 to 9:30 AM. In this section I analyze a week's worth of programming on both morning shows, from January 30th to February 3rd, 2006. This represented a typical week in the life of both stations, and provided me with a significant portion of programming in order to examine each station's weekly rhythms. I use Mix 96 as my primary source of analysis for this thesis, as it is the closest thing to Top 40 radio today in Montreal. I also use examples from the Top 40-like Q 92, which has a high share of female listeners, when useful. At 56% female listenership, according to its ratings, Mix 96's female share is not high enough to indicate that it succeeds as a female-only targeting station. However, there are several reasons why it is fair to analyze the station's programming as predominantly female-targeting. First, Mix is a Top 40 station with an Adult Contemporary bent. Since the 1980s, both Top 40 and Adult Contemporary format stations have targeted women; therefore, despite these numbers, I argue that because this station operates within a long-standing female-targeting genre it can be analyzed as such. Second, the station advertises itself as female-targeting. Mix's parent company was Standard Radio, which, on its website, divided up its multiple holdings according to gender and age, in order to lead advertisers to the media source that reached each

-almost 60% lived in a house with a family. (BBM F04 Montreal central April 2005 quoted on Q92fm.com, accessed Nov 24, 2006).

87 advertiser's target audience. On this website, Mix 96 was listed as a female-targeting media outlet (http://www.standardradio.com/node/368332. accessed Nov 24, 2006). Mix 96 also had a promotional MySpace page, where it was listed anthropomorphically as female, aged 39 (http://profile.myspace.com/index.fm? fuseaction=user .viewprofile&friendID=94668663, accessed April 7, 2008), a reflection of the station's understanding of its "typical" audience member.44 Finally, the female-orientation of the advertising featured on Mix also makes it appropriate to analyze the station as predominantly female-targeting. While there were a few male-targeting ads, including one for a Superbowl party at a local bar, the majority of Mix's ads that had an obvious gendered slant were targeted at female listeners. These included, for example, commercials for liquid facial soap and for laser hair removal. Other advertisements bear out the rest of Mix's ratings picture, targeting suburban listeners living in families with children and a certain income, in other words, branding the female audience in terms of an easily recognizable "housewife" construct. There are public service announcements from the provincial government asking drivers to slow down, ads for family restaurants such as East Side Mario's, for car insurance, for drug insurance, for realtors, and for ski hills. Q 92's ads are similar: they include spots for the same ski hills and tax software companies, as well as several female-specific ads, for example, for "Great Brits"-a movie event on the women's television network. A station's ratings and advertising provide a portrait both of the audience stations actually

Interestingly, on both stations' ratings charts, gender is the sociological characteristic listed first, supporting Goodlad's claim that gender-based targeting has increasingly become the primary means of distinguishing an audience for advertisers. This station has since been bought out by a new parent company, Astral Media, and the website has been changed. 44 Also important to consider is the likelihood of bias in Mix's numbers. The traditional bias of the industry, and the fact that Mix's particular ratings were shaped by station programmers, intended, and made available online for potential advertisers, means these numbers are better viewed as a form of advertising for the: station. As examples of the ways in which these numbers might have been shaped, note that despite the fact that both stations' ratings come from the same standard source-BBM-they have been organized in different ways to make their target audiences appear most lucrative to each station's potential advertisers. Also, each station chose a different BBM release on which to base their ratings, presumably selecting the one that presented their numbers in the best light (but was recent enough to convince potential advertisers of its validity). As previously discussed, women have long been thought of by radio programmers as a less prestigious audience, which has led programmers to continue to attract men within the context of a primarily female-targeting programming strategy (but not the other way around). This was shown to be the case even when including men in the target audience made the demographic harder to easily sell to advertisers. It is possible that this bias against the female audience has led to Mix choosing to advertise a slightly lower percentage of female listeners than perhaps is accurate.

88 attract, and the audience the station wants to appear to attract, a portrait that is then fleshed out, more or less subtly, in the station's overall gendered programming strategies. Advertisers decide whether or not to advertise on a station based on this assembled idea of that station's commodity audience, and whether or not the station appears to reach the same audience advertisers want to reach. When these advertisers do place their ads on the air, this furthers the station's image that it attracts that audience. Based on the image of the commodity audience projected by the station and its advertisements, I argue that though Mix 96's ratings show they attract only 56% female listeners, the station programs for a predominantly female target audience, a female audience that differs little from the audience targeted by Q 92. It falls beyond the scope of this thesis to look at the relationship between station programming and the actual Montreal audience and its interests.45 However, since Top 40 has traditionally programmed based on an imagined rather than actual understanding of its audience, and despite social and media change has continued to imagine and program for this fantastical audience in the same ways, it is unlikely that Montreal Top 40 stations' traditionally gendered programming is created based on an accurate and up-to-date understanding of the station's listeners, or that it reflects the actual interests of their listeners, or that it even attracts the same listeners the station's programming suggests it reaches. Throughout this chapter, I will show how programming for an actual audience does not fit with these stations' commercial imperative. There are two approaches to studying today's Top 40 radio: in terms of its form, and in terms of its spoken and musical content. In this section, I will first analyze the form of Top 40 radio in Montreal, focusing on its programming structure and rhythm to argue that these demonstrate a type of subtle targeting of the female commodity audience,

It also falls outside the scope of this work to conduct interviews with station programmers or advertisers. As a result, I do not have an insider's understanding of exactly who programmers want to reach, how they understand this audience, and how they hope to sell this audience to advertisers. Though interviews with programmers would provide important insight into this project, they were too ambitious for this thesis. However, as the previously cited scholarly works demonstrated, a gendered understanding of the audience and set of gendered programming strategies designed to target this audience both tend to be conserved over time. In addition, these gendered programming strategies tend to reflect a gendered understanding of the audience. Therefore, it is possible to read programmers' gendered understanding of their audience by reading it off the gendered programming on these stations. In the absence of actual knowledge of programmers' idea of audience, my project is to see how these stations' programming reflects, within the history of the genre, a traditional idea of gender and of the gendered audience.

89 understood as an audience of housewives. In the next section, I will focus on the content of the station, particularly the host talk and musical playlist, to argue that both demonstrate programmers' attempts to attract and seem to attract a predominantly female audience, understood according to a traditional, yet slightly updated understanding of gender, and that their programming generally reflects a traditional, yet slightly updated understanding of gender. All of these programming elements represent programmers' commercial strategies for reaching and seeming to reflect the tastes of a particular (imagined) audience, rather than an attempt to cater to the actual interests of the listening public. Montreal Top 40's Form Montreal Top 40 stations' mornings shows are composed of a repeating set of elements including songs, ads, jingles, chat, theme songs, contests and timed events such as traffic, weather and entertainment reports. These elements are linked together to form a coherent whole, meant to be listened to distractedly, and designed to fit into, or at least seem to fit into the presumed lifestyles of the target audience. This distracting programming structure is a commercial strategy that grew out of Top 40 radio's history, and the media's understanding of the gendered audience, and likely continues because it is thought to fit with a woman's routine, as it is understood by radio programmers. Breaks in this flowing structure provide a venue where hosts can build an intimate rapport with like-minded audience members. They also form part of an overall commercial strategy to keep listeners tuned in just enough to maximize the station's ratings. In this section, I will analyze the overall rhythmic structure of the show before examining in more detail the gendering of the hosting structure, music and talk on these stations in the rest of this chapter. Little theoretical work has been done on format radio's particular form and rhythm. In this section, I will draw on research regarding television's form, to argue that radio's programming structure is designed to be listened to distractedly so that it may both fit into the presumed lifestyles of the radio station's target audience and drive up the station's ratings. Scholars have characterized television's form as one of "flow." Raymond Williams argues that it is not appropriate to analyze a single element of television programming (such as a show) independent from the other elements.

90 Television is better understood as a sequence of segments, transformed by other sequences of segments (such as advertising, previews, etc.), forming a continuous flow with seamless transitions (Williams 87), "a continuous never-ending sequence in which it is impossible to separate individual texts" (Feuer 15). As a result of this form, Williams argues, we watch television programming distractedly, never tuning in to one particular element of the flow, or one particular show, instead watching "television" generally (Williams 90). Television's particular form is thus structured to be watched without full attention. Williams argues that television's distracting flow grew out of the increasingly distracting living configurations in which it developed. Specifically, these include the suburban reorganization of American cities as well as the development of freeways and malls (26). Television is also watched distractedly because of its traditional location in the home. As Jane Feuer argues: The experience of flow, I believe, relates as well to the television viewing situation. The set is in the home, as part of the furniture of one's daily life; it is always available; one may intercept the flow at any point. Indeed the 'central fact' of television may be that it is designed to be watched intermittently, casually, and without full concentration. (15) According to Margaret Morse, TV's role, in these distracting places, is to make boredom pleasurable (194), an idea that will be discussed further in relation to the programming rhythms designed for women's lifestyles. Television's distracting flow and mode of reception thus grew out of the distracting living spaces in which it developed. Radio, too, developed within this context. The "total station sound" that emerged in the 1950s was explicitly designed to be listened to in the car, or while on the go and doing something else. Unlike television, radio can be listened to in the car and, in fact, as Rothenbuhler and McCourt argued, Top 40 radio's development in particular was more dependent on the growth of car culture than was television's. As previously argued, after the redevelopment of urban spaces led to the tradition of the car commute, radio stations created the concept of "drive time" programming to occupy commuters (MacFarland Top 40 7-8). This strategy was successful in shifting radio audiences' listening patterns towards the space of the car, and allowed the medium to find its niche after the advent of TV. In fact, radio's link to the car goes even further back. Jeremy Packer argues that in

91 radio's early days, car radio sales greatly contributed to the growth of the medium-by 1933, 85% of American cars had a set (Packer 89). Interestingly, in the 1930s there was concern that car radios would be distracting for drivers (Packer 89). In light of today's debates over the safety of talking on cell phones while driving, this concern seems quaint. In a sense, the two technologies are related: both have been considered dangerous distractions, removing the listener from the space in which they are, perhaps causing accidents. And yet, both are essential to today's Top 40 radio programming. The morning commute is when these stations garner the most listeners, and essential to that morning show programming are cell phone calls from listeners, often from their cars. Listeners' reports on the weather, or responses to contests are an important element of programming because, as will be discussed below, they contribute to a sense of the station's publicness. Both these technologies work together to distract, and thus to sell format radio as a medium appropriate to the housewife audience's lifestyle. The correlation of the rise of radio and that of the shopping mall is not accidental either, associated as both developments are with women, and more generally with the repetitive and with the pleasures of boredom that were traditionally thought to be part of a woman's routine. It was through defining the medium as a secondary one, that Top 40 made a successful return to the airwaves. I argue that Top 40 continues to be programmed to be listened to even more distractedly than television. Whereas television's programming flow still foregrounds the content of the programming, with shorter, usually half-hour programming changing daily, radio's segments are much longer (lasting up to six hours), made up of very small segments (such as weather and traffic reports) repeating often because programmers assume listeners tune in intermittently and distractedly (Barnard On Radio 136). Top 40's information, and the popular music it plays, are only relevant in the moment (the temperature on the hour, a song that's popular this week). As a result, radio's content becomes less important than its role as divider of time, and structurer of routine. Programmers can then take advantage of this structure, by designing a particular

This could by why David MacFarland, author of a radio programming textbook, advocates a "Wednesday Afternoon Format," a format designed to make every day's programming seem the same, demonstrating that these stations intentionally program for background listening (Future 131).

92 distracting rhythm that subtly fits into the presumed routines of their target audience's daily life. As Jody Berland explains: Format radio depends on distraction for its existence. Its primary goal is to accompany us through breakfast, travel and work without stimulating either too much attention or any thought of turning it off. In this respect it is mutually interdependent on the daily life for which it provides the soundtrack... ("The Case" 104) The presence of music throughout the programming, extending from the songs played, to the musical beds that fit under the advertising, helps give radio's flow a particular rhythmic quality. Because of the rhythmic and routine nature of radio programming, rather than flow, it is perhaps more appropriate to view format radio's programming structure as "routinized rhythmic segmentation." While listeners may not be focused on radio programming, this does not mean that programmers are unaware of how to manipulate its structure in order to target them, altering its rhythms to fit with their presumed routines and lifestyles (as will be demonstrated below in relation to age). Though a distracting structure grew out of Top 40's early days, programmers continue to employ this "routinized rhythmic segmentation" structure because it subtly fits with their idea of their target female audience, understood in traditional ways, and as will be discussed below, these stations' hosts explicitly make clear how they see the station fitting into the lives of their audiences. The two Montreal stations I studied illustrate the variety of rhythms that are possible within the distracting format structure, demonstrating that programmers know how to adjust their programming to fit with the presumed lifestyles of a station's target audience. The experience of listening to Mix 96 is one of listening to breathless hyperactivity-weather flows into news flows into chat, and then it's on to the next song. Repetitive segments such as weather and traffic are played with music underneath, providing a driving beat, and making any transitions seamless, so that the programming becomes a coherent whole. Adding to this are constant promotions of what's coming up next, increasing this feeling of speed. Contrast this with Q 92's slower rhythm, and the space given on that station to longer chat sections. These different rhythms (both of

93 which move quickly, though one faster than the other) are programmers' subtle attempts to target and seem to reach different age groups. 7 That these stations manipulate their rhythms within the overall fast-paced structure of the programming shows that they are aware that through using different rhythms they can subtly integrate themselves into different target audiences' routines. Montreal Top 40's fast-paced rhythms demonstrate that, just like in Top 40's early days, these stations are designed to be listened to in the background, subtly fitting into and structuring the presumed lifestyles of their target audiences. While radio's distracting flow may have been a result of its development alongside TV, there is evidence to show that it is now thought of as a rhythm that is appropriate for a specifically female audience, understood as an audience of housewives. Tania Modleski's analysis of television soap operas of the 1970s and their programmers' strategies for targeting and ways of understanding the housewife audience shows how this connection was made. Modleski argues that women's work, which tended to be composed of repetitive tasks performed in no specific sequence and without progress, was understood by TV programmers as a kind of flow. Programmers of that era drew on this understanding of the housewife's routines to integrate their programming into that presumed lifestyle, matching TV and household flows. They also drew on women's presumed interests, specifically, her emotional focus and the part of her work that involved being attuned and connected to others' lives (Modleski 67-9). Through its multiple intense plot lines featuring facial close-ups, the soap kept housewives simultaneously involved in different characters' lives, matching the emotional content of the program with the distracting rhythms of a housewife's always-interruptible lifestyle. Constantly switching between plots, the soap makes interruptions both annoying and pleasurable, habituating women to the "interruptions, distraction and spasmodic toil," of household work (Modleski 71). Drawing on a traditional understanding of a housewife's lifestyle and of female interests, television programmers of the 1970s created distracting and emotional programming in order to attract and serve a specifically female audience.

Barnard explains: "it is the continuous flow of familiar music, its structuring in a familiar yet lightly varied pattern-which will be different from station to station, according to music policy and target age group-that gives music radio its distinct character" (Studying Radio 199).

94 Top 40 radio programming also targets a predominantly female audience using a distracting format. While radio's distracting flow might have been the product of an earlier need to redefine the medium in the face of television's threat, it continues today because of radio programmers' continued understanding of this audience as housewives. There is evidence to illustrate that radio programmers specifically felt that a distracting format was appropriate in order to target a female housewife audience. As Barnard notes, because British music radio programmers of the 1980s understood their audiences as housewives, they programmed a "pop and prattle" format similar to television soaps, in that it was designed to accompany listeners engaged in repetitive work, featuring emotional talk from hosts (On Radio 136). There is also more subtle evidence that programmers today use a distracting format because it seems appropriate to target women, understood as housewives. As British scholar Jo Tacchi has said, music radio programmers have long felt that a fantasy-based approach to radio listening is a feminine trait (152, 164). David MacFarland's radio broadcasting textbook shows how those in the industry understand this kind of background programming, arguing that because Top 40 can be listened to in the background, as a "low demand, open-ended" medium, it becomes "a fertilizer of fantasies and daydreams" (Contemporary 28): the very /^attention that radio listening allows is the modus operandi of the day dreamer. If the radio professional comes to understand that radio's strongest asset is the way it can be ignored, and realizes that the business of radio is to provide fertilizer for daydreams and fantasies, then inattention will stop seeming to be a threat. (MacFarland Future 34)48 Top 40 programmers employ a distracting rhythm in order to have their listeners create a fantasy-based relationship with the set-a relationship that is clearly gendered according to a traditional idea of femininity. As previously argued through examples from trade magazines, radio programmers, at least until recently, have understood their female

He continues: when radio demands so little of the listener, where can there be a sense of having met a challenge? The answer this time lies in smiles, frowns, laugher, and even tears. These are mere kinaesthetic responses, but they are also a kind of feedback. They are feedback in the sense that they confirm to the listener his or her participation in the listening event, and through that, a kinship with the host or singer, or a synchronicity with the spirit of the music. (MacFarland Future 57, describing what appears to be a traditionally feminine mode of relating to radio, and a particularly female means of connecting with the community through radio).

95 audiences according to a traditional view of femininity; therefore it is not surprising that they would program using a distracting rhythm that has come to be associated with femininity in industry discourses. The continuing use of this distracting format on Montreal Top 40 radio today (as well as these stations' hosts' focus on gossip and emotions) are both subtle strategies for attracting a predominantly female audience, understood in traditional ways, and for seeming to advertisers as though the station reaches a predominantly female audience (and thus increasing their ability to sell advertising). A distracting rhythm is commercially advantageous in that it allows a station to subtly target their commodity audience. Media's fast-paced flow also pays off in that it works as a strategy for forcing consumers to ingest more advertising. Because radio is meant to be even more distracting than television, radio programmers can perhaps incorporate even larger amounts of advertising into their programming flow, without alienating the station's target female audience. This is particularly true since female audiences are presumed to be less offended by advertising or boring programming, and are presumed to be distracted anyway by the female-oriented tasks they might be engaging in while listening. Mix and Q 92 have developed a series of programming elements, such as musical beds and jingles, which allow them to merge seamlessly between public service, informational and musical programming, masking the junctures between these components. By always beginning with an informational component, before moving subtly to ads, they also to a certain extent mask their commercial side through a discourse of "publicness." For example, at the end of the traffic report, Katherine merges seamlessly into reading an ad for the oil company that sponsors the traffic segment, while the same music plays underneath. This discourse of "publicness" will be further discussed below. Thus these stations' fast-paced rhythmic structure allows them to program more advertising, without seeming too crass and commercial. According to Rick Altman, television programmers have come up with a strategy to prevent viewers from becoming so distracted or annoyed by the advertising flow that they turn off the set. Within the overall flowing structure, they use the soundtrack to

96 draw viewers in at important moments in the programming, such as plot points. By maintaining a continuity of programming that is only punctuated aurally, programmers train viewers to believe that the soundtrack will alert them to anything important. This less demanding structure allows audiences to watch distractedly (and to potentially tune out the advertising) until sound pulls them in. As a result, the television remains on for longer periods of time. Because ratings count only the number of sets switched on, and not the number of actual viewers, TV programmers benefit through inflated ratings. This is a system "predicated on negativity:" programmers use a soundtrack, and programming in general, not to attract or excite an audience's attention, but to prevent them from turning the set off (Altman 42-3).50 This structure once again points to a tension between the audience's actual tastes and reasons for tuning in, and programmers' commercial interest in increasing their ratings shares. Altman argues that radio stations work the same way television stations do. They must provide continuity in terms of the style of music or talk broadcast throughout the day, punctuating this with repetition of important points (such as survival information like the time and weather) in the hopes that this will stop listeners from making the move to turn off the radio (Altman 43). While repetitive information bulletins might, to a certain extent, break up the station's programming flow, Top 40 has developed another strategy for creating attention-grabbing breaks. Punctuation is created when hosts break out of the distracting and rhythmic structure of the programming to hold unstructured conversations. During these sections, hosts tell stories and jokes, pontificate, relay opinions, and otherwise display their personalities. These sections have three purposes. First, these displays of personality help brand the station, in particular allowing the hosts to display their senses of humour. Second, as will be further discussed below, these sections provide a venue for hosts to show that they are regular people with ordinary, "common sense" opinions (often prescriptive opinions regarding gender), contributing to a sense of shared beliefs and community amongst listeners, and to an overall sense of the

49 Or jokes. This explains why TV programmers employed studio audiences whose canned laughs would ensure that distracted viewers would not miss the humourous (and, from the audience's perspective, presumably most entertaining) portion of the show: This audience also has the added advantage of creating the sense of a shared joke amongst all those watching the show, enhancing a sense of publicness amongst all taking part in viewership together (Altman 48). 50 The fact that ratings also do not count the number of viewers actually watching ads demonstrates how inexact the commodity audience system and its attendant measurements are.

97 "publicness" of the station. Finally, these sections permit hosts to create particularly gendered relationships with the female target audience. Male hosts speak frankly, authoritatively and flirtatiously with the audience, allowing them to create an intimate bond with the female listeners (while female hosts' role will be discussed further below). Top 40 radio's "routinized rhythmic segmentation" is designed to increase ratings and ad revenue, while breaks in the flow provide a venue for hosts to create a relationship with their gendered audience. The content of these breaks in the flow will be analyzed further in the last section of this chapter. Mix 96 and Q 92's rhythms and form are a commercial strategy used in an attempt to attract and seem to attract the ears of their specific target audience, namely women, who are understood as housewives. Though this structure was developed for Top 40 generally, media broadcasters came to associate it with the housewife audience. There is evidence radio programmers are aware of the effects of altering their programming rhythms and flow, and use this distracting rhythm, as well as other means of traditionally targeting a housewife's interests to specifically target their female audience, understood according to a traditional idea of gender. That programmers view their female audience according to traditional gendered ideas is not surprising considering the conservative nature of the industry, and the fact that programmers never did program with an accurate understanding of their target audiences. This fast-paced flow is also a strategy to increase ad revenue without having to increase actual listeners. Breaks in flow keep listeners tuned in by providing a venue for gender-based humour, and for hosts to develop a relationship with the audience that reinforces gender difference and promotes an idea of the station's "publicness." Montreal Top 40 radio targets and appears to target a female audience, using traditional ways of talking to and understanding that audience, its routine rhythmic segmentation adapted especially for her lifestyle. These stations' rhythmic structure, as well as the musical playlists and talk reflect programmers' traditional understanding of that audience, and of gender in general. Montreal Top 40's Gendered Structure of Talk Within the rhythmic flowing structure of the station, the component elements of this programming are held together by talk. The structure of who gets to talk and when on Top 40 radio is also gendered, according to a traditional understanding of gender and

98 of the gendered audience and its interests (while the content of the talk will be analyzed in detail below). Male hosts greatly outnumber female hosts. Programming elements have been developed to position female hosts in roles of lesser authority. As the stations' jingles will also show, just as in radio's early days, male hosts flirt with their female audience members. This gendered hosting structure reflects programmers' continued gendered understanding of their female audience and its wants, and of gender generally (as well as the industry's tendency to conserve the same gendered programming strategies). Despite the shift towards a female target audience in the 1980s the male majority on the air on these stations shows that station programmers continue to believe that women listeners are attracted by authoritative male speakers. As in radio's early days, the host ratio on Montreal Top 40 stations is heavily male biased. Mix 96's morning show centres around the male anchor and main personality of the show, Cat. He is flanked by Lisa and Katherine (whose roles will be discussed below), and by Murray Sheriffs, who does the news. Though there are two female hosts, the show is really Cat's. He speaks first, last, and longer than the others, keeps the others on-topic and generally controls their conversation. He reinterprets or restates facts mentioned by other hosts, he breaks into the news reports to ask clarificatory questions or to express disbelief, and he re-introduces the other hosts after a musical break (though he never needs to be introduced). He is the one who sets the pace of the program and the one who most often is allowed to take a break from the manic pace of the ads and programmed events to chat off-the-cuff. As will be discussed later, he also flirts with female listeners, reinforcing the traditional dichotomy between male authority figures on the air and passive female listeners, looking for company, while working at home. However, Mix 96's gendered structure is less male-biased than Q 92's. Called the "Aaron and Tasso Show,"51 Q 92's morning show centres around male anchor Aaron. Tasso is his sidekick, and the tertiary host is Suzanne. Despite the fact that she is always present in studio and has a regular role as weather woman, at the time of study, she was not named in the show's title. Through this traditional gendered host structure, these stations maintain the same gendered structure of authority from radio's early days.

51 It has since been changed to the "Aaron and Tasso and Suzanne in the morning" show (http://www.q92fm.com/. accessed April 8, 2008).

99 Though women are present on both stations, they are not given positions of power. Rather, on each station, female hosts' presence is justified by their informational roles. Mix's Lisa does the weather and an entertainment report; Katherine does the "Penzoil traffic report;" Q 92's Suzanne does the weather. Though providing weather and traffic reports is an important part of what a local station does, the female hosts' authority in these roles was reduced through a series of aesthetic and structural programming choices. On Mix, Cat and Sheriff also do the weather, and a syndicated columnist named John Moore also does an entertainment report. Female hosts on both stations had their reports underscored by a musical bed (instrumental music played to accompany talk), presumably intended to keep listeners engaged while information is conveyed by a female voice, further reducing female hosts' authority. When Cat or the Sheriff read the weather, they were not accompanied by a musical bed. This gendered authority dynamic was further demonstrated by the fact that Lisa felt compelled to apologize to listeners because her weather report was long and complicated (neither Cat nor Sheriff ever apologized, and clearly the length of her report was not Lisa's fault). As mentioned previously, there are two entertainment reports on Mix 96. Entertainment news receives almost as much attention on the station as the regular news, demonstrating the programmers' assumptions that celebrity culture is of interest to female listeners. The difference between the two reports also illustrates the gendered structure of authority amongst the hosts. Lisa's report is a round-up of entertainment news of that day, accompanied by a small discussion amongst the hosts, including extensive contributions from Cat. Mostly it mimics television entertainment shows, dealing with Hollywood stars and events, and introduced by a saxophone-heavy theme. The other report is a syndicated column by John Moore. He covers the same events and stories as Lisa, though his report provides an insider's look at the e-news of the day. For example, when talking about the then-recent SAG awards, he told behind-the-scenes tales of the fancy free stuff being given away (for example, a $500 watch), making jokes about how Justin Timberlake asked for two free gifts because he's a bad actor. Moore's column allows him to portray himself as a Hollywood and television insider, positioning him as the more authoritative of the two speakers in the realm of e-news. This forces

100 Lisa to assume the role of entertainment gossip, relaying second-hand information, a position more in line with a traditional understanding of femininity. Finally, this gendered structure of authority is also illustrated by the station's jingles. Jingles advertising Mix 96 had a coherent sound: they mainly featured a male voice providing information such as time and frequency, accompanied by a variety of effects, filters and fast-paced sounds, interspersed with occasional whispery, sexy, female voices. For example, one jingle featured a male announcer asking, "Looking for all the hits, non-stop and upbeat?" followed by a whispering woman's voice claiming, "This is my radio," followed by the male announcer again reading Mix's slogan. Another begins with a female voice, affected to sound as if she were on the phone saying "A lot more music on," interrupted by the male announcer's "Today's best music, Mix 96." In a jingle that accompanies Mix's "Win What You Really Want and Change Your Life" contest, a man's voice explains the rules of the contest, followed by a soundbite from a woman who presumably won the contest earlier saying, "Oh my god, thank you so much." In each of these jingles, male voices speak with authority, interrupting and speaking over women's. In contrast, the female soundbites selected represent a traditional, yet slightly updated understanding of the female audience: these women are flirty, sexual, and feel that Mix is "their radio" (an assertion that helps the station both appear to target a female audience, for advertisers' benefit, and appear to be chosen by a female audience). The techno-sounds and fast-paced edits promote the station as fun, youngish, and modern compared to Q 92's less technological, more sedate jingles. The sound effects also position women as audience members, while men speak as if they are in the foreground, on the air, reinforcing the traditional gendered dichotomy between radio and its audiences from radio's early days. The gendered structure of authority established by the hosts' roles is reinforced in the aesthetics of the jingles. This structuring demonstrates that programmers continue to think their female audiences will respond to flirty, authoritative hosts and generally shows a traditionally gendered, though slightly updated understanding of the audience, of the station's relationship to that audience, and of gender. These stations' host structure, overall rhythmic flow, and, as will be discussed next, musical playlist, also all subtly suggest that

101 they reach a female audience. In the next section, I will provide a detailed analysis of how these stations' musical playlist targets and appears to target a predominantly female audience, understood according to a traditional idea of gender. Top 40's Gendered and "Popular" Playlist Music is the primary aural output of Top 40 stations, and therefore supposedly one of its main draws. In this section, I will briefly examine the kinds of music Montreal Top 40 stations play, as well as the ways their hosts talk about this music. Top 40 stations have, from the beginning, claimed to play the music that the public wants to hear, subtly making the case that these stations act as a public service tool. As I show, Montreal Top 40 stations also make these claims to "publicness." However, despite these claims, these stations' playlists are carefully crafted for a different effect-they are intended primarily to attract (and seem to attract) a female commodity audience, while simultaneously seeming to attract a potentially much larger audience as well. These stations program vague musical playlists as a strategy for attracting and seeming to attract a female commodity audience, understood according to a traditionally gendered perspective. This vague playlist is also a strategy for seeming to, and perhaps actually, attracting the largest number of listeners, or, more appropriately put, offending the least (while claiming to merely play what the public wants to hear). These stations' musical strategies demonstrate a traditional understanding of their female target audience and of gender generally. They provide a dubious public service, in that their hosts act as condescending gatekeepers for the female audience, and narrow the public's musical options (while simultaneously claiming that their listeners "chose" these stations, despite the reality that few options existed). In this section, I will briefly explore the musical programming on Montreal Top 40 radio, and how this works within the larger programming frame of the morning show. I will then move on to discussing how these stations' talk generally allows them to claim a certain "publicness" that they then employ as a commercial strategy. In an age of a fragmented radio market, a station's musical playlist distinguishes it from others (and correspondingly, distinguishes its audience from the audiences for other stations), acting as the brand of the station. However, it is difficult to pin down what makes a playlist distinct since they are always changing, and many of the songs may be

102 played on other stations-it is only the particular ingredients, ordering and repetition of the songs on one station that give a station's playlist its individuality. On Top 40 stations, that playlist consists of pop music, which itself is hard to define. As Joshua Clover notes, pop is a meta-genre that could include many different musicological categories so long as they are "popular," which is why he calls this genre music with the "character of mass culture" (Clover 246). Top 40 station programmers take advantage of the inherent vagueness of the ever-changing pop playlist. MacFarland tells young programmers to remain "purposely obfuscatory" when defining their sound, and therefore to use a loose descriptor as a slogan, such as "hot hits" (MacFarland Contemporary 60, Future 68). This explains Mix's "Montreal's number one hit music station" as well as Q 92's "music at work"-both slogans which do not provide a strong sense of the style of music featured on the station. An ill-defined playlist reflects Top 40 programmers' attempt to reach a female audience, understood according to a traditional idea of gender. As discussed, women have traditionally not been viewed as musical connoisseurs. Instead they are thought to relate to music, particularly pop music, emotionally, and to use it as background entertainment. By not drawing attention to the station's sound, Mix does not alienate unsophisticated female listeners, but allows the emotional links the hosts make with the music to set the tone. The host talk on Montreal Top 40, accordingly, rarely centres on the music. Though Mix 96 had several contests running during the week I listened, only one was music-themed or featured music-related prizes. Hosts rarely spoke about music, perhaps because they are likely not at liberty to discuss their opinions about the songs they play or their tastes more generally.54 The musical discussions that did occur centred around either pop musicians with generally respected artistic reputations (usually

52 In this thesis, I do not explore the actual artists featured on each station's playlist. Suffice it to say that Mix 96 features pop music (during the period of study, this included a heavy R'n'B component), and Q 92 featured many of the same pop songs as played on Mix 96, but also featured some older easy listening hits. 53 According to David MacFarland, radio programmers should not just give their station a vague name, but also one that reflects a musical mood (such as "mellow"), since this is the best way to have listeners remember the name of the station (Future 68), another strategy that no doubt arose out of assumptions regarding the female audience and women's relationship with music. 54 Mix 96 has advertising and business relationships with music promotion companies, including, for example, Gillette Entertainment. Since the station's playlist is the basis for the Mix 96 brand, hosts cannot say they do not like a certain artist, and risk alienating potential advertisers or undermining the station as a whole. Thus hosts must be politic in their musical talk so as not to come into conflict with the commercialism of the station.

103 discussed by male hosts), or pop music celebrities (mentioned by Lisa in her entertainment report). During those brief musical discussions that did occur, musical taste breaks down according to traditional gender lines. For example, Mix's hosts held a discussion about the hard-rock band Live, and about the group's musical trajectory. In this conversation, Cat expertly discusses Live's past albums, while Lisa chimes in claiming that she liked them after seeing a special about them on TV. Another conversation demonstrates the hosts' view of their female audience's tastes: Cat: We should also mention pop opera heartthrobs II Divo are coming to town. Pop opera, that's the only cd my mother-in-law's bought in years. She thinks they're great 'cause she saw them on Oprah. Pop opera as they're calling it. Lisa: Isn't pop opera an oxymoron? Cat: But they are fantastic, they do a good job. Tom [a voice from the background, never explained]: I don't think I'm going. Lisa: He's a culture guy, he goes to the opera. Cat mentions the upcoming performance because it relates to music that is relevant to his female target audience. Yet, he, Tom and Lisa also denigrate pop opera as music for mother-in-laws and Oprah fans, making clear that they do not view II Divo as culturally valid. Because female listeners are not thought to have distinct and advanced musical tastes, the hosts instead are more likely to speak about music in emotional ways. The primary emotion employed is nostalgia-hosts talk about the days when you could "rewind the tape," before music was recorded digitally, and they talk about "rockin' parties" they hosted before they had kids, and the kind of music they played at those events. Q 92's hosts mentioned that it was the anniversary of "the day the music died" (referring to the deaths of 1950s musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper), playing one of their songs to commemorate that sad day. Montreal Top 40 musical programming, and their talk regarding musical performers and their supposed taste cultures demonstrates programmers' traditional understanding of the audience and of gender generally. This explains why they work to create a vague musical playlist that fits into women's distracted lifestyle and is accessible to what they view as her less sophisticated tastes. Hosts add to the vagueness of their

104 musical focus by only discussing the music played in terms of its emotional value, allowing their female listeners to have an emotional connection with it. The hosts also portray a typically gendered breakdown of musical knowledge in their talk. These musical discourses and strategies not only reflect programmers' traditionally gendered understanding of their audience, they also work to seem as if the station is able to reach a female commodity audience, thereby attracting advertisers.55 A vague playlist is also a commercial strategy that allows the station to leave open (in the minds of potential advertisers, and of listeners), who their audience could potentially include. As MacFarland explains: "In defining their music, stations generally want to appear to advertisers as if they were highly inclusive of many types of listeners, without falling into the trap of trying to be all things to all people" (68 Future). This strategy involves not only using a vague name to describe the station's sound, but also programming music that is vague and inoffensive in style. A television programmer named Paul Kelin first coined the term LOP, or least objectionable programming, referring to programming that will offend the least number of viewers (quoted in Macfarland Future 12).56 Altman's argument, above, that TV programmers want more than anything to keep the television on (in order to inflate ratings), can explain the logic behind this. These stations do not necessarily need to play an audience's favourite songs, as long as listeners do not turn the knob. However, there is a risk in appearing to

As Berland describes it, these stations create the illusion of a "neutral marriage" between a musical style (if a vague pop sound can be called a "style") and their target demographic, as if the station is merely serving a need (Berland "The Case" 107), which also helps these stations' claim they provide a public service. 56 Not surprisingly, this programming structure leads to musical conservatism. As previously argued, "risk- averse" large media and radio companies hedge their bets by sticking with the same previously successful formats and programming strategies because they do not want to waste time by rethinking them, and hope that if these strategies worked to attract audiences in the past they will continue to offend (or seem to offend) the least number of potential or actual listeners (McChesney Rich Media 33). Top 40 programmers further narrow their musical options by playing not simply what is on the charts: as Clover notes, they use the charts as a guide, selecting only those songs with a more traditional pop sound from that list to play on the air (Clover 246). Other factors also work to restrict that choice, including influence from the record industry, the "consensus cut" that is being promoted by all promoters, and a general sense of what works within the format (MacFarland Future 146). My analysis of the music played on these stations supports , this idea of musical conservatism: there was a definite coherence of sound on both these stations, with the mainly R'n'B and white soul ballads repeated often. Montreal Top 40 stations play risk-free music, resulting in an ill-defined playlist that will alienate, and will seem to alienate, the least number of potential listeners (a strategy that simultaneously works to attract female listeners; presumed to have indistinct musical tastes). The conservatism of their musical playlists is in line with radio's general tendency to conserve the same ways of imagining and programming for their audiences.

105 program to the lowest common denominator, or in this case, the person with the least distinct or advanced musical taste. Audiences might feel condescended to, and audiences and advertisers might not recognize the brand of the station. To prevent the station's musical playlist from appearing watered down, in their marketing strategies, programmers claim instead that their musical selections are driven by popular tastes. As previously discussed, this idea that Top 40 represents the public's musical tastes was part of industry discourse from its early days. Today, these claims can be seen in the jingles of Montreal Top 40 stations. Thus, Mix 96 calls itself "Montreal's number one hit music station," and their morning show is "Montreal's most listened to music show." Q 92 claims to play what listeners want to hear at work (the jingles section above also provides further examples of the ways in which these stations position themselves as playing what the public wants to hear). By invoking a kind of radio "publicness" (and, as discussed, ignoring the reality of the musical selection process), these stations mask the commercial reality of their programming, and the fact that, rather than trying to serve the public, these stations' musical playlists are designed to attract a female commodity audience, and, in general, to offend the least number of potential listeners. In this way, programmers can both reach their target audience, and a potentially larger number of listeners, while also seeming to attract a female audience, and, through discourses of "publicness" seem to be providing the local audience with a public service. It is possible to break down Top 40's discourses of musical "publicness" into its two component parts. These stations claim to be responding to public tastes and thereby claim to be providing a public service to their listeners. However, I will argue that Top

There is evidence that it continues to be part of industry discourse today, with station programmers consciously making claims to "publicness" aware that this discourse would appeal to listeners. As David MacFarland, in a section of his radio broadcasting textbook entitled "Control: Appearance versus Reality" explains: the radio station that succeeds... is likely to be the one that conveys the feeling of putting the listener in control of what he or she hears. The Top 40 pioneers of the 1950s tried to supply at least the appearance of control. They put in machines to make recordings of phone requests so that they could then select for airing those requests that matched their playlist and clock anyway. If you listened then, you had the sense that at least one lucky requester was getting to hear what he or she wanted, even if that song was not what you were after. (Contemporary 49) 58 These two component parts complement what John Street calls British radio programmers' "double conservatism" in their musical selection:

106 40's musical playlist does not fulfill this "public" role, in that this play list does not represent the public's tastes, and the public service they provide is more along the lines of gatekeepers, narrowing the musical choices available to a thought-to-be musically ignorant female audience. As mentioned above, popular taste, as relayed by the music charts, was but one of several factors that have traditionally gone into the making of a station's playlist. As David MacFarland, who studied decision-making at a popular music radio station in 1981 points out, popular taste was not even considered the most important factor: "information in the trades, from other programmers, and from program consultants were all felt to be more reliable and objective than the expressed desires of the local audience" (Future 146). This is because Top 40 programmers fulfill their claims to publicness not by acting as musical facilitators, but by assuming the role of musical gatekeepers. The trade magazines cited in the previous chapter demonstrated that programmers often felt they had a better sense of the kind of music the audience, and particularly the female audience, might want to hear. As a result of this long-standing industry discourse, Montreal Top 40 stations might feel their claims to "publicness" are legitimate, however, I argue that since it is more accurate to say that these stations fulfill these claims by providing the "public service" of acting as gatekeepers, they do not fulfill them. As a result of these stations' gatekeeping role, the musical options available to that public are significantly reduced. As Krister Malm and Roger Wallis note: it is foolhardy to assume that the public is 'getting what it wants' because a lot of people watch or listen to a certain programme on television or radio. It stands to reason that the public prefers what it has got used to. Preferences refer only to the available alternatives. When the gatekeepers stick to well-proven formulae, they are in effect restricting the number of alternatives available to the public, (quoted in Street 124) Popular tastes are represented in the musical charts, allowing stations that play chart- topping music to claim to be responding to public tastes. In fact, these stations' musical

reliance on the charts demonstrates a form of liberal conservatism: giving people what they want, letting them stand on their own two feet, and so forth whereas the criteria for musical selection are conservative in a more traditional, High Tory way: giving people what they ought to want, protecting them from their own mistakes, etc. (124)

107 choices are more conservative, reflecting both the station's need not to offend, and their idea of themselves as gatekeepers, providing a public service to their particularly female audience. As a result, when listeners tune in, they have few musical options from which to choose. This not unlike Probyn's "choiceoisie": these stations claim listeners choose them, when few choices were possible (and, as previously noted, it is possible the station's target audience did not even make this choice). As will be shown below, these stations are not only conservative in their musical selections, but also in their representations and understanding of gender. These claims to "publicness" then allow these stations to claim that women chose to listen to their gendered programming in general. Though music is the primary Output of a Top 40 station, these stations work to obscure their musical playlist's specifics, turning this element of programming into merely another part of its overall distracting background noise. Because of this, I have paid little attention to the specific musical choices made, and instead have focussed on the reasoning behind their approach. The vague musical playlist reflects these stations' tactics for attracting a female audience, understood in a traditional way. Women are thus understood to have less advanced musical tastes, and to relate to music emotionally. Vague playlists are also a means of claiming a certain "publicness" for the station. This masks the commercial stations' commodity audience structure and motives, making it appear instead as though listeners (most of them from a certain demographic group) chose to listen to this station. Next, I will examine the ways in which the talk also allows the station to claim a sort of "publicness," and to claim that their listeners chose not just their musical playlist, but the station's programming as a whole, including its limiting portrayals of gender. Transforming Montreal Top 40's Commodity Audience Into a "Public" Montreal Top 40 radio stations are commercial radio stations. They therefore follow the commodity audience system, wherein advertising pays for a station's programming. As a result, their programming is designed to attract, or seem to attract an audience whose attention they can then sell to advertisers. Despite the commodity audience structure of the industry, these stations have developed several techniques for masking their commercial imperative. As with the musical selection, in their talk, these

108 stations use a discourse of "publicness" to claim that their audience is not just a group brought together by shared demographics, but that their listeners form a community. The station's role then becomes one of serving that public's needs, not just musically, but also through their talk and programming generally. In order to create this sense of the listening-audience-as-public, hosts' talk focuses on the shared space of the city, on the shared daily routines of the community of listeners, and on the listeners' shared, common sense values. They flatter listeners by implying, just as talk radio stations had, that listeners are civic-minded, pro-active participants in their local communities, who all share a similar right-wing world view. The station's hosts then make clear that the station has an integral part to play in the community, portraying itself as a public service tool. Through presenting their audience as a public, these stations make it appear as though their listeners have chosen this station's programming, putting programmers in a better position to sell airtime to advertisers. These discourses of publicness ignore the fact that commercial imperatives drive decision-making and that listeners may not have chosen this station. By infusing the station's programming with this idea of "publicness" and by making the station's audience appear to be more a "public" than a commodity, these stations at once mask their own commercial motives, while also likely increasing their ability to attract both listeners (and potentially advertisers, who might feel better sponsoring a station that is associated with a nobler cause). Montreal Top 40 stations had several strategies for creating this sense of publicness. First, they emphasized the local nature of radio and the station's role within that space. Specifically, they did so by highlighting local references in the informational programming, and by positioning the hosts as everyday people living in that area, and taking part in that community. According to the traditional Top 40 format, hosts on both stations offered information on traffic, weather and occasionally, school closures. Drawing on talk radio's successful use of the call-in format, callers were also on hand to offer information on weather and road conditions in their neighbourhoods, as they called in on cell phones from their cars. Ads featured local phone numbers and street names,

This recurring car-focused feature of the programming can explain why Mix even had a specific jingle that included car sound effects:

109 and promoted local music concerts and occasionally local bands. Both stations also included a birthday and congratulations segment, where local names could be read over the air. During this feature, Mix's hosts sent happy birthday wishes to a listener named Kathleen, and a congratulations to the Brossard Dynamos soccer team (a suburban kids team) that Cat knew. Q 92's hosts listed wedding anniversaries, and Suzanne wished a friend who was going on a cruise bon voyage. After providing a public service by giving local information and access to airwaves to the local community, hosts then made a point of situating themselves and their experiences within that space. On Monday, early on in the show, Mix's hosts compared notes about the terrible commute due to the freezing rain, warning listeners that they had slipped on certain streets on their way in to work in the morning.60 They then took a moment to demonstrate their civic pride, applauding snow removal crews that they had seen working hard that morning. Hosts also spoke about their weekend activities, demonstrating their active engagement in community events. That weekend, Tasso could be found at a local mattress store, while Cat, Lisa and the Sheriff were at a charity basketball tournament the weekend previous. Providing local survival information, with hosts portrayed as model neighbours, these stations create a sense that listeners of the station share more than just a similar space and demographic make-up; listeners and hosts come together as members of a local public (while these stations provide an essential service to that public). Besides the shared geographic area of the city, Montreal Top 40 stations' hosts also tried to create a sense of a shared timing amongst its listener-public, integrating their station's rhythmic flow into that daily routine. They did so by focussing on the fact that listeners are presumably waking up while listening. This explains the hosts' comments above regarding slippery streets: every day, these hosts venture out into the world first, then report back to the listeners, giving them the survival information they will need as

Male voice: Montreal's number one hit music station, Cat Spencer, [honk sound] Lisa Player and Murray Sherrifs [car sounds] on Mix 96 [swoosh]. The commute is a shared experience of those living in suburbia, bringing the audience together in certain locations and at certain times, and thus a focus on this daily part of the routine becomes part of the station's strategy to create a sense of community amongst listeners. 60 Cat then goes above and beyond his meteorological role, providing folksy advice, saying that with the freezing rain, "patience is the name of the game." Using this kind of common sense, and everyday discourse, hosts position themselves as neighbours in the local city space.

110 they start their days. Then, according to the station's jingles, Mix is an integral part of their audience's unfolding mornings, and the rest of their daily routines: Mix 96's Cat, Lisa and the Sheriff play the most music in the morning, then, it's 96 minutes of commercial-free music every morning at nine... followed by nine in a row every hour all day... when we say Mix 96 plays the most music while you work, we mean it. The jingles were one means for Mix to claim to be a part of the shared routines of the listening public. During the call-in portion of the show, hosts also tried to draw out the presumed shared daily routines and Mix's role within those routines. For example, on Monday morning Irene, from Montreal-North won a music contest called the Rob Thomas Rewind Competition. Cat congratulated the caller, adding: Cat: You mentioned you're still waking up. So how many times have you hit snooze? Irene: A million times, but I have to stop. Cat: Well, hit snooze again and it'll be the Player Report in 9 minutes. The station's rhythms thus are explicitly intended to complement the listening public's presumed routines (and as will be discussed, specifically their traditionally female routines). Later, in a conversation with Lisa, Cat goes so far as to claim that the station's listeners might occasionally shape their routines around the station's timing: Cat: We'll be [giving away Rob Thomas tickets] later. Between 7:30 and 8. Lisa: Okay, I like it. Cat: And I'm saying this because I know some loyal listeners get up early just to wait for the Rob Thomas tickets and I don't want them to think we're doing that now. Go back to sleep, hit snooze. It's a quarter to six, get your sleep and come back between 7:30 and 8. By tying this contest to a shared sense of routine, Cat not only makes the case for the radio remaining on, he also subtly implies that those who follow the routines of the station are in some sense participating in community life, and thus should be rewarded by insider contest information. Such talk not only serves to suggest that many people are listening at the same time, but that Cat has an intimate understanding of their lifestyles and thoughts, reinforcing his position of authority with regards to the predominantly

111 female audience. Several other calls featured similar question-lines, mostly asking mothers how they were handling getting the kids ready for school-talk that specifically highlights the presumed shared routines of the station's target female demographic, while also making explicit the link between the station's flowing rhythm and its presumed female target audience's routines. After creating a sense or at least the appearance of a sense of community amongst listeners, these stations then put this community on display, using multiple call-ins and other programming features as excuses to do so.61 This allowed these stations to suggest to advertisers and listeners that they have reached a certain (female) demographic, while at the same time implying that this audience has not been assembled for commercial purposes, but has come together as a community. Finally, Montreal Top 40 stations do not only create a sense of the station's "publicness" through making their audience appear to be members of a local community. They also try to suggest that the listening audience shares a particular set of values. They do this by drawing on strategies developed on brother talk-radio stations. As discussed, talk radio stations created an on-air space that seemed to fulfill the role of a public sphere, where listeners would be treated as citizens rather than as consumers and where they could hear the news broken down for everyday folks (rather than packaged for the public by mainstream liberal media). However, talk radio's version of the public sphere was particularly right wing, a place where listeners, mostly male, could reclaim traditional masculinity and the right. In this way, these stations differ from female- targeting Top 40, as I will further discuss below. Montreal Top 40 stations draw on these same discourses, particularly in Mix 96's Murray Sherriffs' presentation of the news. Sheriffs's newscasts are unapologetically biased and opinionated, presented from a common sense, suburban perspective that presumes his listeners care and share a similar worldview. His Monday newscast is typical in its focus on stories about everyday people: it begins with a news item about men trapped in a mine, followed by a story about a girl shot in Montreal, followed by a story about how frustrating it is that the price of milk is going up. This kind of morals-

61 These call-in elements demonstrate that the station's listeners are predominantly female (or, by selecting mainly female callers to put on air, they at least create the illusion of a female audience). During the week I listened, all contest winners were put on air, with a great majority of those selected being women (on Tuesday, Cat points out that there is an unusually large number of male callers that day), highlighting the presumed female audience.

112 based reporting is accompanied by a certain kind of language that is casual to the point of rudeness. For example, on Friday, Sherriff reports "Andrea Yates, that bitch - sorry I said that on the radio - she murdered five children in Texas. She's out because of one statement that caused the trial to go on the tank. Society sucks. My apologies for saying the word bitch." Colloquialisms give the news a small-town feel, such as when the CEO of Enron was charged with "cooking the books and so much more." This story is presented with relish, dealing as it does with a favourite theme, that of the hypocrisies of the rich, positioning the hosts with the people and against the establishment. At the end of Monday's newscast, Sheriff seamlessly moves into a discussion of sports, with the water-cooler opener, "Did you guys see the game?" The question opens up the talk on the station, to create a sense of a public discussion amongst hosts (who all join for a discussion of the game). This discussion thus mimics the typical daily workplace water- cooler discussion listeners are preparing for by listening in. The newsbreak concludes with Sheriffs's theme: a wild west whistle sound, a sound effect which reinforces the station's position as provider of news for the little guy, fighting the big bad media (which is reinforced by his name-Sheriff!). By drawing on talk radio's speaking style, particularly its common sense speech, Mix creates the appearance of shared values among the listening audience, positioning the station's listeners as civic-minded members of the community, and the station as a place where matters of public service can be discussed. Through creating the sense that their listeners should be viewed as a public, and that the station provides a public service role, these stations claim a "publicness" that masks their commercial motives and likely attracts more listeners. However, despite these claims, Top 40 stations' main imperative is commercial. Their claims to "publicness" must be understood as commercial tactics (partly designed

62 A quick glimpse at Q 92's news reporting reveals how different newscasts can shape the stations' publics according to different values, intended for slightly different commodity audiences. Q 92's news is more in- depth, focusing on tougher issues in a more thoughtful way. They report on such sober topics as higher taxes and increased support for the Liberal party (both topics not discussed during the same week on Mix 96). The hosts also discuss the uproar surrounding Danish cartoons which depicted the prophet Mohammed, and after extended debate, they promise to have a professor on the show next week to talk about the issue. They finish the newscast with business news (also not present on Mix). While they do draw on the talk radio genre in their speech (Tasso quips: "when they blow up something in your country, then you'll stop being so respectful"), their slower and more thoughtful pace gives the sense of a more serious, older audience (and does not, as one might expect of a station with a very high proportion of female listeners, portray a more female-oriented approach to the news or matters of public affairs, a subject I will further discuss below).

113 to mask that commercial imperative). In an increasingly globalized world, radio has an unrivalled connection to the local. There is evidence that Top 40 programmers have long known of the power of radio's localness, and have come up with several tactics in order to exploit this. According to Susan Douglas, a study conducted in the 1960s (and likely made available to programmers of that era), showed that listeners felt a close identification with fellow listeners, a sense of community and belonging, and a shared "basic, elemental Zeitgeist" as a result of the ways deejays shaped their talk, particularly through familiar forms of address (such as "you") (Douglas 230). As Barnard describes it: "The cleverest disc jockeys encourage the listener to feel special, even unique, yet simultaneously one of a community of listeners with common interests, tastes and emotions" (Barnard On Radio 154).63 Examining a British breakfast radio show in the 1980s, he argues that this station's programmers knew that it was its "localness" that gave this station the edge over other national British media (Barnard On Radio 138-9). This explains why they continued to provide local information even when they knew it was not relevant for their actual public. Specifically, the station maintained its repetitive traffic reports even after their research showed that only 15% of their listeners tuned in from their cars. He explains: stations stick with their battery of road reports, however, because they create an impression of pace, mobility and activity which both suits the station's self-image and gives the listener an illusion of service. They make the station seem indispensable, and they punctuate programming at times of day (6 am to 9 am, 4 pm to 7 pm) when the station perceives its 'social' function as one of getting workers to and from their places of work. (Barnard On Radio 137) He also points out that there are other reasons why public-oriented programming might be a smart commercial strategy. For example, call-ins are favoured because they are cheap and they provide the illusion that listeners control the airwaves (Barnard On Radio

53 Berland explains why the deejay can have such power in the local sphere: It falls to the dj's voice to... provide immediate evidence of the efficacy of its listeners' desires. It is through that voice that the community hears itself constituted, through that voice that radio assumes authorship of the community, woven into itself through its jokes, its advertisements, its gossip, all represented, recurringly and powerfully, as the map of local life. ("The Case" 116) While these stations and their deejays may foster a sense of belonging amongst listeners, I argue that this is a result of an overall marketing strategy rather than an attempt to actually understand and serve that audience.

114 142). According to Barnard, then, radio programmers are aware that these discourses of "publicness" can be manipulated to create cheap and local programming that provides an edge over competitors, and so use them for commercial effect, without any intention of actually serving the needs of the actual listening public. In the Canadian context, "publicness" makes commercial sense because local advertising is radio's main source of revenue. Though her information is somewhat dated, Berland notes that in 1986, 73% of advertising on Canadian commercial radio came from local companies (Berland "The Case" 108). My analysis of Mix's advertising today shows that local adverts are still in heavy rotation: including commercials for local hot dog brands, restaurants, and stores. This also explains why the hosts of these programs can often be found at mattress stores and shopping malls on weekends, both promoting themselves as members of the community, and helping sponsor the station. Finally, a discourse of "publicness" makes sense commercially because it likely does mean stations can attract more listeners (these stations appear less crass, they offer useful information), and therefore more advertising dollars.64 Montreal Top 40 radio draws on talk radio's successful strategy of claiming a discourse of "publicness" for the station. They do this by creating a sense of shared timing and space amongst listeners, by putting them on display for each other (and for potential advertisers), and by creating a sense that these are not just people who share a demographic subgroup (though this strategy also demonstrates this), but people who form a community with shared values. They then make clear their role in relation to this public (as provider of useful information, of a space for discussion of public affairs, and as broadcaster of public taste through pop music). By positioning hosts as no different from audience members, hosts create an intimate relationship with their listeners, especially important for male hosts who need to bond with their female audiences. This discourse of publicness is a commercial strategy that allows stations to capitalize on what makes radio different from other media and to profit from the local advertising market.

64 Berland sums up the advantageous nature of these stations' claims to radio "publicness": to put it with complete cynicism...radio's atmosphere of local involvement is designed to attract the highest proportion of listening hours for sale to advertisers, and thus to maintain and promote the particular local 'feel' that can attract both listeners and advertisers. (Berland "The Case" 115) She also points out that while talk and ads on these stations may be local, the music is very much not local and so these stations focus only on life in the city insofar as it's convenient and marketable for them ("The Case" 115).

115 Insofar as providing public service information and employing a discourse of "publicness" attracts an actual audience, it allows these stations to increase their ratings (and their advertising revenue). Insofar as a discourse of "publicness" allows the station to appear to attract a larger segment of the population, they might also increase their advertising revenue. Finally, this strategy of "publicness" also allows the station to claim to advertisers and to other listeners that the predominantly female commodity audience chose this station (and its music), rather than the other way around. Just like post-feminism's "choiceoisie," this ignores the fact that women had little choice in the matter, may not enjoy all aspects of the programming, and may not even be the ones listening. I will further discuss the logic of using a public affairs discourse, traditionally associated with masculinity, to target a predominantly female audience later. Though these stations use a discourse of "publicness" and to a certain extent do serve their listeners, this programming should be understood as a commercial strategy that does not necessarily reflect the station's effort to serve an actual listening audience, but rather an effort to appear to be doing so. In the next section, I will examine the ways in which the talk on Montreal Top 40 reveals a traditional, yet slightly updated understanding of gender, in order to show that hosts' talk does not necessarily reflect the audience's social realities or perspectives. Gendered Talk on Montreal Top 40 While the form and music of Top 40 radio work to sell the medium as something that is meant to be listened to distractedly, the host's talk breaks up that structure, and is in fact intended to draw listeners' attention. These stations' talk does so particularly through the use of comedy. Just as in radio's early days, hosts create humour by playing up sexual difference, drawing on a traditional understanding of gender to create controlled sexual debate and humour. Language-based jokes and marked language are an important part of this style of humour, serving to reflect a traditional gendered dichotomy of interests and knowledge. It is through linguistic agility, and in particular, irony, that the hosts' playful talk and sexual banter can border on the offensive without alienating potential audience members, and also allows these stations to reinforce linguistic agility as a male trait. The masculinity of the deejay role means that women trying to occupy this position must justify their presence on air, by out-performing the men, and by saying

116 things that are even more ironically outrageous than the male hosts. The hosts' talk reflects the fact that station programmers continue to understand and program for their audiences based on a traditional understanding of gender, though slightly updated through post-feminism. Through the previously discussed discourse of "publicness," Montreal Top 40 stations can make the claim that their female audience has chosen to listen to this station and its gendered talk. Just as in radio's early days, the topics of gender and gender difference are central to host chat on Montreal Top 40, with gender understood in a traditional way. During the week that I listened, a significant portion of the programming was either designed to provide, or became a venue for talk about gender, including the contests, call-ins, news and freeform chat portions of the show. For example, much gender-based conversation resulted from the week-long Valentine's Day contest.65 On Monday, the hosts introduced the contest by setting up this gendered dichotomy saying, "it's the last days of January, heading into February, and that's when everybody starts thinking about two different things, Valentine's Day and the Superbowl (ha ha)." Each day featured a different twist on the gender-based theme. On Tuesday, callers were asked to phone in with ideas for what 15% of women do for themselves on Valentine's Day. The callers suggest that 15% of women shave, wear nice lingerie, cry, throw flowers back at their husbands, cook, pamper themselves, and buy themselves a valentine. Throughout these suggestions, Lisa jumps in with comments, such as, in relation to shaving, "it's a special day, better cut down the forest," and in relation to crying, "it's just another day to be disappointed with your husband. I guess married and single women have a lot in common." In relation to throwing flowers at a boyfriend or husband, she laughingly asks the male caller who hazarded that guess if "this happened to you more than once?" The right answer, from a caller named Angie, is that 15% of women buy themselves flowers on Valentine's Day (something Lisa refers to as "pathetic") Once Angie gets the right answer, the hosts ask her various questions, such as what she expects this Valentine's Day (dinner and.some flowers), and from who (her husband Luke). Then, they conclude the segment by presenting the prize thus:

65 Mix's contests demonstrate the programmers' traditional understanding of a female audience's interests, with featured prizes including household goods, family passes for movies, or in the case of the Valentine's contest, a gift certificate to lingerie store Moments Intimes, who also advertised on the station.

117 Cat: Okay, well, we're going to help Luke out a bit to deal with the stress. Because it can be stressful on Valentine's Day. So we're going to send you to dinner with $96 of Mix money. Lisa adds to Angie: And you get to be dessert. Angie: Lisa! I see where your mind is all about. Lisa: Yeah... As with all of the contests, the call ends with the guest, Angie, saying an enthusiastic thanks. These conversations show how the hosts work to create entertaining, slightly scandalous talk by focusing on a traditional understanding of the difference between women and men. This particular gender-based contest is no anomaly in the Top 40 radio world. In fact, a surprisingly similar contest was held on sister station Q 92 during that same week, called the "He Wins, She Wins Superbowl-Valentine's Day Contest." For this competition, Q 92's programmers selected one male and one female contestant and asked them gender-based trivia on the air to see which sex would be able to get three right answers. Examples of gendered trivia included: "What is the name of Sarah Jessica Parker's character on 'Sex and the City'?" "What is the main colour of the Montreal Canadiens' hockey jersey?" and "What is a French manicure?" The hosts asked the men the stereotypically female questions, and vice versa. A caller named Anna wins the contest, and her prize is an II Diyo cd.66 The above contests and ensuing talk show how the hosts repetitively establish and focus on a gendered difference between men and women and their interests, and use this dichotomy as a basis for flirting, joking and conversation. The design of the station's talk reflects not only a traditionally gendered perspective, but also a post-feminist one, where hosts are playful and sexual in their gendered talk. Drawing on talk radio's matter-of-fact discourses, they no longer beat about the bush with regards to sexual difference. According to these hosts, it is now okay to say that women are inherently interested in such typically feminine things as fashion and shopping, and that they often act catty (or, as Lisa tends to be portrayed, backstabbing). Men, on the other hand, are shown to be

The choice of this particular musical group demonstrates Q 92's musical overlap with Mix, underscoring the two stations' similar female pop audience-targeting strategies.

118 their polar opposites, immaturely interested in sex and sports, along the lines of a "boys will be boys" masculinity.67 By focusing on sexual difference, just as in radio's early days, Top 40 stations can create scandal, in a mildly sexual yet non-threatening way. As will be discussed below, the station even draws on the same stereotypes as in radio's early days to create this spicy, controlled controversy: there is talk of "loose women" (whom Lisa makes fun of) and "lavender gentleman" (whom Cat mocks).68 This salaciousness also sets the tone for Mix's male hosts to have an intimate, and flirty relationship69 with their predominantly female audience.70 Through Cat's and the other hosts' scripted contests and conversations, gender differences are re-created and reinforced, resulting in an only slightly updated (in that it is racier) version of the gendered banter and light humour of early radio. In radio's early days, comedy was created not just through a focus on sexual difference, but specifically through the clever use of language. Language-based comedy, including word-play, puns, and the knowing use of marked words to conjure up ideas, often in particularly gendered ways, continues to be employed by Mix's hosts today. Just as in radio's early days, linguistic agility and the ability to be funny using language are defined as masculine on today's radio. During the week I listened, Mix's male hosts used their female colleague's lack of linguistic knowledge as a source of comedy, setting up

67 An example from Sheriffs Tuesday newscast demonstrates the way in which masculinity is portrayed on Mix: Murray: Our world is changing in ways that it's hard to keep up with. Here are two stories: German beer sales are dropping... and the Czechs are taking over. It's because people are worried about what beer does to your health... Drink beer for heaven's sake and exercise it off! And, an Italian on the campaign trail promises not to have sex. Someone should check his ancestry... no Italian man could hold his head high. Later, Murray claims this candidate will probably blow up because Italians are horny people. Murray's tone seems to imply that modern day mores are taking away the things men love most: beer and sex. 68 This could also be a strategy for creating a coherent idea of gender and gender difference in order to better and more easily sell Mix's gendered female audience to advertisers. 69 An example of Cat's flirting occurs during a cutesy nicknames contest, held as part of the Valentine's Week competition. Mix asked its listeners to call in with the cute nicknames they have for their partners (examples include "smoochiewoochie,""snookie" and "snoogles"). The mainly female callers were put on air, where, though these women are clearly in relationships, Cat flirts with them. For example, at the end of a conversation between Cat and two sisters who called in, Cat asks' them to stay on the line, so he can get their numbers... for the contest (Lisa adds sarcastically "sure...."). This despite the fact that Cat is married, and discusses his kids on the air. In contrast, Lisa never flirts with the (mainly female) guests, perhaps because that would imply homosexuality or a certain "looseness" on her part. 70 As further proof that this idea of male hosts keeping their female audiences company continues in the industry, I point to David MacFarland's radio training guide which explains that it is best for stations to hire hosts that listeners would want to spend time with and would view as an ideal mate (Future 127).

119 situations in which she had to display her lack of masculine knowledge through her linguistic ineptitude particularly about stereotypically male interests such as sports. On Monday, the hosts rib Lisa because at the weekend's charity basketball game, she forgot the word for substitution. Cat asks, "You know you're not supposed to tackle in basketball, right?" On Friday, they continue in this theme, repeating a previous segment that was designed so that Lisa's marked language would reflect her gendered knowledge disadvantage. In this clip, Lisa is singled out to make her pick for the Superbowl, and she plays along with the gendered script that is prepared for the situation. She argues that she prefers the little horses on the Carolinas' uniforms, and decides not to cheer for the Seattle Seahawks because that team is named after a scavenger bird. Finally, during this segment, she jokingly admits that she still has trouble remembering acronyms such as the NFL or NHL. These conversations are designed to display Lisa's gendered lack of knowledge, which is translated into her linguistic ability, working to reaffirm this trait (and the knowledge that goes along with it) as inherently masculine. A final example, an excerpt from a television show, which was aired on Mix, demonstrates to what extent linguistic agility is both defined as male on the radio (and perhaps in the media generally), and how it is used as a marker of gender difference, placed in predictable scripts that establish stereotypical understandings of gender. Cat introduces this segment from the American TV show "The Office," as hilarious: Female voice 1: Sports metaphors are one of the ways women feel left out at the office. Now, I know this may seem silly but a lot of women like to go over it. So fumble means...? Female voice 2: To slip. Female voice 1: Right. Par for the course is a golf term. It means right on track, below par means worse. Female voice 2: What about second base? I mean if Michael says he got to second base with you, does that mean he closed the deal? I mean that's a baseball term, right? Female voice 1:1 don't know what Michael was referring to. Cat comments: That's such a great show. Lisa: You know, it's very realistic as well.

120 Interestingly, Q 92 featured several similar joke segments, including a discussion in which Suzanne was also asked to comment about her Superbowl picks, and replied that you cannot win with teal pants. These hosts use language knowingly, focussing on clearly gendered subjects, and using marked words not unlike those laid out by Lakoff in her analysis of men's and women's different languages, discussed at the beginning of this work. Both male and female hosts use language-based comedy to play on sexual difference, to repeat gendered scripts which establish a sexual division of tastes, and to reassert linguistic agility as masculine, in line with the traditional role of the deejay. The deft use of language is employed not just to establish a difference between a certain kind of "typical" masculinity, defined in opposition to "typical" femininity, but also to set up another opposition between "typical" masculinity and homosexuality. On Tuesday morning, Cat tells this story: The ride in is slippery today. When you drive downtown when we get in [to work], you see some strange things. I saw it yesterday but 1 saved [the story] for today. I needed a day for it to settle in. I'm with my friend Jeff, we carpool in. I asked, "Is that guy rolling a joint in a phone booth at 4 in the morning?" Never mind that, he's not wearing a shirt, and is wearing a black bra. He's not wearing a shirt, and is wearing a black bra. It could have been a homemade cigarette, I don't know, I shouldn't... Lisa: It's probably a giggle stick, let's face it. Cat: He drops it, then he bends over to pick it up, wearing a bra. Lisa: [gagging] That's disgusting! Cat: Then I get over the fact that it's a man wearing a bra. Then he's muscular, he's got huge arms. I'm getting scared now. If he sees us-he's built. Lisa: If he puts that in his mouth ... ugh. Cat: That's what grosses you out the most? Lisa: Those phone booths are disgusting. Cat: He had a gym bag, he's muscular. Lisa: How was his lift? Cat: I want to watch this freak show and if he spots us, he's going to be mad. Lisa: You should've said 'Hey, Frankfurter'!

121 Cat: The fun stuff you see at 4:30 Lisa: He was from transsexual Transylvania, no doubt. In this example, playing on gendered and heteronormative assumptions, and using marked language and linguistic play, the hosts are able to dance around the issue of homophobia, arguably without making any outright offensive claims. Despite this, the use of terms like "disgusting" and "freakshow" demonstrates the assumption that this perspective will speak to the station's target audience (suburban women living in houses with for the most part traditional families, who would presumably be interested in discussions of social mores generally).71 The gender prescriptivism apparent in the previous examples is a recurrent feature of the talk, with hosts occasionally using strong language to make claims they think will also jibe with the personal politics of their target audience (often making claims about what's appropriate for men and worrfen). For example, when talking about nudist beaches, Sheriff comments that: "If you can kick your breast and throw it over your shoulder, that's an indication you shouldn't be there." Using comedic and ironic language, hosts on these stations make strong and often prescriptive claims regarding gender, drawing on sexual stereotypes that are not very different than those of radio comedy's "loose women" and "lavender gentlemen," to, they hope, create programming that is titillating but not harsh or out-of-date. How are comments that border on the homophobic and sexist permitted? They are allowed because these comments are delivered using ironic language, which has long allowed speakers to make outrageous and often contradictory claims without ever

71 This particular story was part of a larger discourse regarding homosexuality (or "lavender gentlemen") on Mix. Other examples include: a giggling discussion on Thursday, regarding a Superbowl player who went to McGill, and his position on the team, as the "long snapper." Also, as part of the Valentine's Day contest, the hosts introduced a sub-contest called "sensual sound effects." Callers were asked to call in to provide sound effects to accompany a reading of an excerpt from a short story. The station selected as its featured excerpt, the story that was the basis for the film Brokeback Mountain, known for its portrayal of a love story between two men. Through the callers' over-enthusiastic sound effects (which, in the end accompanied a rather tame segment of the story-the door creaks, baby cries, etc.), the hosts creatively suggest the idea of sex between two men, and make audiences nervously anticipate the innocent callers' sexual sound effects, which never occur. This structure suggests a squeamishness towards the idea of sex between two men, perhaps representing programmers' idea of their audience's politics. Because of the way the contest was constructed, the hosts and guests never make any explicitly homophobic comments, they merely play along with the racy contest's rules. However, the contest's design is based on assumptions of heteronormativity, and through the playful false squeamishness they create, hosts are able to reinforce traditional masculine norms without making any unambiguously bigoted comments regarding homosexuality, while impressing their audiences through skirting around an issue without saying anything definitively offensive.

122 committing to one (potentially offensive) position. Bethan Benwell, in her "Ironic Discourse," examines the linguistic codes used in the discourses of comedy and irony in British men's magazines. She argues that through strategically employed ironic discourses, writers for these magazines can put forth various sexist comments without having to reveal whether or not they believe them. Irony allows them to oscillate between different forms of masculinity-specifically, between sensitive men and conservative "new lads" who want to return to past sexist attitudes and gender polarization-while always evading having to reveal their actual personalities (3). This ironic evasion is a business strategy: magazine readers thus have the opportunity to engage with more feminine ideas, such as self-improvement through consumption, without feeling emasculated, and unwilling to buy the magazine (and the magazine can profit through selling spots to consumer product advertisers). Benwell argues, then, that men's magazines understand men's anxieties in relation to feminism and consumerism, and use irony as a means of overcoming them through providing multiple, unstable forms of masculinity, which accommodate and capitalize on these anxieties (17). This contradictory and evasive talk has clearly been adopted as a speaking strategy by today's radio hosts. Rosalind Gill, who has done much work on post- feminism, has also researched British music radio, puzzling over its contradictory sexism: My ... analysis of Radio One DJ talk indicates that much of the 'old' or outright sexism still persists in its perennial forms. What is interesting, it seems to me, is the contradictory nature of presenters' talk concerning gender (and indeed a whole range of subjects). This contradictoriness means that it is not unusual to hear the likes of woman driver 'jokes' and derogatory remarks about 'mothers-in-law' within moments of expressions of outrage by the same presenter at the continued existence of sexual discrimination! (Gill "Ga Ga" 118) Post-feminism's playful, yet matter-of-fact and back-to-basics approach to gender difference and to gender talk, combined with talk radio's common sense, comedic and politically incorrect style of speaking results in a certain kind of contradictory and ironic gendered talk on today's radio stations. This contradictoriness means that hosts can say one thing, and then say the opposite, without ever revealing which they actually believe. It is by adopting this slipperiness of language that Top 40 hosts can get away with

123 making potentially offensive claims-instead, these comments turn into merely more sexually spicy, but supposedly harmless commentary, targeted at a right wing suburban audience. Hosts can also get away with this kind of comment because the ability to be slippery with language is celebrated on the station, as a demonstration of the deejay's competence in this masculine role. The linguistically agile radio personality was defined as masculine in radio's early days; it was reinforced by the 1950s' Top 40 deejay, and again by the ranting bad boys of talk radio (and even by the wacky Top 40 morning zoo hosts of that era). On the radio, such linguistic feats of on-air derring-do are considered impressive; they contribute to the titillation and humour factor of the programming while also reinforcing the male host's position of authority. Through the adoption of post- feminism and talk radio's speaking strategies, and because of the way the masculine deejay role has always celebrated linguistic agility, these stations are able to embrace linguistic irony and contradictory talk, particularly regarding titillating subjects such as gender. By drawing on these discourses, the hosts can speak frankly about gender in traditional ways and so reaffirm traditional gender roles on the radio. The ironic post- feminist talk also fends off critics who say that their perspective is out-of-date or inaccurate: who can complain, if hosts are just being ironic? The adoption of these sets of discourses provides programmers with an excuse not to have to change their gendered perspective on the audience and their gendered programming strategies. In the masculine hosting context, what, then, is the female host's role? The female host occupies a contradictory position (and one not unlike what a "post-feminist woman" would face today in the regular work world), where she must at once embody the oft-denigrated female, while also proving herself able to fulfill the masculine role of on-air deejay. The female deejay must be explicitly feminine for two reasons: first, to facilitate the traditional gendered talk of the station (and to provide the same vocal variety that first made radio interesting in its early days), and second, to prove that the station's programming is not sexist. As the above examples make clear, the talk on these stations often revolves around gender difference, and a re-drawing of boundaries between typical men and typical women. As a result, hosts are often called upon to play the role of the typical woman or man, particularly in the more prescriptive chat sections of the

124 show.72 The following example demonstrates these performances of femininity and masculinity, and by its length (Sheriff returns to this same topic over and over, claiming it's "a big one"), once again demonstrates how important this male-female dynamic is to the show's programming. At the end of the newscast on Monday, Sheriff brings up the topic of a Scottish study released that day which examined men's and women's different responses to sickness. The study's findings are explained as follows: Sheriff: When guys get sick, it's a myth that they whine more than women. That they want to be nursed. Lisa: It's an urban legend, is it? It's called sucky-baby-dom. Sheriff: I've got suckybaby-itis... I don't believe it, but according to these guys women complain. But men, when they complain they complain a lot... Lisa: Maybe it's just that women complain about everything anyways? Sheriff: Yeah, I love that, look at that! Taking one for the team! Lisa: I'm just owning up. Sheriff: Because women always complain, but when men do, they do a lot. Lisa: Men grunt. Sheriff: Wow, call The Gazette! Stop the presses! [speaking in a more serious tone] Call in if you think it's true in your house. This conversation is then continued later on in the show in Sheriffs later newscast: Sheriff: More on that Scottish study. It reveals that guys should take care of themselves, because women won't. Males continue to be influenced by society to never show pain, be vulnerable, and not to cry. Other guys will call him a wimp. So the only way to reveal emotions is through anger and competitiveness. While women are encouraged to vent, cry, be emotional, and always be volatile, to show feelings. Some women can't help but do this every minute of every day, every day of the year. Lisa: [in a crying voice] What are you talking about?

72 Since I did not conduct interviews with programmers and hosts, I do not know if female or male hosts were told to act in any obviously gendered ways. However, Wollman and Goodlads' work shows that commercial radio stations have in the past requested their deejays to perform in certain traditionally gendered ways as a strategy for attracting a gendered audience.

125 Sheriff: Then they wonder why guys don't seem to hear them when they talk about something important. And guys, trust me on this one, when women say they want a sensitive, emotional guy, they are lying through their dentures. Another of life' s many mysteries. Cat: I've learned so much in the last thirty seconds, including that you date women with dentures. Alongside a discussion of typical gender roles-women's and men's differential responses to sickness-there is call for the male host to perform and represent the male perspective, and the female host, his opposite. Through irony and linguistic play, the hosts can at once speak about the social influence on gender roles, without acknowledging their own role in propagating these ideas, and while remaining prescriptive and traditional in their own talk regarding gender (and by focusing on the crazy ways men and women act when they are sick, rather than on the nuances of the study, they succeed in creating slightly sensational programming). Through ironically ignoring more modern ideas regarding the socialization of gender, the hosts make a typical post-feminist argument against politically correct characterizations of gender. Lisa's and Suzanne's presence, as well as their complicity and willingness to play the role of the less authoritative, typical female, allow the station to deny any criticism regarding the lack of women on air and fend off attacks regarding their traditional portrayal of gender more generally. The above example also highlights the fact that Lisa is comedically and linguistically able. However, because Lisa is working in the masculine radio domain, where that trait is defined as male, she must work extra hard in order to justify her presence on air. There are hints that this dynamic permeates the programming-for example, this conversation occurs on Friday morning: Cat: Murray and I had our first fight today. It didn't take long. It usually happens in the first hour. Lisa: But you haven't yet made up yet? Sheriff: There's going to be no making up on my part. Cat: I like to call it artistic differences. Lisa: You mean autistic differences? Ha ha... Sheriff: You know, you get faster the longer I know you.

126 Cat: Whatever you're eating or drinking, keep doing it. It makes my job a lot easier. Lisa justifies her on-air presence by once again drawing on her femininity. Specifically, she tells jokes that only a woman would be allowed to say, often making fun of women, or herself, and by in particular making comments that are more outrageously sexist and sexual than the men. In a sense, her comments show a contradictory post-feminist perspective: she draws on her position as a woman, in order to matter-of-factly mock herself and other women for not adhering to the norms of traditional femininity. In line with Gill's understanding of the sexual implications of post-feminism, Lisa often makes explicitly sexual comments and criticism about herself and other women. As an example, this excerpt from Tuesday's Player report, where Lisa focuses on the new single of pop singer Pink, called "Stupid Girls," demonstrates her contradictory joking with regards to women: There's a new Pink song out, spoofing some of Hollywood's high-profile helium heads, as she calls them, calling them out too ... [Pink] says they can give her a hard time over the Stupid Girls video, which makes fun of Paris, Lindsay etc. She says she's received a lot of calls from women mad because she's slagging them off, but the estrogen-challenged and fearless Pink grabs the phone and gives them that "what for." She loves stirring things up. This comment is followed by a clip from Pink about her new husband, motocross star Carey Hart, and how she married him because he's an aggressive motocross driver, and a "winner." Lisa follows this up with, "Yeah! Attagirl! She's got a few curves he can check out." Pink's comments perfectly embody the contradictions of post-feminist women: because she is an "estrogen-challenged" feminist, Pink has fun and is not afraid to say what she thinks. While she often speaks out on behalf of women (later on she is quoted as listing several Hollywood women she admires), she also uses her voice to make fun of some "girls" for being too commercial and shallow, and throughout this clip and the later

The following is just one example of Lisa's making fun of women for sexual reasons. During the newscast, Sheriff reveals that the sports magazine Sports Illustrated (also known for its female models) is claiming that Canada won't win many medals at the upcoming 2006 Olympics. Lisa retorts, "What do they know? Their swimsuit models are hags."

127 one, reinforces traditional ideas of femininity and masculinity (she admires her husband's aggression). Lisa's later comments show that there is a homology between the musician's post-feminist opinions and her own: while she celebrates Pink's new single, supporting a female artist, and her ability to "stir things up," she also denigrates Pink by bringing up the spectre of the rabid feminist, and also making sexual comments about her "curves." In this way, the music on the station is in line with the ideas of the hosts, working in a tight post-feminist package to at once prove that feminism is no longer needed (women can be on the radio), but still reinforcing traditional ideas of gender (their role on the air is limited: they must both perform femininity, and to prove they should be there, they display their linguistic chops, a traditionally masculine trait, in a traditionally masculine manner-by insulting women for not conforming to the norms of traditional femininity). As the previous example displayed, in her contradictory gender talk, Lisa often draws on playful post-feminist discourses to make fun of women for not fulfilling the sexual norms of traditional femininity. For example, the following is a transcript from the cutesy nicknames competition. After listing some of the entries (which Lisa claims made her "so nauseous I couldn't see straight"), they draw a winner, and then get one last caller on the air: Cat: Debbie called - she's on the phone. She says she should win [the prize, a gift certificate to a lingerie store]; her boyfriend calls her granny because she wears granny underwear. So she needs to win. Lisa [to Debbie]: Why do you [wear granny underwear]? You could get them with less cover. Debbie: My boyfriend wants a leopard print thong. Lisa: Granny fanny! ... You know, there's a happy medium between dental floss and granny panties! The male hosts may be permitted to flirt with the female callers, but only Lisa can make sexual comments that criticize them.74 Her linguistic agility thus allows her to draw on

Another example contrasts Lisa's ability to make sexual comments about women, with Cat's inability to do anything other than flirt benignly with female callers. During the Player report, Lisa tells of how some of the guys on the radio crew showed her Paris Hilton's pornographic film. She thought the movie was hilarious, seeing Paris and the other women in the film "prop up their chests and flaunt about." Cat

128 her femininity to perform this masculine role (but because she is a female host, she must prove herself by making fun of other women). By using irony and tongue-in-cheek language, just like the male hosts, she can get away with saying potentially offensive things, since she never commits to any one position. Lisa occupies a contradictory but central position on the air: she proves that women have a place on the radio, but that place is limited to a performance of a traditional, often condescending femininity, and to competing with the men by saying things that are more insulting to women than the male hosts would be allowed to say. Perhaps it is best to say that Lisa's presence complements the men's. By employing female hosts, these stations get away with airing racy and traditionally gendered comments (made even more so by the addition of the female hosts' extreme contributions), without the stations being accused of sexism. By adopting post- feminist discourses, most notably irony, the hosts can playfully talk around sex and gender difference, maintaining the same traditional understanding and assumptions regarding gender roles, without being accused of sexism or of being out-of-date. How does this gendered talk fit into the overall programming strategy of Montreal Top 40 stations? Irony is open to interpretation, and closed to criticism. Because hosts never commit to one position, they never offend (though, there are limits to this, and though these stations have extended those limits by hiring female hosts, they never go beyond a certain point in their linguistic play). Ironic talk is a strategy for creating sensational programming that is also least objectionable programming. By drawing on easy-to-understand gendered scripts and knowledge, their programming alienates few listeners or advertisers. Since gender is portrayed in traditional ways, listeners and advertisers immediately recognize the stereotypes, which perhaps helps the station sell their gendered audience construct to advertisers. Such easily accessible programming fits with a gendered understanding of women's tastes, since women are presumed to enjoy the mainstream and the discussion of social mores, while sex talk and more outrageous gender controversy-all more flagrant on Mix than Q 92-would presumably better target a younger audience. Through employing spicy, scripted gender talk, these stations can easily attract and sell their commodity audience, without offending other potential interrupts: "All right! Stop right there, here's Pink on Mix 96." Because Lisa is a woman she can talk about sex more openly, using this ability to make fun of women in sexual ways. The male hosts would not be permitted to say many of the things Lisa says, because they might be accused of sexism.

129 listeners. This "spicy" conversation is designed to cut through the station's distracting rhythm, to attract female listeners to form an intimate bond with the authoritative male hosts, and a sisterly connection with the female sidekicks, before allowing the predominantly female target audience to get back to their housework. With their ironic hosts, and particularly ironic female hosts, who espouse matter-of-fact, post-feminist perspectives on gender, these stations can get away with presenting a traditional perspective on the subject, without being accused of being out-of-date, or alienating listeners. Montreal Top 40's gender talk works in combination with their claims to "publicness," suggesting that this station's listeners chose this programming, including its traditional, often mocking portrayal of women. This is clearly problematic, considering no such choice has necessarily been made.

130 i Conclusion Throughout this thesis, I have argued that Top 40 music radio's traditionally gendered targeting strategies have changed little in the genre's more than fifty-year history. Through an analysis of existing literature on women and radio, and of trade magazines, I have shown that these stations never did operate based on an accurate portrait of their listening audience, preferring to imagine this audience and its tastes which has resulted in a particularly gendered understanding of radio listenership. As a result, despite a shift in focus towards a female audience, these early gendered imaginings and targeting strategies remained for the most part unchanged. Two other factors also allowed these stations to continue to program in the same ways, and to stereotypically represent gender on air. These stations adopted discourses of "publicness" and of post-feminism. I have shown how these discourses operate on today's Top 40 radio, how they provide a limiting portrayal of gender for these stations' female listeners, who, sold as a commodity to advertisers, are falsely made to seem as if, by choosing one station over another, they are endorsing that station's programming as a whole. In fact, the consistency, across stations, of the genre's conservatively gendered programming means that there is little choice to be made, and in fact, women may not even be listening. Top 40 radio has a particular relationship with women. From radio's early days, women were absent from the air. The same traditional ideas regarding femininity are used to explain why women are still less often on the air today. Part of the reason for their exclusion from the airwaves is the fact that from radio's early days, women were understood as housewives, with a corresponding understanding of their traditional gendered tastes. As trade magazines reveal, in the eyes of these stations, women are still passive, irrational, emotional and interested in the commercial; they still have poor musical tastes. Despite a successful shift in focus in the 1980s to the newly "discovered" now-viable female audience, the male audience's tastes continued to carry a higher value, while programmers' understanding of female tastes (and their portrayals of gender on air) did not significantly change. This continuing traditional idea of women can explain today's Top 40 radio's distracting rhythm, a rhythm that has come to seem appropriate for women's routines. It can also explain the fact that radio stations in Montreal today

131 continue to employ a majority of male hosts who flirt with their presumably female audiences. Through these female-targeting strategies, the station makes obvious the appearance that their listeners are women, giving their commodity audience a clearly defined personality that is easily understood by advertisers. This is part of their overall need to attract and seem to attract a particular audience in order to gain advertising revenue. Though Top 40 is a commercial medium, from its early days, an idea of "publicness" has been associated with the genre. From Top 40's beginning, these stations have claimed they provided a musical public service through playing the tunes demanded by public tastes. This idea of the station's musical playlist being driven by popular tastes continues today, despite the fact that radio's role is more along the lines of a gatekeeper, narrowing down choices for an audience that is not thought to have advanced musical preferences. Drawing on talk radio's programming strategies, hosts' talk on these stations also works to create a sense that the station's audience comes together as a community, with the station playing an integral role in that community. While these stations do provide useful information to the local public, and rightfully attract listeners because of this, their claims to "publicness" do not reflect the reality of the situation: namely that these stations' programmers prioritize the commercial over the public. This discourse of publicness is a smart commercial strategy, allowing these stations to not only mask commercial motives, but also to make the powerful argument that listeners chose to listen to this station, thereby tacitly endorsing the traditional ideas regarding gender perpetrated and perpetuated by the genre's programmers. This traditional understanding of the gendered audience, and continuing use of gendered targeting strategies is then accompanied by today's Top 40 stations' traditional, yet slightly updated, post-feminist portrayal of gender. Just as in radio's early days, hosts create comedy and shock value through a focus on traditional gender difference and norms, though today's hosts are more flirty, fun and sexual in their often-prescriptive banter. Hosts draw on ironic language to be able to say potentially controversial, especially sexist things, without offending. This allows male hosts to show off their linguistic skills, which have, throughout radio's history, been associated with masculinity. At the same time, it places female hosts in a difficult position: they are

132 forced to prove they have the supposedly masculine skills and authority to be on air, but are expected to use them in a uniquely feminine manner, for instance, by saying outrageously gendered things that male hosts, in the post-feminist era, would not get away with. It is the female hosts' jokes that best reflect the station's post-feminist discourses: they celebrate women, while at the same time mocking those who do not conform to the norms of femininity, without recognizing the inherent contradiction therein. Post-feminism thus allows the hosts to portray gender in traditional ways when convenient, and when necessary, to update these traditional portrayals of gender through fun and sexual talk. By suggesting that female audiences choose to listen to these stations, and that these stations in some sense represent the audience's interests and tastes, Top 40's limiting portrayals of gender become particularly problematic. There are two elements of the programming I have yet to fully address in this thesis. First, why would a station targeting a predominantly female audience portray gender according to a traditional and arguably out-dated set of ideas, using talk that is often potentially offensive and condescending to women? The best explanation is that this represents a continuation of the media's long-standing denigration of the female listenership-which once manifested itself in an exclusion of women from the commodity audience, but has outlasted that practice and continues in the form of an underselling and underestimation of women's tastes generally. As Wollman and Goodlad note, many stations are aware that their programming may not reflect what some of their listeners want to hear, but if it works as part of their overall commercial strategy, they are loath to change. Montreal Top 40 stations' traditional and often condescending portrayals of gender show that they are not overly concerned with presenting programming that might flatter or engage a female listener. In discussing radio's rhythmic structure, designed to keep housewives company, Barnard argues: "contemporary radio does not simply act as a barrier against boredom or as a setter of time boundaries for the day, it also peddles fantasy of a deliberately modest, yet still powerful kind. A very subtle form of oppression is at work here" (Barnard On Radio 146). His words apply equally to these stations' programming as a whole. As Wollman has argued, as a result of the bias against women in the commodity audience system, women learn not to expect to be targeted or respected in media programming (16). Historically, Top 40 radio has treated women in

133 the same way, programming ad-heavy, dull and male host-biased shows for its female audiences. Montreal Top 40 radio's traditional portrayals of gender, and their gendered means of targeting a female audience tells these stations' female listeners that they cannot expect programming that reflects or targets their actual interests and concerns. Top 40 radio programming's cultural impact becomes the setting (and fulfillment) of low expectations amongst women listeners, which is made all the more disappointing by radio's potential ability to serve its local listening audience. Second, why would these stations employ a discourse of "publicness" traditionally associated with masculinity, in order to attract and seem to attract predominantly female listeners? Importantly, programmers did not wholesale adopt talk radio's use of this discourse of "publicness." Rather than creating the appearance of an on-air public sphere where men could assert their traditional masculine identities, Top 40 markets itself by creating the appearance of a public sphere opted into by traditional- minded women. In her analysis of TV soap operas, Charlotte Brundson argues that through a variety of strategies, including the foregrounding of moral debates and personal lives, "the action of soap opera... as it were colonizes the public masculine sphere, representing it from the point of view of the personal. It is through the concerns and values of the personal sphere that the public sphere is represented in soap operas" (Brundson 78). There is a similar precedent in the radio world: in the medium's early days, daytime hosts used strategies to create a sense of a public amongst the housewife audience. In their talk about everyday life in the city, centring around coupons, kids, and celebrity gossip, in their debates over matters of interest to the social public sphere, including mores and morals of everyday life and the rules of gender and romance, and in their claims of "publicness" Montreal Top 40 can be seen to be creating an updated version of this female public sphere. Through their talk, these stations create a space that appears to represent a female public's concerns and perspective, with femininity understood in traditional ways. Just like talk radio, these stations create a place where it is okay for women to be women again in the traditional sense, to have traditionally

75 On a basic, physical level, this can partly be viewed as the result of the feminist movement's demonstration that women in the 1980s were not just gaining wage-power, but were increasingly joining the world of public affairs. Women now often listen to the radio in their cars, on the way to work, and so the physical listening environment might have forced programmers to at least appear to update their programming slightly.

134 female tastes and lifestyles (and a place that somewhat aggressively defends these tastes and lifestyles against attack from those who might call them out-of-date or sexist). In other words, these stations make a classic case for post-feminism, and claim that this post-feminist perspective is one shared by their female listeners. As a result, Top 40 becomes a space for the re-negotiation and re-articulation of a certain right-wing femininity in the face of social change, convenient for radio broadcasters who use this strategy to seem to be attracting a female audience, but due to the problematic nature of post-feminism, negatively impacting any actual female listeners and society as a whole. Not only do these stations' creation of the appearance of an on-air female public sphere likely not reflect actual listeners' tastes and opinions (if in fact this station has attracted actual female listeners), but female listeners' tastes are being voiced by mainly male hosts (with programming decisions being made by a statistically male biased team of programmers). Female listeners are told that they have chosen to tune in to this station. But in the small Montreal Anglophone radio market, with programmers acting to narrow down the musical and programmatic differences between possible stations (note the similarity between Q 92's and Mix's gendered programming) and generally accustoming women to lower their expectations, what do female listeners really choose when they tune in?

I argue that the situation is better understood in terms of Probyn's "choiceoisie:" listeners are told they have made a choice, where in fact, they have few options (and perhaps this choice was not even made, since it is quite possible that the listening audience these stations claims to have attracted may not be the same audience that has actually tuned in). As history shows, audience change will not necessarily force radio stations to evolve, and so perhaps only by changing these stations' relationships with their audiences, by putting women on air and in decision-making roles, and allowing them to speak to female audiences, could change begin. Finally, there is one more reason why Montreal Top 40 radio's programming, with its discourses of post-feminism and "publicness," is destructive: because these stations do have an actual listening public, and a mandated responsibility towards them. While in this work I have largely ignored these stations' relationship with their actual audience, despite the ratings system's bias, station's disinterest in understanding the

135 actual audience, and the fact that the audience these stations claim may not reflect the audience that has actually tuned in, an audience of some sort exists. According to BBM ratings for the fall of 2006, 91.2% of Canadians aged 12 and over listened to the radio for at least 15 minutes per week, with the average listener tuning in for 20.4 hours per week (http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/publications/reports/PolicyMonitoring /2007/bpmr2007.htm#s2, accessed march 29, 2008). In order to gain a broadcast licence, Canadian commercial radio stations must agree to fulfill certain requirements for their actual listening public. These responsibilities are laid out in the Canadian Radio- Television and Telecommunications Commission's Broadcasting Act.77 This act was updated in 1991 to specifically legislate that radio stations adhere to the "Sex-Role Portrayal Code for Television and Radio Programming," as laid out by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (Letter from Claire Menard to Rob Braide, February 22, 1999). The CAB's guidelines are outlined in this statement of intent: This Code is intended to assist in overcoming systemic discrimination portrayed in broadcast programming, based on gender. Television and radio programming and commercial messages shall strive to present an equitable representation of women and men in various social and occupational roles, at home and at work outside the home. It is the responsibility of television and radio broadcasters to ensure that the provisions of the Code are brought to the attention of those persons within their employ entrusted with program development and production, program acquisition decisions, and commercial message production. (http://www.cab-acr.ca/english/social/codes/sexrole.shtm#l. accessed May 9, 2008) Throughout the code, CAB sets pro-active guidelines requesting that broadcasters attempt to portray women and men in as much diversity as possible, specifically asking that representations of women in sexual ways be curbed, that broadcasters limit the use of

76 According to Berland's analysis of a 1990 Statistics Canada report, 90% of the time spent tuned in to radio stations was claimed specifically by commercial radio ("The Case" 105). 77 Just like the American "Radio Act," the Canadian version establishes that these stations hold a responsibility to their public, stating that Canadian broadcasters should: "serve the needs and interests, and reflect the circumstances and aspirations, of Canadian men, women and children, including equal rights..." (http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/publications/reports/PolicyMonitoring /2007/bpmr2007.htm#s2, accessed March 29, 2008).

136 language that can imply sexual stereotypes, that they employ equal numbers of women and men in news roles, and that they present an overall balance of voices. Finally, these guidelines state that: The objective of equal representation is recognized and the portrayal of women and men shall be comparable to, and reflective of, their actual social and professional achievements, contributions, interests and activities. (http://www.cab-acr.ca/english/social/codes/sexrole.shtm# 1. accessed May 9, 2008). These guidelines demonstrate an awareness on the part of the industry group, and the federal government, that women and men have not in the past had equal roles in the radio business, and that this has likely had a negative social impact on listeners. Both Mix 96 and Q 92, in their application for renewal of broadcast licences in 1999 agreed to these regulations, in order to have their licences renewed until 2006 (Letter from Rob Braide to Claire Menard, February 22, 1999; Letter from Gilles Senecal to Manon Cloutier, March 26, 1999). Despite their claims to gender equality, as I have shown throughout, both these stations use language in stereotypically gendered, often sexual ways, employ a male biased on-air staff, and portray women and men in ways that are very likely not in accordance with their current position in society. For these reasons, I argue that though these stations create the appearance of providing a service to their listening publics, and of creating a specifically female version of the public sphere, in fact they do not fulfill their mandated obligations to their actual public. While such legislation is a good beginning to help improve these stations' problematic programming, Top 40 programmers have developed numerous flexible and robust strategies for remaining unchanged.

Both stations also added detailed letters to their licence renewal forms to explain why their station had no problem regarding gender equality. In its broadcast renewal licence, Mix 96's parent company, Standard Radio, noted that it participates in several initiatives designed to attract and maintain female employees and employees who belong to minority groups. In particular, Standard radio acted as founding member of a group called Canadian Women in Communication, which provides scholarships and training to women in the industry (Renewal of Licence, Standard Radio, November 18, 1998). In their licence renewal, Q 92 points out that they hold focus groups to ensure "equal opportunity to everyone regardless of sex, citizenship and physical handicap," concluding by saying that: "we are firmly convinced that there is no equity problem in our practices regarding on-air presence" (Renewal of licence CFQR-FM, August 30, 1999).

137 While these conservative strategies are certainly formidable, scholars and cultural critics have played a role too, if only that of complicity, in allowing Top 40's blatant gendering to remain anachronistically unchanged throughout its fifty-year history. As a result of the lack of focused critical attention on the medium, Top 40, and commercial radio more generally, has remained background noise not just for its female listeners but for scholars as well. As Caroline Mitchell notes, radio has been called the "Cinderella" medium because of the lack of attention paid to its study in the academic world ("Introduction" 4), like pre-Prince Charming Cinderella's invisibility in her sphere. By paying critical attention to radio, one can begin to understand what it is, how it operates, how it is gendered, what its impact is on listeners as a result, and what its responsibilities are. This work represents my attempt to provide some insight on an oft-ignored medium.

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