Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

Nostalgia

In 21^st century conversations about radio, nostalgia is all but a given, especially as developments in on-demand streaming and other digital media platforms accelerate. For many adults who grew up in the 20^th century and to a lesser extent afterward, the idea of radio sparks quotidian childhood memories. I talk regularly with my childhood friends about the rebellious freedom of listening to “alternative rock” station Live 105 in high school and developing more mature tastes with “adult album alternative” station KFOG.[1] We may remember individual on-air personalities and voices; we may remember a general feeling of pastness intertwined with presence and little else. Kate Lacey notes that there has long been “a sense of foreboding about the new technological future and a certain nostalgia for what went before” in public discourse (2013, 28). She argues that throughout the development of sound recording and transceiving technology, “the quest for audiorealism was at least in part motivated by a nostalgia for the real, a desire to envelop these uncanny experiences in the cloak of authenticity and the simulation of presence” (ibid., 61). Radio can and does—at times—mobilize these nostalgic discourses of authenticity to various ends. In WFHB, it overtly manifests in regular weekly programs Golden Age Radio, which, per its online description, features “music from the great American Songbook, jazz, pop standards, and Broadway tunes from [sic] 1920s through the 1950s;” Firehouse Theater, in which “modern productions are mixed with ‘Golden Age’ Old Time Radio (OTR) classics;” and all-vinyl show For the Record. One radio colleague I interviewed suggested it would serve the station well to expand our range of pastness-based programming:

We have a gap between our standard shows and then the overnight shows, you know, psychedelic stuff and jazz, etcetera. But we don’t have anything that addresses those Generation Xers that were out there listening to, you know, the New Wave stuff in the 80s, or the grunge stuff in the 90s. I’d like to see a show… that sort of fuses those two into a Generation X-type thing that, you know, on a weekend or night or whatever, that focuses on some of that stuff that’s more dance-oriented, uptempo type of music… I do think that if we can look at drawing that group in that are the business people right now, that are in their 40s and 50s and 60s, once you get that group in, you know, then there’s a trickle-down effect… and that’s your donors. (Interview 12)

This suggestion positions nostalgia as a tool of organizational sustainability, an affective strategy for appealing to listeners with the means to support the station (as opposed to “your 20- and 30-somethings, because they’re still paying off their student loans,” and “folks like me… limited because we’ve saved for retirement, and there’s only so much we can do,” continued my colleague).

Certainly, the ethics and politics of nostalgia are fraught. Doreen Massey writes about longing for imagined (and often fictitious) pasts of community coherence as “part of what has given rise to defensive and reactionary responses—certain forms of nationalism, sentimentalized recovering of sanitized ‘heritages,’ and outright antagonism to newcomers and ‘outsiders’” (1994, 147). Svetlana Boym, too, emphasizes the creativity and construction involved in nostalgia, processes requiring critical reflection. She defines nostalgia “as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed… a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (2007). Both Massey and Boym reject the notion that nostalgia must be regressive or isolating. For Massey, the key to “a sense of place [being] progressive; not self-enclosing and defensive, but outward-looking” is in an understanding of the power relations of space and time that inflect nostalgic acts and affects (1994, 148). Boym distinguishes between restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia, the former of which she presents as absolutist and reconstructionist and the latter of which she understands as better suited to accommodate contradictions and ambivalence. “Nostalgics of the [reflective] type are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home is in ruins, or, on the contrary, has just been renovated and gentrified beyond recognition,” she writes; “it is precisely this defamiliarization and sense of distance that drives them to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present, and future” (2007). There is nuance to nostalgia contingent on a kaleidoscopic array of power dynamics.

Many writers have discussed the specific affinity and affordances of sonic practices for the imagined past. Drawing on Boym’s framework in his exploration of “retro” phenomena in pop culture, Simon Reynolds finds that “what reactionary and radical nostalgias share is dissatisfaction with the present, which generally means the world created by the Industrial Revolution, urbanization and capitalism… Where pop nostalgia gets interesting is in that peculiar nostalgia you can feel for the glory days of ‘living in the now’ that you didn’t… actually… live through” (2011, xxvii-xxix). Likewise, Meri Kytö writes about the literal construction of nostalgic imaginaries on Finnish national radio program Äänien ilta (Evening of Sounds), in which producers draw on stock sounds to craft listener-requested soundscapes, many of which are nostalgic in nature.[2] In one sense, these programs are performances of restorative nostalgia, reconstructing as they do remembered soundscapes. In another, they are not so rigid. It should be obvious to the listeners that the sounds they hear are not the exact ones that they remember from their own lives, but are merely similar; further, the multivocality of the requests counters “the persistent myth of the so-called Finnish yhtenäiskultuuri (‘culture of uniformity’), where everybody shares the same values and ideals in every cultural field” (2019, 154). It is self-aware nostalgia, one that, if not inherently progressive, is also not necessarily regressive. In other cases of more polarized politics, though, artistic nostalgia can indeed be revolutionary. Discussing the role of sound in protests as constituting what she calls ephethereal (ephemeral and ethereal) justice, Allie Martin writes that “in the long and creative histories of Black resistance, this kind of justice is not new but is particularly insightful to discuss in the context of gentrifying space, because gentrification so deeply requires and thrives on the erosion of memory” (2024, 488). Drawing on Badia Ahad-Legardy’s theories of afro-nostalgia, Martin argues that “a city that many have continually dismissed as disenfranchised and riot torn is also full to the point of bursting with joyful and pleasurable memories” that, when recalled in moments of nostalgia, offer relief amid crises of injustice (494). This understanding of nostalgia as a force for healing and movement instead of stagnation aligns well with Gwen Raaberg’s discussion of “collage strategies in feminist and minority arts” as “recuperative, restorative… a means of reconnecting fragmented, marginalized objects, activities, and perspectives and constructing a variety of women’s traditions” (1998, 169). Ahad-Legardy, Martin, and Raaberg take into consideration the social positions of these performers and artists who participate in nostalgic activations of space. From this crucial perspective emerges a more thorough and well-grounded understanding of the significance of their appropriations of memories, materials, and space.

In repurposing and activating archival materials, (de/re)contextualization and nostalgia often go hand in hand. Along with his collage work, the aforementioned public defender/artist Matt Gonzalez collects and displays found photography. Unlike the materials he collages, these photographs are generally left in their original form; the art of this area of his work comes from juxtaposition and curation of these vintage snapshots, another form of physical media that for many represents pastness, and the affective generativity therein. “There’s just something wonderful about these moments in people’s lives that triggers a nostalgia in our own lives,” he says, “because they’re basically trying to do what we all do, just live” (in Vochatzer 2023). In radio archives, too, the moments that pique nostalgia are often noteworthy for their relevance to a present moment of deployment.

The serious issues tackled in WFHB Rewind may not offer relief and wonder. An event in July 2025, though, mobilized nostalgia with more joy—albeit still with an undercurrent of urgency.

[1] Live 105 was rebranded as “Dave FM” in 2020 following a large-scale outsourcing of on-air work to programmers recording remotely from centralized hubs for programs across the station’s parent network. In 2023, it reverted to its prior branding as “the Bay Area’s alternative” station Live 105. The last three songs to air on Live 105 as I write this are “Aerials” by System of a Down (2001), “Pardon Me” by Incubus (1999), and “Just a Girl” by No Doubt (1995), all songs Live 105 was playing roughly 20 years ago—arguably tapping into the listeners’ nostalgia for the station itself, which was by the 2000s already largely based on nostalgia for music of the 1990s. KFOG signed off for the last time on 2019 with eight minutes of nautical sounds and one minute of silence, after which its parent company switched its frequency to a simulcast of local sports radio station KNBR.

[2] Suomi mainittu; torilla tavataan!