h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why aliens haven't visited

Posted Mar 29, 2003

Somewhere out in space, hurtling silently through the cosmos, is an emissary from earth. The NASA spacecraft, Pioneer 10, the first man-made object to leave the solar system, carries a simple yet poignant message on its endless journey. A plaque affixed to its sturdy metal shell details some basic data about the human species who sent it, simple pictorial renderings of the male and female form, and some other intergalactic morsels from a lonely yet hopeful human race. The probe also contains some music. Beethoven’s Fifth, a famous and obvious example of the capacity of the human imagination to create beauty, is one of the tracks cued up and ready for whatever ears, or cosmic equivalent of such, may happen upon it in the course of their intergalactic wanderings.

Now I know there are aliens. I’ve got some cousins who formed a small militia living in rough hewn huts in the Montana backwoods who’ve seen classified evidence that the US government has kept from us. Alien crash landings, alien abductions, alien rave parties in the forest just beyond the boundaries of the compound. These cousins of mine know it’s true but, true or not, no alien will ever find our little Pioneer 10.

No, alien exposure to the music of our culture is likely to come from a much more banal source than the romantic yet futile messenger NASA fired off several years ago. Let’s think about radio waves – beamed out across the earth every day in their trillions, into our homes and places of work. A rollerblader on the St Kilda foreshore with a walkman, a gentile spectator relaxing at the cricket with a pocket transistor radio. The panel shop in Sunshine and the fashion boutique in South Yarra. They’re all hearing it. It’s a small step to believing that aliens, billions of years more advanced than us, are tuning into our frequencies.

This is why, contrary to the beliefs of my Montana relations, they haven’t visited. They have heard commercial radio.

What sort of creatures must they think we are if all they’ve heard are commercial radio DJs? Do they imagine us all as middle aged males with studied baritone, faux American radio voices? Flabby arses stuffed into some oh-so-casual denim jeans, gut neatly cradled in the front of a pale blue chambray shirt with the station logo embroidered on one side of the chest. Bigoted, sexist cockheads with networks of old industry contacts, strutting around their desiccating dry, air-conditioned high rise radio studios blowing out cliches with all the weight of flakes out of a snowmaking machine.

Commercial radio is the perfect soundtrack for the times we live in. It broadcasts its message of xenophobia, intolerance, and latent aggression like a wartime propaganda speech in perfectly compressed FM band stereo. An endless parade of empty cash and prize giveaways speak directly to a generation of listeners who want to know what’s in it for them before they’ll offer anything the benefit of their atom-sized attention span.

When ‘Immune Deficiency’ by Rail came out they apparently came very close to having it added to the playlist of Melbourne’s FOX FM.
“The next Australian rock song we add is going to be yours,” they were told. Unfortunately they may as well have been saying, “The next Australian rock song we add after Halley’s Comet next visits is going to be yours”. They weren’t going to add an Australian rock song. The very fact that they categorised their song as such, signifying that they had a quota of new Australian songs they could add, said it all. They just couldn’t risk having FOX sound like an Australian radio station.

Anyway, thank God it didn’t happen. When you have a song broadcast on commercial radio a man with a clipboard comes to your door to congratulate you.
“Congratulations!” he smiles. “Your music has been considered bland enough to fit our demographic and will not frighten away the multi-million dollar corporations who advertise with our station.” To demonstrate, he takes some of your songs and a bunch of others, throws them into a portable washing machine and extrudes them after a reasonable time.
“Compare these songs to those played by this grungy other band. YOUR MUSIC IS WHITER THAN WHITE!”

And it is. It’s also odds on to be dumb enough to be understood by the hundreds of cloth-eared idiots who wallpaper their empty lives with the aural pastels that these stations emit. Commercial radio provides the ideal background to the dull, the mundane, and the routine. Let’s face it, that’s the life most of us are living. Songs we’ve heard a thousand times before offset perfectly the routine that likewise, we’ve performed so many thousands of times before. Why question the fact that the photocopier is out of paper, the boss tried to rape you on his desk, or your workmates have just bound, gagged, and set fire to you in a mock WorkCare ad? It’s a triple play and there is no possible way that life right now isn’t as great as the tosswad of a DJ is telling us as he back announces, cross promotes, and scratches his balls.

Commercial radio is searching for the lowest possible denominator. It searches so low it breaks through the earth’s mantle and ends up holding a vaporised can of Jim Beam while Satan bots ciggies from the pack of Horizon 50s up the sleeve of its t-shirt. They survey Satan and he asks for more of the stuff he knows. No rap crap. No “Alternative” shit. Satan likes the classics. Greatest hits from the primordial soup, the Paleolithic era and the Old Testament. Later that day he calls through a workplace request.
“OK Satan, you’re on the air.”
“Yeah, youse bastards rock!”
“What do you want to hear, S-Man?”
“Me and every condemned soul since time began want ‘Light My Fire’ by The Doors.” In the control room they smile. They know their demographic.

Commercial radio has a format narrower than the lane out the back of the station where the DJs go to procure sex. If we were to back down that lane we’d have smashed the side mirrors, destroyed the duco and been on our knees fumbling with the program director’s fly to get a taxi fare home, and still be nowhere near getting any airplay.

Commercial airplay doesn’t happen unwittingly, and when it comes you wear its stain like an adulterer wears lipstick on his collar: guilty and bereft of excuses. It requires a serious commitment by a band to bland out sufficiently to fit the format required. Countless Aussie bands have completely re-recorded songs specifically to try and garner airplay on commercial radio. It doesn’t work but, it WILL give them the chance to despise themselves just that little bit more.

Ultimately, commercial radio has to answer to the shareholders. Imagine if they did add songs by local bands.
“SELL SELL SELL!!!” the brokers scream as the stock exchange floor boils over into chaos. News flashes cut across the scheduled programming. A run on banks ensues and the country careens into depression. The Reserve Bank props up the ratings figures by making a lot of requests for old AC/DC songs.

“OK, we’ve got Ian MacFarlane on the line. How’s work treatin’ ya, Macca?”
“Well, with Gross Domestic Product expressed as a function of the current account deficit…”
“Thaaaaaat’s great, Macman. Got a song?”
“For all those about to invest, we salute you.”
“Aaaaaaaalright! This one goes out to the hard workin’ guys and gals at the Reserve Bank of Australia. Hang in there, only 2 days till the weekend!”
“Can I say a cheerio?”
“If you’re quick, Macca.”
“Ah yeah, I just wanted to say g’day to Alan Greenspan, head of the US Federal Reserve.”
“Rrrrrrrighto! Check ya, Mac. Wonder if he’s hungry. Could almost be Mac time! Har har har…”

Aliens aren’t going to visit. A ‘No alien crap, just great music from the 60s, 70s and 80s’ format just isn’t their style. They prefer the tried and true stuff like the song of Hydrogen, 1.420 gigahertz of frequency, the ubiquitous background hiss produced by a spin-flip transition of hydrogen nuclei. By the time it’s crossed enough light years to reach them it’s a millennia old and they like the retro stuff. Some of the younger, hip aliens are getting into that new short wave scene. They prefer the government station, broadcasting at 328Ghz from the Parks Radio telescope; cutting edge shit, pumping out mangled distortion and white noise to disaffected young aliens malingering on every singularity and space/time curve in the cosmos. The undoubted future of intergalactic radio.

In the end there’s nothing for it. We’re gonna have to juice up those FOX Black Thunders, get under the hood, rip the old engine out and get some real horsepower under there…say a couple of three-stage Saturn V rockets. Then, armed with a shitload of giveaways – FOX visors, shirts and bottles of absolute zero temperature Coke – we’ll start lobbing on alien beaches the whole galaxy over. Then, lookout! Ratings surveys, here we come!

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