{"id":616,"date":"2004-07-11T20:05:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-11T20:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2004\/07\/11\/616\/"},"modified":"2015-02-17T20:23:22","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T01:23:22","slug":"616","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=616","title":{"rendered":"Soda Executives and Mountain Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

COKE . . . REAL<\/strong>: I read an article the other day about the Coca-Cola corporation. It seems that there\u2019s been a whole lot of infighting about who should be the emperor of the Cokean Empire since the death of CEO Roberto Goizueta in 1997. Two guys have come and gone since then, and a third guy was recently pulled out of retirement to get things back on track. Not that Coke is losing money, mind you. It\u2019s just not growing as fast as in the mid 90s, and stock prices have come down a bit from the high point of $88 in 1998. (But hey \u2013 a whole lot of stock prices have come down since then; it\u2019s pretty clear that the stock market was riding a bubble of speculation in the late 1990\u2019s, and the bubble finally burst in 2000). Still, the big money people got spoiled by Coke\u2019s rapid stock price increases in the mid-1990s, and thus they\u2019re behaving badly under the present circumstances.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t recap the story, you can check out the May 31, 2004 edition of Fortune if you\u2019re interested. Still, it\u2019s a pretty good read. It reminds me a lot of the Roman Empire <\/strong> and how they selected their emperors (thus my allusion to the \u201cCokean Empire\u201d above). Which was through a lot of intrigue and backstabbing (literal backstabbing, as opposed to the metaphoric kind in the modern corporate world \u2013 most of the time, anyway!). I really think that Rome\u2019s biggest flaw was its lack of a stable system for the selection of leadership. It seems to me that the Roman Empire put a whole lot of energy into fighting amidst themselves over who should run the place, and those internal battles gave a leg up to all of the barbaric groups waiting in the hinterlands to breech the borders and pillage the wealthy cities. Eventually they had their day, and the Dark Ages <\/strong> followed.<\/p>\n

Well, the Coke situation certainly won\u2019t trigger a new Dark Age (unless you\u2019re totally hooked on the stuff, which I\u2019m not; I gave up drinking Coke before I turned 25, as it\u2019s just so sticky and sweet; ditto for Pepsi). Still, you\u2019ve got to wonder about the social waste caused by all that political fighting in the corporate world. And in the governmental sector too. And the military is far from immune from it also. Ditto for the non-profit sector. But hey, I\u2019m not Polyanna; I know that the social and economic alternatives (socialism and communism) turn out to be much worse. Nevertheless, I can\u2019t help wonder what would happen if the human race turned it\u2019s ego and greed settings down just a little, so that people could learn to cooperate a bit more. Yea, wouldn\u2019t that be nice. Oops, wrong planet<\/strong>!<\/p>\n

WMMT 88.7 . . . REALER<\/strong>: As you might guess, I\u2019m also quite disaffected by modern day entertainment, especially radio. It\u2019s just about totally profit-oriented, all wrapped around advertising and sales (except for public radio, but that’s not all that entertaining). The recording artists themselves sometimes lament the end of fun radio because of profit-maximizing investors; e.g., Radio<\/strong> by Elvis Costello, The Last DJ <\/strong> by Tom Petty, and Round The Dial <\/strong> by the Kinks. But I just found a radio station where the fun still reigns. It\u2019s called WMMT, a listener-supported station way out in Whitesburg, Kentucky.<\/p>\n

What kind of stuff do they play? All kinds of stuff! As you would expect for southern Kentucky, there\u2019s a good bit of blue grass and country, including a dose of the religious stuff (like \u201cThere\u2019s No Back Door To Heaven\u201d and \u201cIf You Can\u2019t Walk on Water, Get In The Boat\u201d). But they also mix in rock oldies (lots of Elvis, of course), classic rock, new rock, ska, folk, jazz, and who knows what else. And don\u2019t worry, there\u2019s a weekly show for feminist and gay perspectives too. WMMT\u2019s variety makes it a rarity in this age of strict radio playlists written by the Marketing Department. Since they\u2019re not a commercial station, the DJ\u2019s at WMMT don\u2019t have to account for every micro-second of air time. Thus, they often leave dead space between songs and between their own comments. Once you get used to it,though, it\u2019s rather quaint. But with those totally authentic mountain drawls, you’re not always sure what they\u2019re saying when they do talk!<\/p>\n

Still, I find WMMT extremely refreshing after the hyper-commercialized radio formats that we\u2019re constantly fed here on the East Coast. The DJ\u2019s out in Whitesburg seem to be having fun, taking their time, and sometimes even injecting a thought that comes to mind while a tune is playing. And the web site invites anyone passing through lovely Whitesburg to drop in for a friendly visit! Try that at your local Clear Channel affiliate.<\/p>\n

If you want to check it out, their web site is www.appalshop.org\/wmmt\/<\/a>. I suggest that you get the live broadcast stream via www.radio-locator.com. Don\u2019t go thru www.live365.com (which handles the stream for WMMT), which has become another hard-sell advertising site, the kind I definitely avoid. Otherwise you have to register with live365 (and thus add to your daily spam quotient), and they want you to download their special media player (which might come with adware and data-collection software). In other words, back in corporation city.<\/p>\n

WMMT . . . \u201cThe Voice of the Mountains\u201d. A bracing wind blowing in from way out yonder, through the magic of the Internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

COKE . . . REAL: I read an article the other day about the Coca-Cola corporation. It seems that there\u2019s been a whole lot of infighting about who should be the emperor of the Cokean Empire since the death of CEO Roberto Goizueta in 1997. Two guys have come and gone since then, and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5179,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions\/5179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}