Introduction: Words from the Editor

In transcribing the confession, what came clear to me was that on its own, language itself was not enough to show the confrontation between the impossibility of reconstruction and the high stakes of the confession. In other words, transcribing vocality made clear that it is impossible to bear witness to the impossibilities and stakes of coerced confessions without accounting for the non-language of the voice. Bringing Moten and Agamben together has given me the space to materialize the idea of heardness in relation to coercion. Moten’s accompaniment gave room for the inflections, movements, speed, and pitch contour of the utterances. In doing so, it emphasized the sounding capacities of the voice. The lacuna has amplified the impossibility of bearing witness, and therefore the need to listen for what remains unsaid in the testimony. In the case of coercion, the unsaid is both the fact of coercion and the seeming inability to refuse it.

Kerner was the last of the pertinent federal initiatives of the modern civil rights era to acknowledge that Caucasian-centeredness and Black exclusion plagued mass media. Without enforcement power, it encouraged station owners to integrate racially. The commission served its purpose. The report publicized the findings, explained why the disturbances occurred, and proposed measures to alleviate the problems and avoid a repeat of the violent Black discontent.

Radio transmitted the sounds of grief to listeners still navigating the contours of broadcasting. The transmission of this liminal death ritual—the eulogy—signaled the coming together of personal expressions of grief, often delivered by politically powerful men, and an unseen audience of citizens invested in the loss of their president. Well before President Roosevelt’s fireside chats, which Jason Loviglio shows “conflated radio listening with national identity,” Harding’s mourning period collapsed the distinction between public and private.

The term “aftermarket” suggests the commercial sale of goods that have outlived their original purpose. Classic radio programs will always bear the markings of their original production and distribution through the flow of commercial radio broadcasting in the sounds, sponsorship spots, references, and other sonic elements within the recordings. However, the formation of a commercial aftermarket for these programs demonstrates how the history of OTR radio recordings as commodities redefines our understanding of classic radio. Like the thrift shop or reclaimed lumber yard, the practices of Radio Yesteryear, Metacom, and Radio Spirits in selling radio recordings as objects that were remastered, duplicated, and packaged for retail transformed classic radio into a commercially viable commodity long after this content had been discarded by the mainstream media industries.

In the early decades of Le Show, Shearer regularly created satiric segments called “Alternative Scenario Playhouse,” dramatized flights of fancy in which Shearer voiced and painstakingly produced his imagined versions of what happened behind the scenes of historical events. While there has not been a segment with that title for nearly a decade, Shearer’s imagined satires of the private interactions among public figures and their families and associates spans presidential administrations from Nixon to Trump. While presidential administrations are unlikely to be forgotten at least in broad strokes, more likely to slip into the memory hole are facets of US history that were poorly covered by journalists when they happened or that the American people would prefer to forget—or, in the cases of the last few examples in this essay—both.

I underscore, however, that Shearer’s pauses are sometimes so long one wonders if he accidentally went off the air. This dead air is first and foremost the signature of refusal to the neoliberal broadcasting game; every second does not need to be filled with wall-to-wall sound and speech. But it’s also an invitation for reflection, of a breath-taking “outside of the vox,” giving listeners time to process what he is saying, giving him some to actively think aloud and laugh. It is in this apposition of dead air and radio silence, so signified by an almost staccato series of pauses, that we hear the struggle of hegemony.

As a producer and curator of folkness, Shearer’s work—ranging from his voice acting on The Simpsons to his collaborative projects with Christopher Guest and Michael McKean in This Is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind—resonates deeply by highlighting societal contradictions and inviting audiences to navigate these complexities with humor, effectively making them co-participants in the satire. Shearer is, thus, not just a master jokesmith, but a creator of mediated moral ecosystems that are inherently participatory. Audiences don’t just get the jokes; they use them, navigationally, to help make sense of the world.