Since the inception of radio broadcasting more than a century ago, its most enduring and enticing feature has been its potential for bringing people together. As Blum and Hassanpour (1996) have shown, Kurdish-language radio broadcasting has successfully worked in this way for decades to promote a sense of national unity among a stateless, transnational Kurdish “listening public.” At the same time, various media scholars have perceptively argued that radio broadcasting can also reveal a series of fault lines demarcating the limits of solidarity (Fiske, 2022; Loviglio, 2022). In this paper, I build on this insight while extending Blum and Hassanpour’s analysis of Kurdish radio, adding nuance to our understanding of radio’s collective power by examining the role of music broadcasting in global Kurdish radio in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such an exploration demonstrates, first, how Kurdish music broadcasting has ultimately fostered a sense of community on levels besides the (trans)national, such as among radio and music industry professionals themselves. I also show how Kurdish music broadcasting has simultaneously worked against certain forms of community, illuminating or even reinforcing preexisting divisions between linguistic and musical dialects, political affiliations, and urban and rural contexts. Together, these insights not only highlight the affordances of music broadcasting writ large—thereby challenging understandings of music broadcasting as mere entertainment—but also show how the result of radio’s collective potential is inherently complex and, at times, even contradictory.

Twenty-first-century audio media and listening practices are often framed as a threat to traditional radio, an antiquated medium confined to cars and camping trips. Radio scholars, however, have redefined our scholarly understanding of the medium’s meaning and influence, arguing that radio’s aesthetics and practices in fact permeate and structure many of the ways in which we consume music and sound today (Bottomley 2020, Tacchi 2012, Hilmes 2022, Lacey 2018). In this paper, I build on this capacious understanding of radio to explore how the medium is deployed as a powerful metaphor and aesthetic-material framework for contemporary Black musical production. Pianist and producer Robert Glasper’s three Black Radio albums broadcast a collective sounding of Black musical aesthetics, eschewing traditional genre boundaries, and curating a new format out of sounds typically marketed and sold separately. In an allied vision, Beyoncé’s promotional video for Renaissance Act II (due out March 29, 2024) centers around the radio of a yellow taxi skidding down a dirt road in Texas past a Radio Texas sign. The driver, presumably Beyoncé herself, does not touch the dial, and yet the stations scan between a yodel, a blues song, and Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline,” before finally settling on a banjo riff that opens her song “Texas Hold ’Em.” In the video, Beyoncé teases a conceptual framing for her album that resonates with that of Robert Glasper’s, namely radio’s potential for redefining Black musical production, reclaiming whitewashed genres such as country, and broadcasting a new way of listening.

In this talk I formulate and apply a network analysis methodology for understanding the history of song on Egyptian radio. Music is a massively relational cultural form, involving interactions among composers, poets, arrangers, conductors, and performers, among others. The reality of music history thus emerges as a complex network of relationships, unfolding and changing over time. Song production, in particular, centers on poet-composer-singer collaborations. Most Arab music histories narrate lives of the biggest stars, presented in historical and cultural context, but neglecting the broader network of productive relationships. However many important musical figures are not celebrities, and the full complexity of the non-linear network can only be grasped holistically, including big-data empirical analysis, not pointillistically through case studies of celebrities. Such holistic analysis can reveal surprising emergent, structural patterns that are not apparent in any single narrative. Social network analysis (SNA) offers a powerful suite of tools enabling such an approach, including metrics for centrality and the detection of cohesive subgroups, analogous to the “invisible colleges” of scientists that de Solla Price (1963) discovered through examination of citation networks. Starting with a large dataset of songs broadcast on Egyptian radio, I extract a network of poet-composer-singer collaborations, then apply SNA algorithms to reveal its social structure. I then interpret that structure in light of wider socio-cultural and historical factors. In this way, my talk both sheds light on Egypt's musical history, and supplies a model and method that may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to other musical domains.