Voices between the Tracks: Disk Jockeys, Radio, and Popular Music, 1955-60

Abstract

While much historiography on U.S. radio and popular music of the postwar period portrays disk jockeys as having a large degree of freedom, this article challenges this rendition and argues that their autonomy was constrained by a number of institutional and industry pressures. Based on discourses in industry and lay publications, the author argues that disk jockeys were pressured by recording industry largess and station management, which constrained their autonomy and public representations and contradicted the democratic ideology articulated by the U.S. broadcasting industry. Rather than neutral arbiters of public tastes, disk jockeys were complicit in a concerted effort to endow undifferentiated commodities with symbolic capital.

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