Live radio streaming

The late Saturday night radio show Pirate Satellite on NU107 is the best approximation local radio has of live streaming, the format patterned after other progressive shows worldwide and drawing huge inspiration from the punk rock band The Clash.

The title itself is lifted from a Clash song lyric, vocalist Joe Strummer coming alive again after seven years in the grave. Segues, spiels and sound bites are direct transpositions from, among others, the early 1980s Clash album “Sandinista!”, so that the effect of listening to Pirate Satellite is akin to hearing that Clash album for the first time, a three-record set that in its time redefined the boundaries of rock music not only as dance music but also as political statement. It was most probably the band at its creative peak and influenced some homegrown bands like Yano with guitars reminiscent of advancing armies.

Whatever happened to all the old songs is an often repeated phase in the program, and by this is not meant mere nostalgia but hankering for the time when music was not factory and mass produced, borne on the wings of hype and PR and easily downloadable. Pirate Satellite then gives access to the free radio listener material found usually on Internet streaming, on the other side of the world or in the opposite hemisphere where airwaves move counterclockwise.

Those who can’t get enough of Pirate Satellite’s renegade albeit somewhat British like programming may want to explore the Internet for some live streaming that may even be better than the NU radio show, in particular the stations just a click away under the categories college radio or jazz and classical, even reggae. On the collegiate level right past the pre-buffering stream can be located Detour radio, which prides itself with playing anything and everything, where Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys can be heard side by side heavyweight blues acts and obscure metal bands on the far side of thrash, not trash.

A plus of these programs are weather situationers on that part of the globe, whether cloudy or foggy or rainy, and the announcer just starting his or her day while we are about to end ours, or vice versa, so that the message may be the sun never sets on the listener of live radio streams — cheating time may not exactly be like cheating death, but the experience provides us the momentary comforting illusion of a flexible, perhaps meltable clock, as in the painting by the surrealist Dali.

Under the category jazz can be clicked a station devoted solely to the music of guitarist Pat Metheny, with different versions of his group as well his many collaborations with fellow jazz musicians. Metheny’s guitar style is unmistakable, his notes bobbing and weaving through the basic post-bebop framework.

The only problem with live streams is that they may intermittently be cut especially if the computer is approaching dinosaur status, so that the link has to automatically reconnect and rebuffer.

Shifting through the different streams is always an option not unlike changing horses, but this is what makes Internet radio preferable to a set playlist in the iTunes library. There’s always room for surprises much like Pirate Satellite, and Strummer singing how he fought the law but the law won.

Speaking of Strummer there’s a film on his relatively short 50-year life, The Future is Unwritten, directed by Julien Temple. Funny how the late Clash vocalist took a dig at non-smokers, saying a law should be made preventing them from enjoying or benefiting from anything invented or made by a smoker.

There’s a scene in the film where the four Clash members — Strummer, guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon, and drummer Topper Headon — are interviewed on the upper floors of a tenement building about the incongruity of fame and fortune with their music, and Simonon is seen spitting over the railing much like soccer players do on the pitch in the heat of a game. Then years later at about the time the documentary is made Jones revisits the selfsame place alone, and the view of the city lights is not any different, except that the guitarist is now a wizened old man with even worse teeth, slowed down a bit by drugs and alcohol but none the worse for wear.

It’s a quietly moving film, in a class separate from the celebrated rock and roll biographies by Martin Scorsese, a tribute to the rock genius that was Strummer and the music of the Clash.

It was said that Strummer went into self-imposed hibernation to reevaluate his music when he learned that US bombers had scrawled “Rock the Casbah” on missiles they let fall on Middle Eastern countries in the post 9/11 war on terror.

Songs like Junco Partner and Somebody Got Murdered from “Sandinista!” are rarely heard these days save for shows like Pirate Satellite and other live streams, bits and pieces of them too on The Future is Unwritten.

But is it really? Listening to a radio show in another part of the world, the sun already setting on theirs while rising in ours, indicates music’s power of transference, psychoanalysis aside. If the novel is dead and we are waiting for its resurrection, radio is alive and streaming is its future.

This is what is written in the stars tonight when the pirates are out running roughshod on the airwaves, fighting the law despite knowing the law will win in the end.