Image via Chris Moyles' Instagram.
In what is one of the most depressing facts of British life since someone in Whitechapel tried to rent a shed in their living room for £530 per month, Chris Moyles will return to breakfast airwaves nationwide on September 21 as a presenter for Radio X: a new “male-focused” station that will play “the best fresh rock and guitar-based music”, with Vernon Kay, Johnny Vaughan, and Kaiser Chiefs frontman Ricky Wilson scheduled in for the mid-morning, drivetime and weekend slots respectively.
The new station will occupy XFM’s old slot by playing exactly the same sort of artists (Mumford and Sons, Kasabian, and Royal Blood) only this time marketed more specifically at men between the ages of 25 and 44. The press release claims this makes it “the first truly male-focused station”.
By marketing specifically at men, they’ve taken a genre that is already frustrated by a legacy of sexism - hence why alternative music festivals often boast 96% all male line-ups and the people in charge of booking for them say things like “they [women] seem to like watching bands more than being in them” - and just said “let’s just face it, it’s lad music”. It’s a move that’s both ingenious and infuriating. By asserting itself as “for men”, Radio X automatically exempts it from criticism. You can’t complain about the lack of women in a genre that has a legacy of sidelining women if it says on the tin: 'NOT FOR WOMEN'. Still, just because all the facts are right there on the label for all to see, doesn’t make the reality of its contents any less shit.
Vernon Kay on Room 101 explaining how to use a bin.
Radio X is a station designed specifically to appeal to the swathes of British men who are tired of hearing about how everything they like is problematic. This is the cross-section of the population that signed the petition to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson. They get their news from The Lad Bible, buy Mansize tissues, and think frappucinos are "gay". Radio X, then, represents a group of celebrity men who have at some point all been rejected by a changing industry opening their arms out to the generations of everymen struggling to adapt to a changing society and saying, “it’s okay, we’ve still got each other, and also Muse.”
It makes sense that something like this would happen now, in a Britain mid-masculinity "crisis" where meninism is a thing but not even Dapper Laughs - a guy literally famous for being an archetypal lad - can commit to his schtick. Still, it's a sad state of affairs when one of the UK’s “most highly-anticipated” radio stations turns out to be the absolute antithesis of every lazy stereotype and dangerous “othering” that progressive voices in the music industry have been working tirelessly to overhaul. But at least one positive function of Radio X is that it’ll operate as sort of a litmus test for music. If you’re a supposedly alternative act that ends up on the playlist, you’re literally not doing enough to be alternative. A co-sign from Radio X will be like a rubber stamp that says 'JUST UNIMAGINATIVE ENOUGH FOR VERNON KAY'.
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