You've Got Your Mother in a Whirl

The Onion AV Club looks at Sue Carpenter's "Trojan-horsed hipster memoir" 40 Watts from Nowhere, and though they aren't too thrilled with the "and-then-this-happened approach," they do find plenty to like:

...Carpenter's stories capture the joy of spinning tunes for friends and strangers without rules or regulations. She makes her stations sound like a lot of fun, and makes it impossible not to wish there were more of them out there. With luck, she might even inspire someone to do something about it.

Carpenter does have interesting stories to tell about running "pirate radio" stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but you've got to endure a lot of whining along the way. She's enamored with the romance of living outside the law, but hates how much it costs and how all her DJs take advantage of her. She's thrilled with being an underground sensation, but annoyed when her notoriety threatens to rise to the level of government attention. That latter contradiction gets particularly tiresome; people who post flyers for their illegal activities in hip Silverlake record stories don't have much room to complain about attention from the press, or the attention from authorities brought about by attention from the press.

A lot of the information Carpenter chooses to share falls under the category of Not Compelling to Anyone But You: Junkie boyfriends, for example, aren't a form of "vicarious liberation," and they certainly aren't "an inadvertent opportunity for me to experience life's seamier aspects without actually participating." (It amazes me that she could say this while living in SF, where they did a pretty thorough job of making even the straight folk AIDS-aware.) They're just junkie boyfriends and they get old fast.

Thankfully, in this case, they disappear pretty quickly, too.

In all fairness, the stuff about hanging out with fellow indie music lovers and the occasional rock star is awfully entertaining, and there's plenty of it to go around. But Carpenter has problems establishing her story's significance. For one thing, she's very vague until halfway through about exactly when all this is taking place. It's just sometime in the '90s, and you're out of luck unless you happen to remember exactly when, say, Beck released Odelay. And though she takes a stab at staking out the political issues surrounding "pirate radio" (or microbroadcasting), particularly its stance as a response to media consolidation, she doesn't really flesh out the context as effectively as she might. For her, it all boils down to how she defied FCC regulations because the pop stations sucked and none of the college stations would let her on the air.

It's a shame she doesn't nail down the political angle, because this could be a very relevant story, given the controversies swirling around not just microbroadcasting but online phenomenon like streaming audio and file swapping. She does run into folks whose commitment to microbroadcasting is explicitly political, but she doesn't have much time for them. Instead, she coasts on alternative anti-glamour, expecting both admiration for her rebellious behavior and sympathy for all the trouble it brings her. This classic Gen X combination isn't without intermittent entertainment value, but it's hardly a call for audio buccaneers to hoist the freak flag high.