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Radio's Perfect Voices: Menace to Our Youth?
We are well aware that the radio broadcasts that enrapture Mr. and Mrs. America every evening are intended as fanciful entertainment, an escape from the humdrum cares of everyday life. But we fear that the golden, perfect voices that dazzle our ears nightly may be setting an impossible standard for our children. Fed a steady diet of flawless diction and rich, clear tones, they may begin to believe that such vocal gifts are the rule, and not the exception.
Take, for example, the cast of the National Broadcasting Company’s Chevrolet Presents: Go Panthers!, the acclaimed youth sports drama. We have no quarrel with the show’s hard-hitting football action (ingeniously presented via mock color commentary), nor with its sensitive and thoughtful storylines. But having attended high school in a small Texas town not unlike the program’s setting, we can assure you — the supposedly teenaged players’ elocution far surpasses those of our former peers.
None of the show’s otherwise talented cast sound convincingly like teenagers, and all have the sort of robust, impossibly attractive voices to which only a handful of lucky actors and actresses can aspire. Our impressionable youth may listen to this program, compare it to their own squeaky, hormone-inflected voices, and feel unjustly glum about the vocal gifts God gave them. This is a sad state of affairs indeed.
True, there are squeaky voices, rough voices, even ethnic voices on our radios as well. But these invariably belong to the supporting players — the comical garbageman, the Italian gangster, the eccentric psychiatrist. The leading man and lady of each program invariably speak in more desirable tones, and are thus a greater focus of envy and wish-fulfillment among young listeners.
Over the past decade, the standards for perfect voices on radio have only increased. Where once series could feature stars with the occasional stutter, or perhaps a touch of sibillance, now the airwaves are all but exclusively filled with young, pitch-perfect voices. And the new, higher quality of wideband broadcasts will surely only amplify this growing trend.
We have been horrified in recent months to hear of teenagers consulting with surgeons in an effort to sound more like their radio idols. One lad from Wichita, Kansas reportedly had his vocal cords scraped to more effectively mimic the distinctive gravelly sound of Mr. Keith Southerland, star of 20th Century Fox Broadcasting’s Jack Power of the C.T.U. And two years ago, a young woman in Oregon died after undergoing a voluntary procedure that she hoped would allow her to speak with the same fluidity and grace of the stars of The Loves of Stars Hollow.
No more must our children live in the shadow of an ideal only a handful can reach, America. We must prevail upon the broadcasters to present the nation’s youth with a more realistic image of healthy, natural voices — if not for ourselves, then for the benefit of generations to come.