Wednesday, June 18, 2014

The Long-Awaited Completion of a Voyage

This coming January will mark 20 years since the debut of the television series Star Trek: Voyager.  When the series debuted in 1995, I tuned in religiously.  For the first season or two, if I didn't see every episode when it aired, I came very close to it.  Then, working on my Master's degree interceded; life moved on from there; and except for the occasional instance when I happened to catch it, I didn't see much of the final five seasons of the show.

By the time the show ended its seven-season run in May 2001, I was living across the country from where I was when it began, I was a few months away from starting my Ph.D. program, and I was generally out of touch with the Star Trek television universe.  It had been two years since my favorite show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, had ended, and even though I had remained a little more regular in watching that until the end, I still hadn't been as consistent about it as I had been in the early 1990s when that show first started.

For Christmas 2006, knowing it was my favorite television show of all time, my wife bought me the complete collection of Deep Space Nine, and I began the process of watching the entire series from beginning to end -- a process that didn't take me too long to complete.  Then, two and a half years ago, when I got an Amazon Kindle and signed up for Amazon's Prime service, with access to Voyager available as part of that service, I began watching Voyager from the beginning.  It's been and off-and-on process over the past two and a half years, sandwiching episodes and sets of episodes within breaks in my workload.  Last night, though, I completed my voyage (pun intended) through the show's run, and I'm a bit sad to see it go, for the sake of nostalgia but also for something more.

A couple of years ago, just after I started watching the entire run of Voyager, one of my students told me that the show struggled for the first couple seasons but found its stride in Season 3 and was noticeably better after that.  I would agree completely with that assessment, and I would add that, in my final analysis, Voyager gets an undeserved bad rap.  In particular, the show left on its best note, as the seventh season contained a lot of excellent work that sought to address conscientiously the interests and complexities of multiculturalism.  From its beginning in 1966, Star Trek has always sought to articulate a multicultural vision, starting with the constitution of the original series' cast.  Still, especially with the original series, those attempts were clumsy, a reflection of a 1960s version of multiculturalism from which the show emanated.  Among the many reasons I like Deep Space Nine so much is that the series addressed multiculturalism with complexity and nuance that reflected growth in understandings of power relations and ethics in intercultural situations that had occurred by the 1990s.  Voyager seemed to seek to articulate some of that same understanding throughout its run, but it really hit its stride in its seventh season in doing so.

Interesting enough, Voyager's run ended just a few months into the George W. Bush administration and just a few months before the events of September 11, 2001, both of which facilitated (though, it should be noted, did not originate) a multicultural backlash within the United States that remains prevalent today.  I wonder if the final season of Voyager would have been the same had it aired today.  I tend to think it wouldn't.  I also, though, tend to think it would be worth returning to where Voyager left off in its articulation of multiculturalism and seeing if we can chart a course for a renewed voyage that furthers that mission. Voyager was certainly not free from critique, but it seemed to be moving in the right direction -- a direction that's worth revisiting and (again, pun intended) reengaging.

Monday, June 16, 2014

Long Distance Dedication

My interest in popular music blossomed in the Summer of 1987. Sure, I knew my share of hit songs before then, but I didn't really follow popular music until that summer, starting with watching Dial MTV every weekday and listening to Rick Dees' Weekly Top 40 every weekend.  The story lines of song working their way up and down the chart appealed to me, and soon thereafter, as I noted on this blog a little over a year ago, I discovered Billboard magazine as the source of those story lines and the histories of artists' performances throughout the rock 'n' roll era.

I soon learned, though, that Dees' countdown did not match Billboard's countdown, and I realized that that occurred because Dees took his Top 40 from Radio and Records magazine, not Billboard.  For the Billboard Top 40, I needed to listen to Casey Kasem, and I migrated to his weekly countdown, American Top 40, instead.

Less than a year later, in August 1988, Kasem left American Top 40, replaced by Shadoe Stevens.  I continued to follow along for a while with Stevens, at least until midway through 1989, when I bought a subscription to Billboard and no longer needed to listen to a countdown to learn the Top 40.  Still, Kasem had left his mark.  Listening to Kasem's American Top 40 significantly fostered my interest in popular music that became a fundamental influence on my decision to study popular culture, which I now do for my career.  I doubt I would be the same person I am today without those experiences listening to American Top 40, and so I owe Kasem, who passed away the other day, a dedication of gratitude for the part he played in making me who I am.

Thank you, Casey.  You are already missed.