AAM DISPATCH

Ever wonder what the music is you hear in our programs, or why we use certain pieces of music? Well, here’s some insight.

Music is a critical component of our radio programs, and radio journalism in general. It can be a subtle mood “enhancer”, a punctuation mark, a palate cleanser, or an inside joke. Music is commonly used at the beginning and end of segments to set a mood, create some pacing, and provide a cue that a segment is beginning or ending. We often use music under long segments of narration at the top of a story and sometimes in the body of a piece if there is a long stretch of dry (meaning lacking background sound, not boring) narration.

Sometimes music is used to create a sense of a scene or chapter in a piece. Music often serves as a transition – an abrupt start or end to a piece of music cues that something new is coming up. It can reinforce tone – serious, exotic, even chaotic. There are times in a piece where the listener needs a moment to digest a sequence of serious and complex information, and music can provide a pause – since long periods of silence don’t go over particularly well in radio – to give the listener a few moments to absorb what he or she has just heard.

For example, if you listen to the first few minutes of our October program on the economic relationship between the US and Mexico, you will hear several different pieces of music (actually, because there is such a rich body of music to draw from for a Mexico program, we used a lot of music in the hour). Since the intro to the show was on the long side, I decided to use different pieces of music to maintain momentum, and to reinforce some of the thematic points in the script (plus, you can never have enough Los Lobos in a program). The songs start “hot” in the clear for a second, and then continue for a bit then fade. The hot start signals a “chapter” and then when the music fades out, it draws the ear in deeper to the conversation. Then, the next piece comes in to signal another point and chapter.

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Sean Carberry Afghanistan, America Abroad, Four Piece Suit, Led Zeppelin, Los Lobos, Mexico, Music

Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, is now an infamous place. The international and Mexican press is peppered with tales of drug smuggling, rehab center massacres, inter-cartel killings and cartel-military clashes. Just this week, the number of murders in Juarez passed the 2,000 mark, surpassing last year’s 1,600 murders with more than two months left in the year. Its American sister city is now home to pockets of Juarenses who can afford to flee the violence. These rates are astounding and alarming for a city of 1.5 million that before 2008 had about 200 murders a year.

These numbers tell the bloody story of a city under siege and brought to its knees by drug violence, tragedy and hopelessness. But the story of Juarez is not just a drug story – it’s also a story of economics, where the aftershocks of the global financial crisis play out in unforgiving ways.

After ratifying NAFTA in 1994, Mexico tied its economic fate intimately to the US, and for a time, that approach seemed to work well, at least for some sectors of the Mexican economy. The Juarez-El Paso metro area became one of the largest manufacturing hubs in North America, as hundreds of maquiladoras opened their doors in Juarez. American companies found these Mexico-based factories appealing because they offered the twin advantages of lower worker wages and close proximity to the large US market. Maquiladoras producing anything from clothes to electronics offered a livelihood to thousands of Juarenses and migrants from other parts of Mexico and a steady supply of goods for American customers.

But the US economic crisis brought this manufacturing engine to a sputter – with Americans not buying, thousands lost their jobs in Juarez. America’s recession has been devastating for the Mexican economy – at least for its “legal” economy. Meanwhile, the global economic slowdown has yet to bruise the “illegal” economy and slow the flow of drugs, guns and laundered money across the US-Mexico border. With the contraction of Mexico’s economy, the value of the peso has fallen, which means that drugs coming from Mexico are cheaper than they were before the economic slowdown and demand among American consumers, whose wallets have also thinned, has remained steady.

For many struggling Juarenses, whose livelihoods have been tied to American patterns of consumption, that’s meant they must go where the jobs are, namely the huge drug industry, one of the few flourishing industries on the US-Mexico border. Last month I traveled to the El Paso-Juarez area to work on a piece on the economics of the drug trade. For a primer on the actors and market forces of this illegal economy, listen here:

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Monica Villavicencio drugs, Economy, Latin America, Mexico