When Jerry Wexler first coined the words “rhythm and blues” back in 1949, his intention was to elevate the genre above the pejorative term “race music” and also to citify a form of music which seemed to have rural, not to say agricultural, roots. Older readers may recall that the perfume favoured by Alvin Robinson’s Down Home Girl, which was covered by the Rolling Stones when they too called themselves a rhythm and blues group, smelled like turnip greens. By the time the genre has been bent this way and that and we arrive at Will Young’s Essential 90s R&B (Thursday, 10pm, Radio 2), it’s more penthouse than hen house. Here we are in the world of Mark Morrison, Coolio and Mariah Carey. It’s shagpile music, which sounds above all expensive. Young is a genial host. We must hope that, as he gets more confident, his patter will grow more personal and we’ll feel he’s playing the records rather than reading their names off a sheet.
Oddly enough, musicians aren’t really sure that what they have to say between records is valid, which is why they so often reel off discographical information. They’re at great pains to say that this is only their own personal opinion, as if we didn’t know that. At the other end of the musician-as-presenter spectrum is former Sex Pistol Steve Jones, one of the names attached to Spotify’s new In Residence strand. This has the likes of Popjustice and Guardian Guide alumnus Peter Robinson “presenting” a pop show and the boys from Jungle doing the same with dance. Since the links are recorded separately and slotted in between the tracks there’s a slightly disconnected feeling, which they will no doubt remedy in time. There’s also an accompanying tendency for the presenters to ramble. In the course of Steve Jones’s “Jonesy’s Jukebox”, he fills the gap between Georgie Fame’s Try My World and Foals’ What Went Down with a surprising amount of detail about his experience with Hepatitis C and the perils of dirty needles. And since nobody has told him to get to the point of a story since he first became famous, which is 40 years ago, he spends a full five minutes doing so.
Everybody knows that there can be no programme nowadays without a journey at its heart. Self Drives (Weekdays, 12.04pm, Radio 4) features Will Self motoring down from Edinburgh to Cambridge on the trail of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who pioneered the theory of electro-magnetic waves without which we wouldn’t be able to phone home to say we’re on the train. The plan is to undertake the journey in an electric car. This is great news for the Self-aware. If it was all going to go smoothly there would be very little point having Self aboard.
Home (Sunday, 2.06pm, BBC World Service) is one of those routine joys the BBC should make more fuss about. It’s the second of a four-part series in which Aasmah Mir talks to three women of different generations from immigrant groups about their experiences of either coming to or growing up in this country. In this episode, she talks to three Jamaican women about their experience of the cold, the contrast, the culture. The casting is perfect. Between the three of them – the older Enid, who remembers colonial rule in Jamaica with great fondness, the middle one, Sharon, who suffered from the low expectations of her UK teachers in the 80s, and the 22-year-old go-getter Rehanna – they describe how much this country has changed and how they have changed along with it.
