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Radio Stations
April 16, 2007
As of the 1990's and early 2000's, Dhahran was serviced by only a handful of English radio stations, primarily the ones broadcast on 91.4 FM, 96.5 FM, and 107.9 FM. The station under 96.5 FM was broadcast from neighboring Bahrain, presumably by the U.S. military present in that country. My impression was that they were generally more music oriented than their U.S. military radio counterpart - 107.9 FM, the American Forces Network station that I have been informed was set up around the time of the Gulf War at the start of the 1990's. I emphasize that this is an impression based on my statistically hearing more talking on 107.9 FM than on the 96.5 FM band.
91.4 FM, on the other hand, introduced itself on the air as Studio One FM. They typically played a one to two hour segment of top 40 songs as "The World Chart Show". It routinely began with a familiar, "Hi, I'm Ace. And I'm Joe. [together] And you're listening to the... World. Chart. Show.", sometimes followed by their contact at [email protected] and a mention of their studio in Hollywood, California. This revealed that they were not a locally recorded station, and their readings of letters and song requests from listeners from regions like East Asia and Africa implied that this was a station recorded and played worldwide. (Around the time I moved away in 2004, I also discovered the remnants of their website at aceandjoe.com.)
During my years in Dhahran, these top 40 songs consisted of almost exclusively the pop and pop rock genre, which were dominated at the time by such names as Eiffel 65 and Aqua in 1997/1998, and Smash Mouth, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Lou Bega in 1999/2000, and Kelly Clarkson by the end of my years there in 2004. Outside these two hours of top 40, the rest of the station played hours and hours of country music. Our art teacher in the 7th grade tuned into the station during these hours, and Jewel's "Foolish Games" and "You Were Meant For Me", as well as Shania Twain's "You're Still The One I Want" played so often that they partially defined my experience in that class. Beyond that, many people and I tuned out whenever the country genre kicked back in.
The radio services available in Dhahran were sufficient, considering our relatively low population of English-speaking foreigners. I could probably attribute my preference for pop to the nearly exclusive dominance of the pop genre on the airwaves, and I had noticed a similar large representation of the pop segment of the U.S. music market during my travels to Europe and East Asia during those years. By the time I began spending most of my months back in the U.S., my colleagues were surprised that I had not heard of a fair number of their regular music artists. This is not to suggest that other genres were absolutely unavailable overseas, or that others around me had not been exposed to anything else. However, my exposure to that genre range on the foreign airwaves ultimately shaped my tastes in music.
-Gordon Mei
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