`Whatever offends your parents most, that's the thing you get into." DJ Marshall Jefferson's comment about the main criterion for youth-culture choices is facile, inadequate and even inaccurate (what about Boyzone?), but it still has the cruel bite of truth that makes for a great aphorism. It also made a perfect "out" for House (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday), Ann-Marie Power's documentary about the club-music culture that has been arguably the most important popular phenomenon of the last decade - and certainly the most inpenetrable for over-30s.
What makes Jefferson's line about the value of parental distaste so appropriate is its context in this programme; the JNLR ratings don't include "ravers" as a demographic category, but it is probably safe to guess that the number of them who regularly listen to Radio 1 documentaries could fit in a DJ's booth. Parents of ravers, on the other hand . . . So House set out to explain the electronic dance music known broadly as "house" and the attraction of ecstasy in terms older folk could understand - but without being entirely uncool and without the panicky tone that most media emanations have contributed to this subject.
At one point, in fact, it practically pandered to its audience. A 19-year-old woman who was eloquent in her ecstatic descriptions of a night on E told the story of one drug-induced epiphany: "I suddenly realised how much I loved my mother, how great she was and how much she had done for us." Aaah, well there you are, Mammy. Then again, the same woman suggested that half the fun of taking an E or two was not knowing what might be mixed into the tablets. The attraction of risk, of not knowing what might be around the next corner and being prepared to synthesise a runaway lorry, was a calculated factor in the drug's pleasure.
Power didn't make the mistake of devoting House to ecstasy. The programme also explored the roots of this most rootless-sounding music and its relationship to other cultural icons such as the Internet. The way grunge gave way to house, historically and in the minds of individual fans, was amusingly described - "getting up and dancing as opposed to sitting around and moaning" said one contributor; another suggested that Nirvana and Pearl Jam are fine for depressive 13- or 14-year-olds, but late teenagers are so well sorted out in themselves that they can simply enjoy!
House culture, the programme suggested, has at least partly moved on from all-night, drug-fueled raves. The appearance of the music, the lingo and the visual style associated with house in ads for beer and banks attest to the rising age and growing respectability of the chemical generation. Cafes are the new marketing opportunity for entrepreneurs chasing middle-class, nearly-30 house devotees and their money. They're "not yet ready for dinner parties", says Power, but vodka and caffeine are becoming the drugs of choice. Radio here has been notoriously timid about house music. Although it has had its pockets on legitimate stations, there has been nothing to match the energy and vitality of the pirate dance-music stations that thrived in the early to mid-1990s - before the pirates discovered the commercial viability of Britpop.
One great man of radio, at least, fully appreciates the cultural and musical significance of house. In fact, B.P. Fallon was talking about it last week when he dropped in to spin records and talk tunes with John Kelly on the Eclectic Ballroom (Today FM, Monday to Friday). Fallon is by his own description, unfortunately, an "unemployed disc jockey". "I hope you're no good," Kelly joked - but like anyone in Ireland with any pop-music sense, he knows better. In spite of starting the programme with the Ramones' hopelessly cheesy, shamelessly nostalgic Rock 'n' Roll Radio, Fallon was wonderful and bang up-to-date in his musical choices - and he has no fear of talking about the music and the people who make it with a loving knowledge that's rare.
With his totally different style, Joe Jackson also has a loving way of sharing his knowledge, eminently evident in his old Arts Show special about Frank Sinatra, repeated on Saturday evening. With Radio 1 also hosting Brendan Balfe's three-hour obituary tribute on Friday, RTE marked the singer's passing with appropriate ceremony and erudite appreciation.
And there was one of those little pieces of serendipity that make life so endearing: as the real Frankie went wherever he's going, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were the subject of Colm Keane's powerful rockumentary, Welcome to the Pleasuredome (RTE Radio 1, Saturday).
Sadly, this programme was under the shadow of death for reasons beyond the Sinatra coincidence. It was a special for Irish AIDS Day, because singer Holly Johnson (extensively interviewed by Keane) is HIV-positive and has symptoms of AIDS - in spite of which, he says, "I actually feel I'm going to live for a long time."
