You know, I am not sure how I feel about this piece. But I do know it takes a long time to figure out.

This is a very interesting piece that I am not sure how to review. On the one hand, I love the subject. In public radio we have a propensity to dive down into the neighborhoods that many of our members would never visit. How can I say this politely....Public Radio often takes the junior leaguers into the 'hood for a field trip. This, with varying degrees of success, "is a good thing."

But it takes a ton of compassion and intellect to get the uptowners engaged and prevent the downtowners from feeling exploited. This piece does a good job with the latter, but not the former. I just didn't feel like I cared enough about the topic or the people telling the story to sit through the whole thing...but I am reviewing the piece so I did.

The producer chose a first person construction with little reporter narration. This is not what I think the piece calls for. At an hour, the listener needs someone to provide context and analysis as well as someone to reset the characters. There are so many voices in this piece that you quickly loose track of several individuals and the piece becomes muddled.

I had to rewind the piece several times to keep the stories straight. This is not an option in for in-car listeners.

Also, there are, frankly, too many f-bombs edited out.

The story is wonderful though, combining American Idol-ish reality talent competition with no nonsense events management and a desire to create change for the artists? professionally and their city as well.