In December, WXYC spoke to writer and professor Katherine Rye Jewell about her book “Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio,” and the history and future for WXYC.
WXYC: I think with this book, an important thing that you’re able to capture is the passion behind college radio. You wrote about UCLA’s college station – about how no one gets paid. I found that super funny, because people ask me all the time, like, “You get paid for that, right?” And I’m like, “Nope, nope, I just love it.”
What’s so special about college radio that keeps students so dedicated?
Jewell: I think it’s kind of the perfect encapsulation of what we’re trying to do in college, which is learn things – learn practical skills, learn how to do things like running a station board, the time management that goes into running a station or having a show. But it’s also about finding your voice, finding what it is out there in the world that resonates with you, and that you then want to share with others, and being able to engage in that conversation of thinking about what it is that you love and want to share with people. And then seeing that resonate with others – college radio gives participants the ability to really feel those connections over content in ways where they’re kind of applying the bigger educational values that are underlying all the things we do in college. And so it’s one of these special places in the college experience where you’re able to pull all of those things together and do something creative that’s also an extension of that educational experience.
It’s so special because you have all of these people who are equally as passionate as you and you’re all learning from each other. And more than that, you also get to share with the community and give back in that way. And through that, I think it’s very interesting, trying to figure out what the sound of college radio is.
I know lots of stations have struggled with that historically – WXYC too, it’s like, is it freeform or block? Do you appeal to mainstream tastes or play for major labels? I’d love to talk about WXYC for a little bit. How did WXYC find that balance of sound?
It was a struggle for a while, and I think the station really benefited from clear leadership that was very dedicated from a pretty early point in carving out that space for students to be adventurous and to defend this certain way of doing radio through an educational lens. I think one of my favorite quotes in the entire book comes from a student talking about the station, and I think they wrote in the student newspaper, how, you know, “We don’t go down to [The Ackland Art Museum] and expect to see 100 copies of the Mona Lisa.”
I love that one. That’s so true.
It’s so true, right? And that is so much of what it’s about, right? These stations, a lot of them come about because, you know, there’s many different reasons that they come around. And for some people, it was about study music and just having that. A lot of students lived off of campus, and it was a way to kind of stay in touch, get news and information. And so when they were tuned in, they just wanted music that they liked and that they could study to, while also sort of feeling on-campus.
Stations like WXYC were really cognizant of the fact that they existed in this larger radio market, where there’s a larger cultural scene that they had a role to play. And to kind of push beyond that, you know, “just a student jukebox” mentality.
[During] pre-internet days, that was probably a bigger tension because there were fewer places where students could go to find the music that they liked. They couldn’t pull up Spotify to turn on whatever they wanted. And so they wanted to hear the songs that they liked from their stations. So I understand the impulse behind it, of why students would want that. But there was also so much more that these stations could do. And I think that’s why, you know, that leadership at WXYC was so instrumental in making sure that students have that place to explore.
And speaking to that cultural influence and development, I think the 90s are a really interesting time to look at WXYC and Chapel Hill with that growing scene with Superchunk and Archers of Loaf. Can you talk a little bit about what WXYC was doing to interact and help feed that scene?
I always think about it as kind of this underground ecosystem – there’s kind of a landscape of radio stations and music venues and record labels and bands that all kind of feed off one another. And so it’s not that the radio stations created the scenes.
The scenes usually were already in existence, and would have continued whether or not there was a radio station. But what these radio stations did, is they were able to kind of locate the scenes within a larger network of scenes, a lot of times because there were college students who come from different places in the country. And so they would go back home, they would hear something at home and they would bring it to their station.
They would often help bands on tour that knew that they were getting played on the radio station, the bands would call the radio station, and they would, you know, crash on a DJ’s couch. I think one of the members of R.E.M. told me that they crashed on someone’s couch in Chapel Hill, because of the radio station connections, when they were on their first tour.
I remember, because I did college radio in the 90s, that the bands would seek out the radio station to call up and say, “Hey, we’ve got a show tonight. We’re gonna come down to the station. Is there anybody there who might want to interview us?” And so I interviewed Man or Astro-man? on the radio station, because we just happened to have the show. We were like, “Well, we’ll entertain the band, and we happened to be going to see them tonight.” So that was cool, too.
These stations kind of occupied that interesting position of connectors in these scenes. Some of the way that zines did, but you kind of had to be “in the know” of like, where to find a zine, whereas with a station, anybody could stumble across it. So it also kind of did the proselytizing work of making sure that that sound was getting out there and that people could kind of serendipitously discover things that were going on in music scenes.
That’s very interesting that you mentioned zines, because that was actually my next question. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but this fall, WXYC had a zine release party. We still make our own zine. Our music director, Annie, creates zines and they’re absolutely awesome. So we had our second edition released this fall, and we had a zine release party at All Day Records, a local record store in Carrboro. It touches upon like, lots of the historical developments of college radio – we had screen-printed FCC underwear, with the FCC logo on the front and all the dirty words on the back. We had Clok-Lok, a local Chapel Hill band, which was formed in the 90s and recently came back through our rotation. And so now they kind of had a resurgence and they performed.
Can you talk a little bit about how zines and college radio have developed together over the years?
Yeah, I love zines because it’s that perfect kind of DIY ethos that comes out of the punk scene. And so literally anybody could put them together if they had scissors and paper and glue and a photocopier. And I love that zines are kind of back again – there’s something so tactile about them. And they have a very similar bespoke sort of intimacy that college radio does too. One of the really cool things about radio is that it’s live, that you can be in a space, a very private space like your car or your room or your headphones, and somebody can be right in your ear who’s speaking at that moment. And it creates a sense of connection.
I think zines have a very similar type of connection that they foster, where it’s completely unfiltered and a kind of artistic expression that you’re able to pick up and just take with you and kind of get a sense of the inner workings of someone’s mind or how they’re interacting with culture, and to give you that kind of tactile engagement with it. Whereas radio is in your ear, right? There’s that kind of aural connection that you’re making.
And so I think there’s something about the sense of connection that both of those two media experiences give to a consumer that are very special and help to not only create a sense of, you know, what it is you want to listen to, or what it is you want to bring into your private space, but also what you then want to send back out into the world, right? What do I want to create? This is very possible, it’s very doable – I can have a radio show, I can make my own zine [and] I can do my own art. And so it’s about that sort of next step, and the act of creation, that I think takes it to the next level from other types of radio or other types of print media.
At many of the radio stations, you mentioned, there’s been this clear issue of college radio having a very, like, white indie rock image. Also, in sound, this has been historically true as well. You talked about WBAU, which is Adelphi University’s radio station around Long Island, New York. They’ve done a great job in representing their community. What can other radio stations learn from what they’ve done?
Yeah, they had this really strong community radio ethos. Some of it was totally driven by students, and some of it was, you know, what the community was asking for. But I think it comes from this idea that these are public stations with an educational mission. And that really helps protect or promote this idea that universities are for more than just the people who attend to them that they occupy public space. Their airwaves are also similarly occupying public space, so that gives the public and the community surrounding the university a claim, especially to the radio stations, that they don’t necessarily always get with maybe the physical facilities on campus. Public universities tend to have to have their libraries open to the public, but as you probably know, a lot of universities don’t. You have to have a card swipe to get into most buildings.
In some universities, there’s this really strong barrier between the community and the university, whether it’s through gates or walls, or there’s some sense that there’s a barrier that exists between the towers of academia and the community. The radio station permeates those barriers. And so I think what WBAU does so well is really perform acts of public service, from their position as a university, in a way that the community also values, so they weren’t talking down to the community from a sort of elitist perch on high. They were really trying to do the real work of cultural connection and community service in ways that the communities surrounding that university wanted.
I think it’s really that mentality of being educational and doing public service without it being preachy, and kind of top-down.
Yeah, it’s hard to not be pretentious. I think it’s like, that’s like the struggle of college radio. You want to show everyone all this cool music without being pretentious about it.
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it’s a fine line between these things, but it’s definitely part of the learning process too. I think a lot of college students are familiar with the experience of maybe going home that first Thanksgiving after going to college, and they know so much and they just want to tell everybody, like, all these things that they’ve learned, and it’s like, “Okay, settle down.”
I think eventually the stations come to understand this as well sort of in a lot of their missions. The real lesson that you got from college is not necessarily how much you know, it’s how much you don’t know. That’s sort of the mentality that is the marker of somebody who’s kind of gone through this educational process. And so they’re able to stay curious and stay open to new ideas. That’s the value, right? That’s what employers look for. They want people who know how to learn and are open to new ideas and putting information together in new ways. That’s really the valuable skill that students are developing. And I think that mentality of being open is very much a part of these radio station cultures as well.
**I think so too. And that’s something we stress also, like, even in our hiring process. We want people who are excited to learn and discover more. I’ve been at WXYC for a year, and the amount that I thought I knew before, like a year ago, is so different from what I think I know now. And there’s just so much out there. And radio is just such a great way to discover all of that. **
In the eyes of many, radio seems to be a dying industry with streaming and new technological developments. You experienced this with Napster and the closing of WRVU [in Nashville]. So the music industry is very quickly changing. Is college radio still thriving in the way that it used to? And where do you see it going?
I think it’s a really interesting point of transition, where there’s a lot of dangers out there, but there’s also some opportunities. I love my alma mater, I love the education that I got there, at Vanderbilt University – I mean, doing radio in the heart of Music City was unlike anything I could have ever expected. It was unbelievable. But that experience was facilitated by the fact that the University valued that connection with the community. And when they took the radio station away, on the surface, it seems like, okay, it’s because radio is no longer this valuable property. But I think it stems from something even more dangerous, which is that the university no longer saw those community connections as being valuable.
Even though students can still do radio at Vanderbilt, it’s for the campus only. That’s really what the emphasis is on – that a student’s only talking to other students. And so that’s the real danger. It’s less that radio and music discovery are going to be a thing and more that these institutions are no longer investing in those larger community connections, and that kind of bigger educational mission.
But at the same time, the opportunities in these stations still exist. There’s still some reason that universities are maintaining them as a student activity, and I think college students are extremely creative. If we just protect the ability of students to do radio, they will figure out what the next phase of college radio is going to look like. It might not have the same position in the music industry that it did in the 80s and the 90s, but it’ll do something else.
The biggest threat to that is, you know, at the university that I work at, most of my students work 30 hours a week. They don’t have the time to go down to the radio station two hours a day, like I did, and, you know, comb through the stacks and like, hang out on the couch. They’re going off to work at Dunkin’ Donuts. And that’s the real danger of, you know, putting education to such a stretched position of feasibility financially, but also kind of the means testing of the degrees that students get, where they have to have something very practical that immediately gets them a job. They aren’t able to have those kinds of bigger, exploratory experiences where they aren’t getting paid. So that’s that’s the flip side of that opportunity that there’s still some barriers to overcome there.
I think, like lots of the stations, we’re working towards just making college radio more accessible, for both the students and the community as well. And I think we’re headed in a good direction, as someone on WXYC. I think we’re headed in a very good direction.
I think so. I think the future is bright.
