Radio Daze, and a Blog Review: WFMU
Maybe it’s just a byproduct of being in the New York media market, but it seems like radio is a fickle place. Radio stations don’t last, and the few that have seem to have mutated beyond all recognition. At any given point from the late ‘70’s to the early ‘90’s, you could spin the dial and hear anything from Nektar, The Clash, Elvis Costello, PiL, the Smiths, the Cure, Joy Division, and the Style Council rubbing elbows with the likes of PWEI, Killing Joke, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, King Crimson, Big Youth, Pat Metheny, The Wonderstuff, and others, sometimes side-by-side.
Times have changed. WQCD is off the air (thankfully), while WNEW and WHTG have changed call signs and formats multiple times. These days over at WBLS (which Ross Davis once described as a “crack house with turntables”—does anyone else remember Paco?), if anyone tried to play a Clash dub plate back to back with the Sugarhill Gang, someone’d throw a Molotov Cocktail in the lobby.
So I’ve come to appreciate WFMU, which, for years now, has never lost the free-form ethos that made FM radio such an interesting place when I was younger. Judaica? Check. Bluegrass? Sure. Indie that’s indie, and not “Indie” (in the way that any pop that didn’t sound like Springsteen got labeled “Alternative” sometime around 1990)? Hell yeah. And thanks to FMU’s Beware The Blog, you can get your sound collages, your Ralph Stanley, and your “JM in the AM” no matter where you may be.
The station is also home to the 365 Days Project, a repository of some of the most warped sounds ever put on wax; and UbuWeb, where you can find a variety of media–some of it very rare–from poets, painters, art insiders, and cultural outsiders. Beware The Blog doesn’t try to be everybody’s everything, but it does a darned good job of being quite a bit to those of us who remember that radio doesn’t need to suck… God bless ‘em for it.
Tags: Beware the Blog, blogs, radio, WBLS, WFMU, WHTG, WNEW, WQCD