pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

i think it's really important to have a university employee--someone who's been around for a while--as a kind of bridge between students and longtime community DJs. you need someone from the university community who knows the station and can carry that institutional memory, since students by definition are around for a few years (at most) and then leave. even basic things like knowing when/how to fill out our FCC license-renewal application were made difficult because nobody had done it before.

what is this thread about again?

the students claimed.....a lot of stuff. none of which has gone anywhere. the consensus among community members is that they just didn't like having him around. so they got rid of him. and they got rid of the student advisor who had been there for decades. it will end in lawsuits. the students REALLY want the station to be a CMJ-style indie rock station. and the WMUA charter is not about that at all.

we've been dealing with this for years. We employ student volunteers and paid student directors who pay nominal attention to the thousands of other students who pay fees towards the station. Whenever we reminded them of obligations, they accused us of trying to get'em to sell out. "Selling out" in this case is...playing their music at museum and ratskellar events? idk

I use the "guys, I'm a freelance music critic" card as much as I can

(i think my position was made easier by the fact that i was never all that into indie rock, and i was sympathetic to the diversity that the community DJs brought to the mix... reggae, gospel, oldies, folk, etc. stuff most of the students didn't bother with.)

college station deejays are a reaaaaallly insular bunch. Unlike our newspaper students, the deejays actively want to withdraw from campus life and anything related to college. Hence why we had so many deejays who stayed at the station years after graduating (or never graduating). We changed our bylaws last year and it's helped clear much of the bad air.

our campus newspaper made a huge deal about being independent of the university and university funding but I wouldn't say they actively wanted to withdraw

just to bring this discussion (almost) full circle

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wesleyan-newspaper-black-lives-matter_5602f1efe4b0fde8b0d0f40d

there's some seriously illiberal campus-activism BS that can be easily critiqued from any political position btw

We thought about going indie for a while but this is a commuter university in a major urban environment; we never had the ad rate necessary to do it. Now lots of colleagues around the country who helped make their papers independent are in serious trouble.

the biggest shows on WMUA are the weekend polka shows. and they are consistently the biggest money-makers when it comes to donations. by, like, a BIG margin. tens of thousands of dollars a year that goes to the station. and these students have alienated them too. and they are the nicest people you will ever meet. they have a world-wide audience. they don't need this kinda stuff. they are total pros.

ha, Maria was all about that Wesleyan story. that's her alma mater.

...and mine :)

she went to school with the guy who did Mad Men. though i don't think they knew each other well. and johnny temple from girls -vs- boys. i will just never get over the fact that alvin lucier was her music teacher. hipster cred for days!

matthew weiner is a wesleyan alum?

hey alvin lucier... and anthony braxton.

Really cool stories way more informative than anything I've seen on pitchfork in a long time.

Honestly was more like "kids still do that?" than "kids today!" about this college radio stuff. I thought they'd all be podcasting their vines, not squabbling with the olds over what's on ye olde dial

Still feel frazzled thinkin bout four hour meetings at the ol alma mater

at the end of the afternoon when your work day should be ending and they're getting out of bed

ha i still mostly keep college-student hours, i just work a lot more

Discovered recently some bullshit in-studio fight with communication dept profs I barely remembered from my time 15 years ago has been chronicled like The Shot Heard Around The World on Wikipedia, with new students played recordings of the affair so they can realize their debt. College radio is mental.

that's a bummer -- i liked having the olds at my college radio station ... so many of them definitely had better shows than anything the kids were doing. i'm sure there was a little tension there, but i can't remember any real conflicts.

Ime a knowing, wise community elder can often be a naive, self-righteous student who stuck around town.

yep

and ceases to be knowing and wise when you threaten to give his show of 13 years to a freshman

Community radio is a good thing and student radio is a good thing but I dunno if they should be the same thing

Obv people will take what they can get from both sides, just saying in an ideal sitch

seriously, the best polka shows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOnuSLmm_vU

Yeah but even in 2015 an FCC license can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (at the very least). It's not something random community members can just band together to buy, hence college radio stations with community involvement.

xp @da croupier

It's precisely the specialness -- the reality even -- of an FCC license that students don't wanna accept, which I get. I was a college deejay too, just wanted to play my post punk classics for a couple hours and no one fuck with me.

i mean, what was cool for me about community DJs (at least partly) was that they were *from the community*. it was good to get a different perspective from the bubble that was a liberal arts college in the hudson valley.

I'm just wishing that more conversations on the Internet regarding either Pitchfork or SJWs would result in videos being posted about polka.

"i mean, what was cool for me about community DJs (at least partly) was that they were *from the community*. it was good to get a different perspective from the bubble that was a liberal arts college in the hudson valley."

this is the problem with the kids who run the station at Umass now. they really don't want to have anything to do with the community. and they really seem intolerant of different opinions/viewpoints. and older strange radio people. they just want to play their spotify playlists on the air and ignore the outside world. i dunno, they're young. they get paid too. the management people who are students. looks good on a resume.

reassuring to know this is a national epidemic. Repeal the Bill of Rights.

It's precisely the specialness -- the reality even -- of an FCC license that students don't wanna accept, which I get. I was a college deejay too, just wanted to play my post punk classics for a couple hours and no one fuck with me.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 1, 2015 4:51 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't even know what college radio means to students in an era of hyperabundant soundcloud mixes, itunes whatevers, etc. etc. i was in college at the very cusp of all that, when even setting up an internet stream for our station was incredibly cumbersome, and wouldn't work on half of our laptops.... nowadays i imagine that radio might seem a bit antiquated, like public-access TV...

i have to say that the worst thing about the college station here (which is neither great nor terrible on the whole) is that the kids come in and plug in their ipods or ipros or iclouds or whatever and play these lossy, fucked-up-sounding MP3s over the radio and they sound just awful. i'm tempted to write a letter to the station manager but then i will have officialy become Annoying Old Guy Audiophile.

also i once subbed for a guy on the station and every single one of their turntables and CD players was fucked up and barely worked and i was really tempted to just throw my hands up and walk off leaving a bunch of dead air.

that's normal!

our soundboard is from the Reagan administration and held together with tape and paper clips.

yeah but imagine you bring a few boxes of stuff to play on the air and then none of the turntables or CD players work and the on-duty manager is like "oh yeah, they haven't worked this week, sorry." my point is that 99% of the student DJs just plug in their digital hoohas and hit "shuffle."

/old man

what fun is being a college student if you can't plug in your digital hooha

http://i299.photobucket.com/albums/mm300/TheSurvivalist/heat-pacino-buggy.jpg

not pictured: S1mon3

i don't know what's worse, this review or this entire album concept http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21145-meow-the-jewels/

"But Meow the Jewels isn't really about music at all; instead, it's a major milestone in cats' slow-but-inevitable climb to the status of Hip-Hop's Favorite Animal."

Whoa.

one thing about this particular thread is that it's humorless as shit

at least the album was made for charity

yea bc cats are so fuckin funny right xp

jfc

we need like a whiney CATS HOLY SHIT SO FUCKING FUNNY LOL OMG LOOK AT THIS CAT WOW IM DYING thread

it's an album review............. about a cat album......................

Missed all the big talk from yesterday but:

i think it's really important to have a university employee--someone who's been around for a while--as a kind of bridge between students and longtime community DJs. you need someone from the university community who knows the station and can carry that institutional memory, since students by definition are around for a few years (at most) and then leave. even basic things like knowing when/how to fill out our FCC license-renewal application were made difficult because nobody had done it before.

KUCI, where I DJed from 1992 to 2000, was very lucky in this regard -- Kevin Stockdale, officially the broadcast media coordinator, essentially pitched for and created this job, officially part of what's called University Advancement last I checked (covering media, etc.) out of nothing back in the 1980s when he was an undergrad. He's fulfilled that role ever since, and we couldn't've been luckier -- management always changes but he never directly involves himself in that yearly process, and he just keeps a careful eye on things to make sure all the dotted lines are signed. Helps that he's one of the most quietly earnest but still very chill people around, just a steady hand on the rudder no matter where the ship's being steered. He's still there! And good thing too.

college station deejays are a reaaaaallly insular bunch.Unlike our newspaper students, the deejays actively want to withdraw from campus life and anything related to college. Hence why we had so many deejays who stayed at the station years after graduating (or never graduating). We changed our bylaws last year and it's helped clear much of the bad air

I can definitely see that. We were much luckier in that the show lifers tend to be Saturday/Sunday morning folks who wanted shifts nobody else felt like getting up for; also they tended to be more community members than former grads, though not all. Definitely a bit insular but not entirely; they almost always showed up to every staff meeting and participated in wider events.

i 100% endorse pitchfork moving away from a ratings scale to employing emojis - assuming they are never explained with a scale