Sunday, March 7, 2010

It came from Upsala It is the middle again of the annual WFMU fundraising marathon WFMU Dot Org. This is when - to take a dry run through the story - WFMU the former campus radio station of Upsala college of New Jersey, late and laid to rest these past fifteen years, tries to raise the million or so dollars to perpetuate itself another year . The station is minded now by shards of the students or staff that was there when it ended, alumni and a vanguard of the like minded WFMU - Wikipedia. At my job as a copy-cataloging clerk for the University of Maryland Libraries, I ocasionally will have reason to work over a box of materials sent over from one the broadcast archives we are associated with  National Public Broadcasting Archives or  The Library of American Broadcasting . These will be books that belonged to retiring radio professionals, books of retiring professors, and items published by the NAB, and other things they have gotten a hold of. Many of these items will have titles like "How to do Radio, How to do Morning Radio, How to develop a Morning Radio personality". Their appendices are filled with details about the proper format-clocks and day-parts, GV, MV, FV and recurrents. How many times you should run a promo [untill half your listeners have heard it three times]. Most of these books are written by people who are in their own way trying to be desperately earnest about it all. The end result is to make sure at the end of the day no glint of creativity  or spontaneity shows through the process. The greatest good is control, seamlessness and a perfect existence in the background. WFMU is not like that. They are free-format DJ programmed radio. Their knowledge of music, their segues, their dead air and provocatively awkward pauses. Real wing and a prayer radio (Wing and a Prayer is a song by Joseph Spence). It is active radio, engaging radio, Radio that can maintain a real dialogue with a musical communitity. The last bastion, and model of real radio. 11:41:11 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2010 P. Bushmiller. Last update: 4/2/10; 2:17:15 AM.