College radio and politics

[fybush@world.std.com (Scott D Fybush)]

There's something about college radio that seems to bring out
these impassioned but (usually) entirely pointless political battles.

I have memories (possibly, with the passage of time, even fond ones)
of the incredibly heated fights that erupted at WBRS during my
time there over all sorts of silly little issues.

Case in point: The station's "programmaments" circa 1990 included
a strict prohibition against "judging" music.  Which is to say, if
I'd pressed a CD of myself singing tunelessly (the only way I
know how!) with the West Suburban Boston white pages as the lyrics,
and submitted it to the station as "music," it would have been
treated as no better, and no worse, than a Beethoven symphony,
a Bob Dylan album, or a Charlie Mingus track.  

So far, so weird, but then there came the day when the station's arts
and entertainment coordinator tried to (gasp!) review a musical
performance, only to end up spending several hours in a studio 
engaged in a screaming match with several board members because --
yes, that's right -- she had tried to "judge" a piece of music.

Similar arguments seemed to erupt at almost every board meeting.  The
board meetings were all recorded, and some board members collected
the best moments for a montage of yelling, screaming, throwing
various objects, and crying.

After that, it was an absolute breath of fresh air to enter the
"real" world of commercial radio, where the decisions were just
as arbitrary, but at least they were coming from a couple of elderly
guys who actually signed the paychecks, not from a power-hungry,
hormone-addled (you'd be amazed the role THAT played) college
junior.  I was still at Brandeis at the time, and it was amazing
how insignificant the fights at WBRS seemed by comparison with what
I was doing up in Lowell.

Oh yeah, I also got to work with an up-and-coming star
of talk radio, some Bill O'something-or-other, but that's another
story entirely ;-)

- -s

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