My conversation with archivist, journalist, and radio host Jennifer Waits (of Radio Survivor + KFJC 89.7 FM), following the tour I gave her of KUCR 88.3 FM. We sat in the station across from each other on a breezy Sunday morning and discussed the DIY ethos of non-commercial radio, physical histories, and much more.
Jennifer looking through KUCR’s jazz vinyl library. Gayle Moran’s ‘I Loved You Then…I Love You Now’ caught her eye.
Diya: From journalist to journalist, what do you feel is your driving force to make an archive of radio?
Jennifer: I started blogging about college radio in 2008 and some of it was to, kind of, I don’t know, get the word out because nobody else was really writing about college radio anywhere, which seemed really strange. They weren’t writing about it in a blog sort of way or even in academia or anywhere in the popular press. And part of the impetus was also that I had been involved with a number of college radio stations, and I felt like each experience was very insular. Like, you know, our own world at the station is what we knew. And we didn’t really think about what was happening beyond that. So I wanted to write about what was going on in the culture of college radio so that other college radio stations also were aware and could learn from other places. And that led to this whole project of visiting radio stations, doing field trips and writing up articles about them just so everybody could see and understand the diversity of college radio–that not all stations were the same, and that college radio was alive and well. And that it’s not defunct. And to bring to light the importance of student media. I’ve always been such a proponent of student media going back to when I was on my high school newspaper. I think students don’t get enough credit–that they are actually media makers and what they’re making is important. And I hate it when people describe college radio as a sandbox. I feel like that’s just so pejorative, you know? Why can’t you just appreciate that students are creating amazing art that doesn’t have to be compared to anything else?
Diya: Yeah. I think it also dismisses the amount of new music that gets highlighted because of college radio, NACC, non commercial, etc, right? I don’t think people realize how hard it is for independent musicians to get their music out. And when they are appealing to a college crowd or promoting or just sending their stuff over, there’s a lot more of a benevolent audience. With college radio, you get people who are being paid to sit down and go through all this music and give it some thought and sometimes even write about it or get back to them on it. And I think that’s really great because I’ve had a lot of independent artists sending music and just looking at it–you can see how hard they’ve worked on it. And it’s just nice, because a lot of other ways to get your music out there are not very benevolent. [Algorithms] don’t necessarily have people giving music proper attention or possibly writing back or responding to emails, you know? It’s all very automated. So I think more often than not, you’ll get a lot more reception, and not even just attention, but quality listening time. Even like me as a music director–like, super nitpicky–I still make sure I listen to everything I receive, you know? And I feel like it’s easy to take that for granted if you’re just talking about playing music, you know?
Jennifer: I think a lot of people in the general universe don’t think about college radio–and that it’s still this vibrant place for music. And that we’re still that, you know? As music directors, material is coming in that’s being reviewed and it’s being added to the radio station. And it’s still an important part of the music ecosystem that, you know, an artist being played on a college radio station has an impact on listeners in the area and record stores in the area. That’s still happening. We have so many different ways to distribute and promote music. I think some people forget that the college radio–non commercial radio–is still really important part of that and that there’s some artists that might not get radio play otherwise, You and I were talking earlier before this interview about genres like noise and other genres you’re not going to hear on commercial radio. So you know, noise artists, I think college radio also, you know, we bring in a lot of artists to the studio to perform live or to do interviews and we do ticket giveaways. So all of that, I think, has an impact in helping artists get the word out about their music and upcoming shows they have.
Diya: Definitely. I find a lot of people to often be really disdainful of new music or complain about a so-called “lack of good new music” or whatever. I hear a lot of older people especially–and actually, even younger people, I’m not even going to make it about age. It’s definitely something I hear people my age say too. And it’s always “oh they stopped making good music after, like, the XYZ era” or something.
Jennifer: Yeah, that’s so ridiculous.
Diya: And it’s so annoying, especially as somebody who literally is employed to listen to new music and gets influxes of new releases constantly. I am constantly bewildered by the amount of innovation I keep hearing. And even as somebody who tends to reject things if they sound a bit too overdone or bland or like a pastiche of something older, I find myself very often pleasantly surprised by the amount of beauty people come up with. And I think it’s a very hopeful, optimistic position to be in. It’s really easy to reject new art and younger people making art because you have this kind of hopeless, shrouded vision of life–the ”Oh, we’re all going downhill as a society. We’re all going downhill and there’s no new art.” rhetoric. And it’s so great to be in a position where you’re constantly experiencing new art because you’re constantly snapping out of that rhetoric, being like, “no, that’s not true”. There’s so much new art. So much of it is super relevant, important and innovative too. And people just aren’t talking about it because they have an illusion of there being over-saturation, because music is more accessible to make now, which is a good thing, right? So I feel like because of that, people assume that there’s suddenly less quality across the board when there isn’t. They’re just not looking for the beautiful stuff.
Jennifer: Yeah, and most people are really only encountering a fraction of what’s out there. And totally. You know what amazes me? At the station where I DJ, we add a lot of material from the past–experimental underground material. And I’m constantly learning about crazy stuff from, like, the 1950s, and the majority of people in the 1950s probably weren’t exploring very early electronic music or, the early days of computer music and things like that. I think–I don’t know, I mean–I’ve heard that people tend to get stuck in the music of their youth. Most people don’t go beyond that. And you know, people who work in college radio hopefully are there because they want to keep expanding their music taste and horizons. And if you’re in that environment, it’s very obvious that there’s always innovation going on.
Diya: Totally. And it also lets you share that with other people, which is important. It’s kind of archaeological in a way. I find that a lot of releases that are considered cult classics or favorites tend to be ones that were kind of buried when they were released. Like, if you look at Mort Garson’s Plantasia–huge album, huge deal for Moog, synthesizer music, early computer music, whatever–when it was released, it was kind of taken for granted because it was kind of just given to people when they bought mattresses or whatever. But now, people my age, people in their 20s, etc., are finding that and thinking, “oh, wow, this is actually a really influential album” or “that’s an interesting premise–music for plants to listen to?”, but that’s the kind of thing that makes waves, I feel. And people are digging that up and being like, oh, wait a minute, this wasn’t given enough attention when it was released, but now it’s a cult classic. I feel like people often don’t realize how much of the music they love is actually just rediscovered older music that the mainstream was initially disdainful towards. If you look at Linda Perhacs’s Parallelograms, a big deal in psychedelic folk and freak folk scenes, it’s another album that was considered somewhat of a “commercial flop” when it was released. And then I think of how people dug it up much later and were like, “whoa, this is so cool, it’s great, it’s awesome”, and then here I am talking about it. I wouldn’t have been able to know that album if people hadn’t been looking for music like this, right? I feel that’s the responsibility of being a DJ or a radio show host or a curator of any sort–whether it be on air or in your friend’s garage, making a playlist. That is your responsibility, if you choose to take on it–to just keep looking, digging things up, and reading between the lines for things that are often dismissed or waved away.
Jennifer: That’s why it’s so upsetting to me when radio stations that have massive record libraries purge material from the past that they think isn’t that great or that interesting. Because I think people’s appreciation of different things and different genres changes over time. And like you said, sometimes things are not even understood in the same way. It takes a while. I mean, this happens with all kinds of art, right? Like certain films when they came out were so hard for people to understand, and just seemed incomprehensible. And then years later, people realized they were really brilliant. Yeah.
Diya: Totally, and I know you’re a David Lynch fan, so…
Jennifer: Yes! I was thinking of Fire Walk With Me.
Diya: Exactly, you’re probably very sympathetic to that as well–avant-garde art and how it’s later discovered, usually under a different context. But I am curious to know more–you told me you had your own radio show in college and that you currently have one. I would love to hear more about what you play on air and what you aim to do with it. I remember you mentioning playing primarily women in the first half of your show.
Jennifer: Yeah, so I have a really underground-focused show. I DJ at KFJC at Foothill College, which is, you know, a mostly underground music focused station. And the reason I stay involved with college radio is because I want to keep learning about music, and you know, keep getting exposed to things. So I’ve had my show for decades. And what it sounds like today, hopefully, is different from when I first started doing my show, ’cause I want to keep growing and not playing the same things over and over again. I get really frustrated that women still aren’t represented equally on the radio airwaves. That really bothers me. I love the sound of the female voice. And that’s not the only aspect I like–you know, I like to play other sorts of experimental artists who are women whose voices you might not hear in a piece. I try to highlight new adds to our library at the first part of my show. I also organized a female takeover a few years ago where we did over a week of all female-identifying artists and DJs. And I was hoping for it to be sort of a radical thing where I was trying to get [DJs who tended to not play women at all] to play more female artists. I wanted to tip the balance because–I don’t know. I mean, you’ve probably heard some of these statistics where over the years there have been radio stations that have had mandates where you couldn’t play female artists back-to-back.
Diya: Oh wow, really?
Jennifer: Yeah, ’cause they thought people would turn the dial. It’s crazy. Like why? I don’t understand. Like it’s all from the same pot of music. And so I think for years and years there’s been this bias, maybe especially in genres like rock and metal, so I love that we can pull up compilations like Women Take Back the Noise that might surprise a lot of people. Like, yeah, there are women who are making noise and doing metal. And so yeah, I just think it’s important to remind people that women are involved in all kinds of different genres of music. So that’s a part of my show. I’m playing all sorts of things–experimental, black metal, prettier and more acoustic metal (Diya: Opeth!) that has more operatic vocals, like Grayceon…I love them. I like discovering things from the past that we’ve added–some music from the 1920s, you know? Because there’s so much music that was from before we were born. That’s amazing. And you don’t hear music from the very early days of recording music on the radio very often.
Diya: For sure. Definitely lots of different technology as well. I remember you mentioning that you were super into old technology and that kind of stuff. So I feel like stuff that was recorded on very niche pieces of equipment would fascinate you and your listeners.
Jennifer: Yeah, like wire recordings and things recorded on cylinder. You know, there have been some releases that have come out that are very old 78s and cylinder recordings.
Diya: Yeah, totally. That’s really interesting. As a blogger, I’m wondering about what your take is on independent media versus social media. There’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently where I’ve been trying to distance myself from centralizing everything I do on social media in favor of using my own website. And I have been trying to put things there more. I assume that as a blogger and a journalist, you’re probably thinking the same because there’s less censorship, more control of your platform’s layout, and more ability to curate things. And it’s a bit more removed from advertising and noise, you know. So I feel like as a journalist and as a creator of whatever, I think it’s really important that we encourage more artists and musicians and writers to have their own sites. I think that’s what radio shows do, in a way.
Jennifer: I think radio stations too, you know? Radio Survivor is where most of my writing appears. We have our own domain. So when I started blogging, it was on Blogger. I still have my old Blogspot. I worry that it’s going to disappear. So I keep backing it up on Internet Archive, on the Wayback Machine, because I’m afraid. But another project I have is curating this digital college radio collection that’s part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications that’s on the Internet Archive. And so I’m trying to get radio stations–college radio stations–to send materials. And you know, a lot of it is historic, but one thing that worries me greatly is that a lot of college radio stations’ announcements and promotions about events are happening over social media, especially Instagram. And that’s not necessarily going to be saved anywhere. That’s so ephemeral, especially Instagram stories. I wish that more of that communication was happening on their websites. And that could be backed up on the Wayback Machine, because suddenly, I don’t know, let’s say a new college radio station launches and all the communication about it is on Instagram. So you’re missing all these little things that in the past you might have been able to look back to on their website or an old flyer. So I, yeah, I think I would encourage folks to try to do more and more on their own platform, on their own website, just so that you have more of this permanent record of what you’re doing. And with a lot of colleges, the archivists there will actually do backups of the website that periodically help save that material. There’s a lot of stuff that is, you know, “born digital” that we’re that we’ve already lost.
Diya: Yeah. I definitely see a kind of resistance to that–a wave of people trying to have as much physical media as possible, a huge wave of scrapbooking as well.
Jennifer: Yeah, that’s great.
Diya: I’m super into that. I know you’re also a fan of collecting little tidbits.
Jennifer: Yeah!
Diya: I think that’s a really important culture that I hope that more radio stations, more artists, writers, bloggers, musicians preserve. And that’s one of the reasons why the physical radio station is so important to me–it is a culmination of physical history and there’s just so much tangible stuff away from the cloud.
Jennifer: And for historians, I’m doing projects where I’m looking back at radio stations that started in the 1920s, even. I’m so grateful that people saved all kinds of paper material– typed and handwritten meeting notes. And I think in the modern era, even though we have our phones on us and we’re taking photos all the time and taking videos and audio, I don’t know that it’s all being saved in the same way. And the, and we might be so overwhelmed by all the random things that we’re capturing that I don’t know if the things that are important. I don’t know what’s important, but you know, certain things like the documentation of the business of a radio station, I don’t know if that’s being saved in the same way.
Diya: The politics of ownership play a big role in that too. I’ve been thinking a lot about that as well. And I assume you’ve probably thought about it a lot too, with being a radio historian, etc. You know, when you subscribe to things–when you take photos of things–the cloud kind of has a part in that. It’s not so much you. So I feel like going the extra mile, owning your music, archiving your radio show, all of that. Having your own archives of things you’ve done that exist under your jurisdiction and not a cloud’s. So yeah, that’s really interesting. I do want to conclude with one question. What do you think is the most important part of human curation as opposed to algorithmic curation? I know that personally, I’ve tried my best to reject as many algorithmic recommendations as I can.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Diya: More relying on other deejays–NTS, KUCR, other stations, deejays on YouTube and all that for discovering things… Instead of looking at–I’m not a Spotify user, but–TIDAL or whatever.
Jennifer: Yeah. I do my radio show on the fly, so things aren’t planned ahead of time unless it’s a special where I’m really trying to think about things chronologically or something. And I think there’s something so beautiful about a human created segue–it’s so much more intangible than what an algorithm comes up with. I might do a show that has a secret embedded theme throughout it related to something going on in my life that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else. Let’s say you’re doing a show about a friend, or your partner, or getting laid off. You’re going to play specific things that are very personal to you. And I think that’s just so beautiful. And I think listeners can feel that passion coming through and doing unexpected things. So, yeah, I don’t think a computer could ever do that because it’s so intangible. That’s the human part of it, the soul. There’s an actual human brain who, on the fly, is like, “oh, there’s something in this piece that’s reminding me of this [other] piece”. And then you run to the other room and grab something and throw it on, you know?
Diya: I think that, no matter how “asymptotically close” AI tries to get, it will never be able to mimic the constant idiosyncratic behavior of humans.
Jennifer: Plus, there’s the universe of music that isn’t digital. On a radio show, you can do all these interesting things like layering, playing around with the speed of things, playing things backwards, and bringing things in. On my last show, I was bringing in bird sounds from online, and then I’ve done weird things where I’ve put the radio station on delay. So it created this weird echo effect with my voice and with all the music where it was just like a hall of mirrors. There’s no way you could get that with any kind of algorithm.
Diya: That’s one reason I love DIY radio shows, even online ones like on NTS, as I mentioned. There’s lots of people on there who do bird sounds and wind chimes and ambient stuff and talk about whatever. That’s what I aim to do too–with reading poetry and whatever. But yeah, that’s really beautiful. I love the way you put that.
Jennifer: Even when I was doing my radio show when I was 19, it was at my college radio station, which had been around forever. And so, there were old spoken word records in the library. There’s this whole series called This I Believe. You know, great thinkers with their thoughts on life. And I remember layering that with music even back then. And I think something about being in a radio station with a history and that kind of library just inspires that sort of behavior.
Diya: Totally. And a lot of experimental music is super self indulgent–and I love that and I think that it’s not a bad thing. I think all music is inherently self indulgent–by principle–despite what critics say. But I think just having access to that history and variety, like you mentioned, encourages people to lean into that side of themselves… To be creative, to write, to edit videos, to make colleges and share them, etc. I think that DIY spirit is extremely important, especially in the age of “corporate art”.
Jennifer: I think “collage” is a good term to think about when doing radio too… That’s the opportunity you have when you’re doing non commercial radio.
Diya: We have a couple pieces of paraphernalia around the station that say “commercial radio sucks”. I agree. But that’s great. Thank you so much.
Jennifer: Sure, yeah! Thanks for having me at KUCR.
Radio Survivor‘s KUCR feature: