As a result, college radio stations like MIT’s WMBR, Emerson College’s WERS and Boston College’s WZBC became a way for offbeat artists and independent record labels, who struggled to find a home in the mainstream, to reach a wider (though not necessarily a mass) audience. This increased visibility happened to coincide with the emergence of the punk, post-punk and new wave, largely youth-driven genres that espoused a countercultural ethos. And eventually, the music industry started to incorporate those signals into their business model.” “Suddenly, these stations that were invested in cultural exploration and speaking for communities that weren’t being served by commercial radio become more visible. “Ironically, a lot of those small, 10-watt stations actually upgraded their signals” in order to keep broadcasting, Jewell said. In 1978, lobbying from those bigger stations led the FCC to eliminate the Class D licenses that many small college stations relied on in an attempt to push them off the air and free up broadcast bandwidth. “Their hope was to use radio to knit communities together and speak to the nation’s cultural pluralism.”īut in the 1970s, a conflict arose between professional public radio and the more amateurish college radio, whose tiny, 10-watt transmitters often clashed with the signals of larger, more polished NPR affiliates in their broadcast areas. “The noncommercial identity of college radio is shaped by this idea of ‘educational radio,’ which was developed by reformers from the 1930s who were trying to carve out a space for content that wouldn’t have a broad, commercial appeal,” said Jewell. (Courtesy The University of North Carolina Press) Delving deep into the archives of dozens of stations from Cambridge to California, Jewell highlights the role these institutions played in elevating boundary-pushing, out-of-the-mainstream music and cultural perspectives in their communities.Īccording to Jewell, the status college radio attained in that era was largely an accident - a strange, unexpected confluence of progressive New Deal-era public policy and a subsequent neoliberal shift in broadcast regulations that ended up backfiring on its corporate proponents. The result is “Live from the Underground,” which examines how college radio stations all over the United States came to have such an outsized impact on the culture and politics of those decades. But when Vanderbilt sold WRVU’s FM license to Nashville Public Radio in 2011 and the student-run station became an internet-only stream, she saw it as a signal that an important era was coming to a close - not just for Vanderbilt but for college radio as a whole. (Courtesy Katherine Rye Jewell)Īfter graduation, Jewell left her radio days behind as she pursued her career as a historian. “And it was a way for me to enter into this world of underground music that I had never really known much about.” Katherine Rye Jewell while a student at Vanderbilt University. “When I discovered that I could be on the radio, I thought that was the coolest thing ever,” Jewell said. Growing up in rural Vermont, she’d had little exposure to college radio and was excited at the prospect of getting on the air. Jewell, a professor of history at Fitchburg State University, attended Vanderbilt University in the late 1990s and served as indie rock music director at its student-run radio station, WRVU. In “ Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio,” author Katherine Rye Jewell takes readers on a deep dive into the amusing, anarchic and surprisingly influential world of student-run radio stations, exploring what made those left-of-the-dial broadcasts so special during the 1980s, ‘90s and 2000s.
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