EP. 617: LIVE FROM THE UNDERGROUND: THE RISE OF COLLEGE RADIO ft. Katherine Rye Jewell

Get Katherine's book here: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469677255/live-from-the-underground/

Welcome to our show! Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with professor and author Katherine Rye Jewell about her fascinating new book, "Live from the Underground," which explores the rise of college radio. Unlike typical homages to white indie rock and obscure fringe artists, Jewell provides a materialist historiography that examines how college radio helped shape the music landscape.

 

In "Live From the Underground," Jewell writes:

 

> "College radio offered an ideal venue for these attitudes. It could never overtake commercial radio, remaining scarce and subaltern. Pop culture rejects sought sanctuary at these stations by the 1990s. Protected by institutional homes and noncommercial licenses, these stations operated on the public’s airwaves for educational purposes. Such missions offered useful cover for DJs seeking the weird, the unheard, or underappreciated. Such music might never reach, or actively defy, mainstream audiences. Many participants were content with remaining on the outside, in the underground. Stations developed devoted listener bases of engaged music fans and lured college students who didn’t quite fit in on campus. Community DJs turned to college radio, too, seeking purchase on the nation’s airwaves—or at least however far the usually low-wattage collegiate signal reached.

 

> By the early 1990s, college radio had earned a national identity that evoked generational dissatisfaction with pop culture even as it remained deeply conversant with it. These signals did offer alternative voices to willing audiences. Yet college radio’s collective status as an alternative, or counter-hegemonic, medium is debatable. Virtually all elements of the college radio model—educational mission, anti commercialism, funding mechanisms, organizational structures, professional practices, content, or audience relationships—were contested in one way or another after the 1970s. Some stations explored the furthest fringes of musical expression, but these were missions shaped historically and through conflict. Numerous DJs sought careers in the news, music, and media industries. Not all stations devoted programming to music lacking broad commercial appeal, but these signals and their participants also shaped the nation’s landscape of collegiate radio. College radio’s status as an alternative medium is thus tenuous, even if in aggregate or individually these stations possessed disruptive potential."

 

Our guest today, Katherine Rye Jewell, is a historian and a professor at Fitchburg State University. Her work delves into the intersection of business, politics, and culture. Please give a big TIR round of applause for Katherine Rye Jewell!

 

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