WHEN I FIRST READ that my beloved KCMU radio was being effectively taken over by Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project people, moved off of the UW campus, and renamed KEXP, I half-thought the announcement had to be an April Fool’s prank–even though I’d heard and read rumors about such a move for over a year, ever since the station won its hard-fought operating independence from KUOW, the UW’s money- and demographics-obsessed NPR station.
It just couldn’t be happening. Not really.
Like many loyal listeners to one of America’s finest “college radio” (whatever that means anymore) stations, I’ve invested a lot of time and memories in KCMU.
But I’ve also got a degree of pseudo-proprietary interest in it, having been one of the first new-music DJs on the station in 1980-81 (when it ceased to be a UW student-lab operation and became the valuable community resource it’s been all these years).
As I aged from nerdy college-radio new waver into dorky near-middle-aged progressive-pop fan, the station followed my (and my peer group’s) aging. It laid off from much of the hard-punk material (alas) and inserted a whole variety of fun and/or progressive genres all mixed up (yay!).
But KUOW management gradually asserted more control over KCMU in the early ’90s (at the height of the Seattle Music Scene hype KCMU had helped jump-start). I joined in with the C.U.R.S.E. (“Censorship Undermines Radio Station Ethics”) gang that had launched a boycott, eventually forcing management to back down on its programming-gentrification plans (although the station’s top-notch progressive-news programming remained excised, and today exists only in a Sunday-morning timeslot ghetto.)
This past year KCMU’s been about the best it’s been. The now full-time staff has got the “variety format” down pat, relentlessly mixing everything from power pop and emocore to delta blues and Italian soundtrack tunes.
So when the Big Change got closer, and more likely to be oh-so real, I almost feared setting my clock radio for Monday morning.
As it turned out, nothing seemed to have audibly changed. Yet.
But diligence is necessary.
We don’t want Allen’s minions turning KCMU (I still can’t type “KEXP” without trepidation, let alone say it) into some bland boomer-nostalgia station, or (almost as bad) the type of defanged, Paul-Simonized station the KUOW guys already tried to turn it into.
P.S.: If any of you have tapes of any of the now no-longer-to-be-heard KCMU promo spots, I’d love a copy.)
NEXT: Mulling more possible changes to the site. (I know, again….)
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s darned hard to think of Frisco Net-boors as folk needing or deserving our “support,” as postulated by the organizers of today’s “Back the Net Day.”
ELSEWHERE:
