August 31

Again, with the deep well of WCBN wisdom that floats around the station. A couple of conversations inspired the meanderings in this show:

(1) A long-haired man named Tony serves the station by serving our servers, and he’s the man who turned me on to Glenn Branca. Glenn is known for composing music that’s performed onstage by gazillions of (10-100) electric guitar players. simultaneously.

(2) Tony and I also got to talking about a genre in our music library that we label with black and yellow tape. (oh, but how much controversy surrounds this idea of genrefication in our freeform radio station; see the jazz? episode of Break Your Radio.) It seems as though anything that “sounds weird” gets tossed into this “experimental” bin that’s labeled black and yellow. Tony, however, illuminated another angle of the origin of this genre that he calls “20th Century Classical”–he argues that if the musician takes his or her compositions quite seriously, then we respect their wishes and their art by adding it to the 20th Century Classical collection. An interesting perspective, and one which I explored a bit in these two hours.

(3) Some station members and I discussed indecency, which we are wont to do. I complained that rappers should be more creative about redacting their rhymes–simply bleeping out the words is lazy and isn’t fooling anyone. Ben argued that the censorship itself is unnecessary and upsetting. In any case, Kristin intrigued me by mentioning that N.W.A. put out an alternative album to the language-violation-riddled “Straight Outta Compton”, with nearly entirely new lyrics that omit the dirty words. nice. If the clean version doesn’t do it for you, Paul says that you can find edits lurking around the interwebs that contain only the curses…

(2 hours)
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