Why KTRU is the way it is

Are we tired of talking about KTRU yet? No, of course we are not. Actually I guess we are a little bit, which is why this post is four days late, but until the fat lady sings, this isn’t over, so fatigue or no, there are things that still need to be said.

For the last ten to fifteen years or so, KTRU has an uneasy relationship with music fans in Houston, as exemplified in John Lomax’s essential piece of gonzo journalism on Houston radio:

KTRU can be the most frustrating station in town — you’ll hear ten minutes of great stuff, then that will be followed by ten minutes of pompous sub-Yoko Ono avant-garde noise that the DJ thinks will impress some girl in his chemistry class. Then there’s the classic mumbling college rock jocks… On hearing one of these guys drone his way through a break a year ago, John Henry Lomax, my then-seven-year-old son, said, “What is with this guy? Is he new?”

When he was writing the Racket column at the Press, Lomax espoused the fervent belief that Houston radio needed a station that catered to fans of his taste:

I would spin new acts like Lily Allen, the Arcade Fire, the Shins, Drive By Truckers, Amy Winehouse and Scott Miller alongside neglected oldies by bands like the Clash, the Smiths, the Jam, XTC, the Cure, and the Ramones. To that, I would add a rap mix of stuff by Public Enemy, De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest, the Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast, Eric B. and Rakim and Cypress Hill. (Since this is, after all, Houston, you would also hear Scarface/Geto Boys, Devin the Dude, Z-Ro, Big Moe, UGK and Lil’ Keke too.)

This latter quote was from an interview piece with David Sadof, who opined on KTRU’s weaknesses thusly

Sadof’s exasperation with KTRU is unrelenting. “When I was on the radio, I always tried to educate my listeners,” he says. “I would play a couple of songs, and then come on and tell people what I just played, who played it, what album it was on and so on. KTRU will play 30 minutes of music and then the DJ will come on and mumble a bunch of stuff. Maybe he will tell you what he just played, maybe he won’t. You’re supposed to know, or something, and if you don’t, well, you’re just not very cool. Radio should be more welcoming than that.”

These quotations illustrate the frustrations that local rock fans have with KTRU:

1. KTRU frequently plays obnoxiously challenging music

2. KTRU DJs have no personality, mumble a lot, don’t go on the air often enough, etc.

Lest it be thought that Lomax, whom I have named as a bad example before and often tussled with in the Letters section of the Press, is being targeted here, let me say that I respect his opinion- and that, moreover, he has a very good point. The fictitious radio station that he describes above- with the proposed call letters KMAX- should exist. Probably there is some college radio station that plays something like that mix of music. That would be a great radio station. Actually, during free-form shfts, Austin’s KUT isn’t too far off, though it’s probably a little more oriented toward stuff that “sounds like Phil Collins” than Lomax might like.

Before I became a DJ at KTRU- like Conor, I was rejected when I applied as a freshman- I shared some of the exasperation that KTRU didn’t cater to my specific tastes in music. I remember hearing the University of Georgia station, WUOG, when visiting friends in Athens. At times, that station was wall-to-wall punk rock. I loved it, and I wondered why I couldn’t get the same thing from KTRU.

It wasn’t until I became a DJ, after the station was shut down in 2000, that I realized that there was a specific, if unstated, reasoning behind the KTRU aesthetic. And that is, that all types of music are of equal value and deserve representation on the radio, and that KTRU exists to provide that representation.

Here’s how a non-specialty KTRU shift is constructed. Like other radio stations, KTRU has a playlist. What differs about KTRU is the size of its playlist: between 60 and 100 full-length CDs, along with a smattering of singles, LPs and other material. This playlist is constructed by the music director(s), who review new music that is submitted to the station and collect reviews from other DJs as well. The best music directors create playlists that are incredibly diverse and interesting, both through their selections of albums to occupy playlist slots and by managing music intake so that CDs are reviewed by DJs who will appreciate them.

From the playlist, the DJ is required to play a certain number of tracks an hour. When I was a DJ, this number was 3. So in a three-hour shift, the DJ would have to play 9 songs from an available collection of something between 600 and 1200 songs.

In addition to this quota, the DJ is also required to play a certain number of “alternate” tracks each hour, usually 1 or 2. These are tracks from sections of the music library other than rock and pop, including blues, jazz, Americana, experimental music, world music, classical music, and others.

Aside from these requirements, DJs are free to choose any music they like from the music library. I doubt anyone has any real idea of the size of the music library, but it surely runs into the dozens of thousands of titles on CD and vinyl, going all the way back to the beginning of KTRU in 1970 and including any number of rare and out-of-print titles, traditional college rock fare, thousands of “alternate” options, and random stuff you’ve never heard of.

I said that DJs are free to play anything they like, but that’s not strictly true, because they are strongly discouraged from playing the same songs or even the same artists from week to week or even from the shift before theirs. It’s easy to see why: with this vast library at one’s disposal, to play the Arcade Fire two weeks in a row is simply lazy.

From this perspective, I think it’s pretty clear that a DJ who plays a bunch of junk you’ve never heard is doing a much better job than a DJ who plays the awesome rock music one might want to hear on KMAX. This is not because the DJ is trying to impress someone- it’s because the DJ recognizes that there are many different types of music in the world, and an innumerable number of musical works, most of which are completely unrepresented on the FM radio dial, or even on satellite radio or Internet radio. KTRU is one of only a handful of stations in the entire United States that make any attempt at all to even approximate the diversity of recorded music that exists. Most Houston radio listeners might not want to hear the Plastic Ono Band, or Albert Ayler, or Windy & Carl, or Ariel Pink, or Tuvan throat singing, or Bollywood soundtracks, or Nurse With Wound. Does that mean these things shouldn’t be played on the radio, ever, anywhere?

Of course, playing a lot of not-very-well-known music does make it more important that DJs tell their audience what they’re playing. And on that point, Sadof has something of a legitimate complaint against KTRU DJs. But here as well, this has nothing to do with the DJs being elitist. Veteran DJs, of which KTRU has a handful, will break into the music on a regular basis to inform the listener of what they’ve been playing. Even some less grizzled DJs, such as the unfortunate student I heard play “Townes Van Zunt” last week, sometimes grasp this practice. In fact, KTRU DJ training specifically instructs them on it. But sometimes, as a result of KTRU’s curatorial philosophy, DJs play long tracks that can’t be interrupted easily for fifteen minutes or more. Some of them take the KTRU mic style guidelines- which is, briefly, “you are not a radio personality-” too literally. And sometimes they just forget. We’re talking about college students here, many of whom have been on the radio for a year or less. As a rule, college radio DJs the world over have terrible mic style, whether they talk too much or too little. Blaming KTRU for it is not fair, and being exasperated with it is an exercise in futility.

Returning to the issue of KTRU’s aesthetic philosophy in conclusion, it occurs to me that part of the reason that KTRU supporters, like Conor, Justin, and Julie, are so passionate about the station is its explicit and uncompromising valuation of art for its own sake. As consumers, as citizens, as workers, nearly everything we do in modern America to interact with the world is governed by the logic of the marketplace, which, even in the age of the “long tail,” necessarily favors the bland, the moderate, and the generalistic. By contrast, KTRU operates according to the logic of aesthetic experience, which favors the idiosyncratic and the radical, and acknowledges the multiplicity of feeling and opinion. To shelter and insulate this type of thinking, which rarely survives exposure to the marketplace, should be among the highest missions of an institute of education. Nobody else can take it up on any kind of scale. For an institute like Rice to abdicate that responsibility so nakedly- quite frankly, it just tears me apart.