After Goodman lecture, delving into WVKR charts

Freddy Deknatel Arts Editor

During her lecture on campus last week, entitled “Independent Media in a Time of War,” Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! spoke extensively on the importance of non-corporate, independent media outlets. She mentioned Vassar’s college radio station, WVKR, numerous times, highlighting the importance of non-commercial radio, whether the airwaves were transmitting music or talk.

Indeed, Goodman’s lecture focused on the Iraq War and the concerted effort to have independent media sources able and willing to broadcast what the major networks will not, either out of dollar considerations or other corporate edicts. But her numerous mentions of Vassar’s own independent radio station prompted the question of how well the functional aspects of WVKR are understood by the campus.

Each week, this section of The Miscellany News prints a chart of the top ten albums at WVKR. These albums, to dispel murmurs heard around campus, are not chosen by a hand vote or by an insular group of obsessed music fans. The ten albums printed on the following page are the top ten from a list of 30 albums at WVKR submitted each week by the station’s Music Director, Hannah Horovitz ’07, to the College Music Journal (CMJ), which functions both as a commercial magazine, CMJ New Music Monthly, a music industry newsletter, CMJ New Music Report/Alert, and a college radio station-fueled directory for charting, reviewing, and cataloging new music.

The weekly charts Horovitz sends to CMJ are the most frequently played albums on the station’s New Music Playlist. “Promotion companies and record labels and bands send us music,” explained Horovitz, which “gets listened to, and is either rejected or added, in which case it's dated, reviewed and added to the [New Music] Playlist, which is made up of a bunch of newly released CDs [that are] less than one month old.”

WVKR is a Core Radio Station within CMJ, which means that its charts have more weight than some other, smaller stations. City colleges like New York University, Barnard College, and Emerson College have Core Stations within CMJ as well, but WERS 88.9 FM, Emerson College radio, for example, has more range, listeners, and clout than WVKR on account of its location in Boston. The same is true for WBAR 87.9 FM at Barnard.

“From the playlist, New Music DJs”—those whose shows revolve around playing new music—“are required to play five songs an hour, which they mark down in the Operator logs,” said Horovitz. On Monday nights, she culls the operator logs and charts the Playlist CDs, submitting the top 30 to CMJ.

In an article for CMJ New Music Monthly a few years ago, the music writer Douglas Wolk took stock of the direction of college radio in an age of free downloads, where listeners have apparently limitless access to music, new and old. “What makes sense…is to give listeners music they don't already know they want to hear,” he wrote after quoting then-WVKR Music Director Tal Levin, who reported to him that "if anything is on MTV or Top 40 radio in the Hudson Valley, we can't play it—it's in our constitution.”

As larger budget commercial stations can cover more commercial-alternative music, which listeners will download for free anyway, the vitality of independent radio seems to lie in unearthing gems from the piles of promotions. Horovitz deals with some 20 to 50 records a day, listening to snippets of songs and relying on DJs to review and either suggest or disparage records. The work is not haphazard, but in in fact a challening effort, especially when searching for the surprises.