Austin McCoy on Katherine Rye Jewell’s *Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio*

Except for those who listened to college radio or worked as DJs as students, many who attend college might never listen to the local station, especially now that we live in the era of streaming music and podcasts where we can access full record catalogs and human- and AI-generated playlists. I was one of those students until a few college radio DJs working for Kent State University’s Black Squirrel Radio asked me to try out to become a DJ as a graduate student in 2007. Kathrine Rye Jewell’s Live from the Underground:  A History of College Radio explains why we should not take the FM dial and college radio for granted. In her book, Jewell demonstrates how campus radio stations emerged as a contested site for ideals straddling the U.S. economy and civil society—professional training, public service, education, and democracy—in the 20^th century. In the wake of the development of college radio in the New Deal era as a mechanism to “enable mass democracy, inspire an enlightened citizenry, and promote cultural pluralism,” Jewell contends that college DJs and their stations navigated these oft-conflicting ideals related to the market and visions of college and university administrators’ visions of higher education to construct their expressions of alternative culture.[1]

In Live from the Underground, Jewell weaves together cultural, political, and higher education history to show readers how DJs navigated culture wars, federal media deregulation, contractions and expansions in the music industry, and the transformation of higher education in the late-20^th and early-21^th centuries. She organizes chapters into three parts investigating the origins of modern college radio and its “alternative” ethos, college radio’s interaction with national politics and the record industry, and DJs’ and stations’ struggles with successfully shaping popular culture, namely with alternative rock and the changing landscapes in media policy (i.e., the 1996 Telecommunications Act) and higher education, and the emergence of the internet.

Those familiar with music subgenres such as alternative rock or alternative hip hop might be familiar with how some of these artists define their “underground” artistic ethos, styles, and sounds against their mainstream counterparts. However, Jewell delves into conflicts around college radio stations to historicize this idea’s emergence among DJs, a subset of culture workers and producers. For Jewell, “alternative” or “underground” refers to a rejection of mainstream culture, anti-commercialism in art, embracing the obscure, and one’s desire to protect these established boundaries. Thus, college DJs did more than cue music and spin records; they produced and helped shape culture through curation. DJs saw their expression of the alternative as an authentic demonstration of “good” taste in a democratic spirit of localism, education, and sonic exploration .[2] These DJs asserted this cultural ethos in the face of radio bosses, college and university administrators, student and community listeners, federal regulators, cultural warriors, and the music industry, who often sought to bend college radio to their purposes and tastes.

Work as a college DJ thrived on negotiating tensions—between anticommercialism and capitalism, authentic artistry and professional development, personal curation and community appeal. DJs at college radio stations operated in the interstitial space between capitalism and liberal arts exploration. Jewell argues that working at the station was professional job training for many DJs and their supervisors, as many would move from their stations into the music and culture industry. Yet, many DJs hued to expressions of alternative culture—many saw themselves as part of a countermovement against mainstream music. Their role as college DJs was to educate listeners to treat culture mainly as realms of sonic exploration. Thus, they desired to construct shows around upstart artists and bands, B-sides and deep cuts, and musical subgenres on the margins of popular music. Essentially, college DJs became evangelicals of the culturally obscure and downtrodden, at least until those artists and bands toiling at the margins hit it big.

However, as alternative rock and hip-hop became commercial powerhouses in the music industry in the 1990s, college DJs navigated the meanings of and cost of success. College radio stations like the University of Georgia’s WUOG launched stars like R.E.M. and alternative rock albums and singles became critical sources for radio shows.[3] Which artists and labels would DJs turn to for curation? And, with college radio’s growing influence, how would DJs navigate their supervisors’ and administrators’ attempts to professionalize their stations further and cater to broader audiences?

Live from the Underground features unexpected examples of workers, or DJs, articulating visions of workplace democracy. The ability to curate one’s playlist and radio show formed a common theme among DJs across identities, schools, and regions. Curation for DJs represented an expression of nimble democratic and critical thought. DJs had to consider artists’ changing status, namely moving from the margins to the mainstream, and regulatory threats from their bosses, higher education administrators, federal regulators, and dissatisfied community members and listeners who might want to listen to more palatable music.

Jewell’s analysis of CURSE’s strike at the University of Washington’s KCMU station (CURSE stands for “Censorship Undermines Radio Station Ethics”) is one of the book’s most dramatic examples of clashes between radio DJs and station managers and university administrators pitting the ideals of professionalization and catering to a broader market against an alternative ethos focusing on DJs’ rights to free expression. Stemming from the station manager’s introduction of a nationally syndicated show, volunteer DJs organized a work stoppage to establish greater decision-making power and protect their autonomy as DJs. The station fired several DJs as they picketed, spoke out, and refused to fundraise.

Yet, the CURSE example also underscores another central question Jewell addresses throughout the book—who possessed power? The possession of power also represented a moving target. College DJs pushed back against efforts to censor them. They navigated threats posed by groups like the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and regulatory agencies like the FCC and possessed some cultural power in their roles as tastemakers. DJs working in Northeastern college radio stations flexed their muscles when Arista Records sought to impose a $150 subscription fee to receive their albums.[4]

However, when college radio DJs confronted college administrators, they often learned they had less power to run their stations without outside interference. College DJs could not determine their stations’ role within the context of their institutions. In a case that seems extreme in the context of the book, college DJs and their supporters at WBAU could not stop the station’s closing as Adelphi University’s president sought to shutter  it amid his attempts to restructure the university around a narrow vision of “Western civilization” education.[5] Adelphi University president’s conclusions that WBAU could not fit into his vision of a “Western civilization” education anticipates contemporary efforts by administrators, politicians, and activists to dismantle DEI programs and eliminate or curtail the teaching of issues of race, gender, and sexuality.[6] Jewell reminds us that the fate of college radio is bound up historically with this impulse to curtail expressions of multiculturalism or diversity.

In writing Live from the Underground, Jewell accomplished an enviable feat—she produced a cultural and political history of college radio that has mass appeal. There is something for historians, music fans, and former radio DJs in Live from the Underground. Of course, writing a political and cultural history of college radio that can appeal to scholars and music fans alike will also provoke questions like, “What about my favorite college radio station or show?” Jewell’s short discussion of Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito’s Show at Columbia University’s WKCR begs for a deeper conversation, especially since Live from the Underground skews heavily towards alternative rock. The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show was one of hip hop’s premier radio shows, regardless of which institution hosted it. A deeper conversation about Stretch and Bobbito’s show (the author cites the insightful documentary about the show, Stretch and Bobbito:  Radio That Changed Lives) might have added more texture towards understanding the meanings of alternative across genres. Did DJs Stretch and Bobbito, and other hip-hop artists define alternative differently than their rock counterparts? Did they approach curation of rap similarly? In other words, did they construct artificial reasons for playing, or not playing, particular artists based upon what record label they were signed to? Did hip-hop’s surge in popularity in the 1990s, as well as primarily Black artists’ emergence from poverty and inner-city violence (from peers and the police), change rappers’ and DJ’s relationship to the “underground” and “alternative”?

With the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, radio corporate radio consolidation, higher education’s embrace of market-based reforms, and the emergence of streaming music and podcasts, it would be easy to suggest that Jewell presents a declension narrative in Live from the Underground. Jewell’s discussions of the rise of internet- or digital-based music in her final chapter, “Hidden Tracks,” as well as the recent news of the selling of music criticism sites like Pitchfork and the overall restructuring of culture journalism, would seem to point towards diminished roles for the college DJs as tastemakers who can not only help lift marginal artists into stardom, if not sustainable careers but also introduce and educate listeners. However, as Jewell’s Live from the Underground suggests, the history of college radio is more complicated. Streaming music, with all the curated playlists, did not kill college radio nor conceptions of “alternative” and “underground.” Jewell’s text demonstrates how understandings and expressions of alternative curation never go away despite changes in media technology, politics, and higher education. College DJs, as well as podcast hosts, critics, and tastemakers, always find a way to stay underground.

[1] Katherine Rye Jewell, Live from the Underground:  A History of College Radio (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press), 2023, 6.

[2] Jewell, 10.

[3] Jewell, 72-73.

[4] Jewell, 81.

[5] Jewell, 325.

[6] Conservative Republicans launched their assault on Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in the public and private sector after the summer 2020 uprisings in response to the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. This right-wing offensive features Republican-controlled state legislatures passing “anti-DEI” bills aimed at defunding and dismantling these programs at colleges and universities. In a move similar to Adelphi University in 1995, the State of Florida and University of Florida’s Board of Trustees established the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education with the purpose of teaching Western Civilization. See Jaclyn Diaz, “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs a bill banning DEI initiatives in public colleges,” NPR.com, May 13, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/05/15/1176210007/florida-ron-desantis-dei-ban-diversity, accessed July 31, 2024 and University of Florida News, “UF Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education receives $1 million pledge, the largest to-date,” May 2, 2024, https://news.ufl.edu/2024/05/hamilton-1m/, accessed July 31, 2024.