Love Letter to 93x
Ann Arbor may have a lot to offer in terms of coffee shops and places to buy Keen hiking shoes, but leaves much to be desired in terms of a local music scene and decent radio stations. Like most cities, Detroit’s local radio has largely been commandeered by Clear Channel and its ilk, with shock jocks in the morning and fixed playlists which ensure that, while I’m driving around in the county vehicle for work, I hear Coldplay (whom Chuck Klosterman rightly called “the shittiest fucking band I’ve ever heard”) and Death Cab for Cutie at least five times a day. There is one lo-fi station that broadcasts from the Michigan campus, but with notable exceptions here and there, it’s manned by indefatigable hipsters who like to play poorly recorded Mongolian goat herding choruses and minimalist German techno songs that last eleven minutes to prove that they’ve advanced beyond the concept of instruments.
That is why I’ve come to the conclusion that there was never a better radio station than 93.3FM in St. Louis. It was a non-profit station staffed, as far as I could tell, by one or two people who had the most bitching taste in music I’ve ever heard, and there were no commercials other than occasional promos for a local show or new concert venue opening up. They played all sorts of stuff from Husker Du and The Jam to Liz Phair and Finley Quaye, a ton of local music no one had ever heard of like the Diner Junkies and Dumb Luck, and were responsible for introducing me to Elliott Smith, Chan Marshall, Sonic Youth, and the Pixies at the tender age of 14. Occasionally I would stray over to the bigger “alternative rock” station to hear Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, but I always came back to 93x (assuming I could get their signal that day). It was sort of an early cousin of Radio Free Brooklyn and listener-supported KEXP in Seattle…maybe not quite as cool and definitely unaware of its coolness (which in itself is pretty dern cool), but in the desert of worthwhile music during the late 1990s, it was something.
Perhaps because their signal was so lousy, no one I knew at the time listened to 93x like I did. My first car did not have a tape deck and my after-school jobs did not provide me with adequate income to spend on a dozen CDs every week, so I was stuck listening to the radio a whole lot. However, this little unknown station contributed a vast amount to my musical tastes and love for music in general. In high school, people are defined quite rigidly by their interests and the type of music they listen to–it’s a big part of how we define ourselves when we’re too immature to work on other aspects of our character. I was friends with people who refused to listen to anything that was not hardcore punk influenced by such bands as Black Flag and Minor Threat, and these friends made fun of me for listening to the radio at all or admitting that even though I liked punk, I could also get into Juliana Hatfield and Rage Against the Machine. My friends at school (who were few) listened to horrible late 90s grunge rock like Limp Bizkit and Godsmack or shitty top 40s R&B, and I couldn’t relate to that, either. When I got home from work or school every night, I would go straight to my room in the corner of our basement and listen to 93x for hours on end and sometimes pretend I could play the guitar.
Now that I find myself once again driving long distances throughout the day without the benefit of an iPod line out or CD player, forced to channel surf through the tripe these radio stations churn out hour after hour. And the commercials! So many of them…three songs and then five minutes of advertisements. I’ve gotten way too cozy with streaming radio from my laptop and taking my Nano everywhere I go. The only stations, it seems, that are still untouched by Clear Channel are the oldies and classic rock stations, where the deejays are free to play crap no one cares about anymore. Fortunately one of my high school boyfriends turned me on to Led Zeppelin, and one of my favorite pastimes is screeching along with Robert Plant whenever I’m transporting a certain client who finds this terribly amusing.
P.S. My love for 93x has been so deep and abiding that once, during my senior year of high school when my English teacher assigned us the task of composing a sestina, I wrote mine about this particular radio station. I wonder if I still have it copied down somewhere. I think the words I chose were loud, play, love, sing, and two others I can’t remember.
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