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The Rice Thresher
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Try this column I stopped listening to popular radio in 1992, when 104.1 KRBE played "Life is a Highway," every time the radio was on. It was a tumultuous time for music: the Hammer dominated school dance floors, Kid and Play had made only one movie, and Vanilla Ice had only very recently been cool. I was in seventh grade, and I spent a lot of time hanging out with my best friend Andy. Since neither of us had girlfriends or athletic abilities, we vented our pent-up hormones on video games and headbanging to his Black Sabbath tape. When the Black Sabbath got old, we turned to 91.7 FM - KTRU. You see, this was a time when alternative music was still that. If you didn't want to listen to a boy band or a packaged rap group, Rice radio was the only place to turn. It wasn't perfect - it often played jazz or weird stuff, and one time Andy listened to 10 minutes of nothing but breathing because he figured any second there would be an awesome guitar riff and drum solo leading into a kickass song. But when KTRU did deliver, it gave us the screwed-up, on-the-edge music our 13-year-old sugar-loaded bodies needed but couldn't get anywhere else. I'll be the first to admit that KTRU can play some very bad music. I remember freshman year, when every time I turned it on I heard songs like, "Philip Glass was way too conformist," or "Man discovering which end of a saxophone to blow into #12." It was bad. And there are still times when I'll turn on KTRU and ask, "Who listens to this?" For instance, the other day when I was driving to Rice, I turned to KTRU and heard two hits from Pakistan in a row. But, when the DJ came on, he said he'd had a request for one of those songs, and since he wasn't sure which one he played both. That is why KTRU is such a great station. It's a radio station completely unaffected by profit and driven by requests from people who can't hear this music on any other station. KTRU claims to be an "educational" station, and some think it should therefore play more Rice sports events. That's misleading for two reasons. One, listening to sports events is not educational. Don't get me wrong - I think that playing on a sports team takes a great deal of talent and mental concentration, but listening does not. Writing and performing a comedic routine takes a lot of talent. Watching does not. Brewing a good beer takes knowledge and hard work. Drinking does not. Two, the mission of KTRU is not to "educate" their listeners. It's to play the kind of music they want to hear, music that isn't played anywhere else. They're not a bunch of music gurus spreading enlightenment, they're people who really want to voice their taste in music. However, there is still an issue with the fact that KTRU receives blanket tax money. We, the students of Rice University, pay for a significant portion of KTRU's programming, but chances are most of us do not always agree with their choice of programming. Plus, unlike the Thresher and the yearbook, students do not elect any KTRU representatives. I have two things to say to that. First, I doubt there is any programming format that the students of this university could agree on any more than the one already in place. Second, before you try to change KTRU, consider what you'll be ruining. I have no affiliation with KTRU, and I rarely listen to it outside of a car, but I really like the idea of having an all-music station that tries to play music not because it is popular but because it is good. Right now KTRU has a listening audience of over 50,000. Every time I hear Rice sports events on KTRU, it sounds wrong. KTRU is a music station - putting more sports events instead of music on KTRU during prime time hours would be like putting more regular programming instead of videos on MTV during prime time hours. If university interests are allowed to overrun the station, very quickly it will lose what it now has. That's why you should support leaving KTRU programming up to the KTRU members. While radio stations across the nation are running more and more nationally broadcast material, we at Rice University have something very unique, a radio station with its own personality. We shouldn't allow the university to kill it.
Gordon Wittick is a Hanszen College senior.
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