Radio Zine 2016
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RADIO IS DEAD LONG LIVE 1 RELATIVELY RDBNPNG ISSUE NO.25 DARK SPRING 2016 BLUE Editors Christopher Cappello—Editor-in-Chief NEITHER Chloe Lizotte—Managing Editor Stefanie Fernandez—Assistant Editor PURPLE Contributors NOR Emma Keyes—7 Olivia Klevorn—11 GREEN— Stephanie Smelyansky—19 Sanoja Bhaumik—23 RADIO Stefanie Fernandez—29 Greg Suralik—35 IS A.R. Canzano—41 Charlie Bardey—45 DEAD Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi—53, 57 Christopher Cappello—61 (LONG Nick Grewal—71 Allison Primak—75 LIVE Ebony Bradwell—79 Teddy Sokoloff—83 RADIO). Benjy Steinberg—89 A.R. Canzano—97 ISSUE Design NO. Carr Chadwick Joshua Graver TWENTY Printing FIVE. GHP HAPPY ANNIVERSARY. RADIO IS DEAD LONG LIVE 2 3 GOODBYE WATERFACE GOODBYE WATERFACE In November 2014 I got in a car with Jeff and of the Charles River and smoked in the brutal late-No- drove one hundred and thirty-four miles to Cambridge, vember air. Thomas texted me saying he was home and Massachusetts. We were carrying a mixer, two speak- I could come over now. Thomas used to be GM, too. ers, a PA head, t-shirts, a handful of vuvuzelas, and at That was back when I was a freshman. least two hundred copies of the first issue of the zine “Well,” I said. “I’ve gotta go.” I headed out east- that I edited: #23, on appropriation. Jeff played songs wards down desultory Memorial Drive, looking blankly by Tycho. I played songs by Neil Young. We talked at the river. At a stoplight, I took my earbuds out of about Pavement records and the year ahead of us; at my leather jacket and put them in my ears. I scrolled the time, Jeff had just been elected as general manager, through my iPhone and pressed play on Tonight’s The and I was the new programming director. The next day, Night by Neil Young. Tonight’s The Night, sang Neil. Yale’s football team would lose to Harvard’s football But I was pretty stoned, and my night was mostly done. team at Harvard Stadium. I flexed my fingers in my gloves to increase the circula- In Cambridge we stopped at Theo’s uncle’s place tion and walked the mile and a half to Thomas’ place. to drop off the equipment. Theo was living in the area The next day WYBC had a tailgate outside of the sta- at the time, and after Jeff navigated the complexities dium. Not too many people showed up, but the bar- of the Cambridge residential parking system, she came tender was serving a horrific cocktail called yucca flats out and gave me a hug. “Welcome,” she said. It was and I drank it with my friends and we ate soul food and dark and freezing cold but there was the prospect of a played music and laughed. It was even colder that day, full night and day and we felt alive with it. I was a soph- but we talked until our throats were sore and our hands omore in college. were numb. Jeff went off to play a show with his band, Young I never entered the stadium to watch the game. Republicans, at a student bar somewhere on Harvard’s In fact, I don’t think I even had a ticket. Instead, I campus. I stuck around for a while and watched Jeff’s went home on an Amtrak train and thought about the group. Then I met up with Anna and she showed me absurdity of falling in love—not with a person, but with WHRB, Harvard’s student-run station. “We still broad- a radio station. A community, to be sure, but a commu- cast on the FM,” she said. “Ninety-five point three.” nity orbiting around the radio—a format so dead that I met Anna’s friends and told them about WYBC, it’s part of the unofficial WYBC tagline that introduces about the zine, about how we brought Porches. to this issue. Love is love, I thought. Absurd or other- campus the previous year. They were impressed, they wise, there’s no wrangling to be done. I thought about said. That night, Kal Marks and Bad History Month my dad, who had attended Brown in the 1980s before were performing in-studio sets at the station. I drank WBRU went commercial. I queued up Tonight’s The cheap beer and Anna drank Angry Orchard cider and Night again and drifted off to a half-drunk sleep as the we watched the artists play. train rolled back to New Haven. Anna and her friends showed me Harvard’s cam- The liner notes of that album, most of which was pus. She showed me her dorm. We went to the banks recorded in a single day in 1973, feature a cryptic letter GOODBY WATERFACE 4 5 GOODBYE WATERFACE written to a pseudonymous figure called Waterface. “I’m sorry,” says the writer. “You don’t know these peo- ple. This means nothing to you.” If that quote sounds familiar, it’s because the Staten Island indie rock band Cymbals Eat Guitars interpolated it in their song “Lifenet,” which came out in the summer of 2014 on an album called LOSE. This, to me, seems to express the fundamental anxiety of the confessional artist—what if what I wrench from the bottom of my heart doesn’t mean a thing? What if I give it my all, and nobody wants to take? “I’m climbing this ladder, my head in the clouds,” sings Neil on “Borrowed Tune,” a lone- some song with a melody self-consciously cribbed from the Rolling Stones. “I hope that it matters,” he sings. He draws out the last word over piano keys as if to extend it—as if to drive in his stake just a little bit further. In his biography, Neil Young says that the Water- face character wrote the letter, too—to himself. “It’s a stupid thing,” says Neil. “A suicide note without the suicide.” This being my last issue as editor, I guess you can consider this letter to be of a similar nature. But this is our 25th issue and we’ve all worked hard and I know that this publication’s future is in good hands. So with that in mind—Goodbye, WYBC. We’ll always have Cambridge. Emma Keyes —C ON HAVING A “COOL DAD”ON HAVING — 6 ON HAVING A “COOL DAD” EMMA KEYES Teenage rebellion is a time-honored tradition. at the time) singing “Bastards of Young” by the Kids are supposed to start considering their rebellious Replacements together. Since I’ve already mentioned phase when they turn thirteen, and then get over it the band twice in this piece, it bears mentioning that once they move out of their family homes. I mostly the Replacements are the coolest eighties indie band missed that integral stage of life because I never had hands down, and yes, I will fight someone about this. any reason to rebel. My dad was cooler than I was, and One of my favorite musical stories my dad told me in I needed all the help I could get. (I love my mother, my it-feels-far-away-youth (besides when I made him but I would not have gone to her for anything related explain the entire narrative progression of “American to “coolness,” Pie” to me although it seems probably ten like bluegrass is times) is about becoming a hip the music video genre to listen for “Bastards of to, so maybe I’ll Young.” From need her help my (probably sooner than I bastardizing anticipated). In (ha)) sixth, seventh, memory: The and eighth grade, Replacements a pretty large had a record chunk of my deal, as identity was based on the music I listened to, which I many bands do, and that record deal included some stole straight from my father. If I had rebelled against requirement that they make [x] number of music my dad, I would have lost access to the channels videos or whatever. The band didn’t want to make a through which I formed my identity at that time. music video, but they did want to get paid, so they said, Full disclosure before I continue: I am writing “fuck this,” (metaphorically) and filmed a guy (half this while listening to the soundtrack of the musical off-screen) listening to the song on a speaker, smoking Hamilton, which is probably not that cool, but that a cigarette. At the end of the song, the guy gets up and doesn’t mean I don’t listen to “cool” music. When I was kicks the speaker to shit. That’s it. That’s the video. I thinking about the opening paragraph to this piece, I thought that was the greatest thing when I was twelve was listening to the Replacements, who are the epit- years old. My opinion hasn’t changed much in the past ome of cool college radio-era bands. Anyway. six years, either. My dad has told me that one of his proudest I have a memory of having gone into our moments as a parent came from hearing my brother basement on some morning when I was probably and I in the shower (so you know we were real young eleven years old with my little green iPod shuffle to try ON HAVING A COOL DAD EMMA KEYES 8 9 ON HAVING A “COOL DAD” out our dusty stationary bike. Really the only memo- rable thing about that moment in my life is that I was listening to “Another Saturday Night” by Sam Cooke.