RTP-area local music and culture

[grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>]

Chris Calloway wrote:

> i'd like to thank ross for all the favoritism.
> gatekeeper is a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.
> there are hundreds of bands around here and very few
> clubs. only a fraction of these bands are actually
> worth seeing or hearing on the radio. good job, amigo.

See, you can't quite tell if he's being serious or being sarcastic. My 
money is on both, since that's kinda how I feel about it myself.

For instance: At home I have one of those metal shelving units that you 
get at Lowe's. It's full of mail bins. The mail bins are full of local 
CDs. Many of them aren't all that great. Yet I'd never dream of throwing 
them away, because Attention Must Be Paid.

If you arrange them neatly in 2 levels of 2 rows, you can fit around 150 
CDs into a mail bin. Each week at WXDU we usually get right around one 
mail bin full of CDs. In the months that aren't April or October, we get 
a little less; in those two hellish months, somewhat more.

At the radio station, we just have the one playlist. At any given time 
it has, I dunno, 120 CDs on it, something like that. Some weeks more, 
some weeks less, especially around the holidays when the students are 
gone and the world shuts down. Each CD gets to spend 6 weeks on that 
playlist. This means, if you're willing to do some math, that each week 
we've got room to add 20 new CDs, total, out of that 150 that show up in 
the mail.

Even with our strong commitment to local music, there's clearly only 
room for me to add a finite number of local releases to playlist every 
week, since the local releases gotta share the same space with all that 
other stuff y'all claim to enjoy listening to. Some weeks I add 
everything I get in the mail.

Other weeks I don't.

What are my criteria (other than the dead-giveaway of a CD that arrives 
with a cute little portfolio like you used in middle school, with a 
sticker on the front and an 8x10 glossy inside . . . you never have to 
listen to those, unless you just wanna have a larf at someone's expense)?

Well, basically, I line them up & listen to them, and based on how many 
playlist slots I think I have, and how many reviews I feel like writing 
(look, I gotta listen to each damn CD through at least 2 or 3 times, 
scanning for indecencies & whatnot . . . if you want to be my friend, 
mark the songs where you cuss, OK?), and whether any of them are so 
egregiously awful as to make the baby jesus cry, I playlist however many 
seems right at the time.

What I've learned over the years is that, assuming there's room on the 
playlist shelves, I can playlist a CD that I believe to be a total piece 
of ratshit, and no harm will come by it. If it *is* a total piece of 
ratshit, your average XDU DJ will figure that out almost instantly, and 
won't play it. If it's *not* a total piece of ratshit after all, then 
they'll play it, and I won't care because I can't pick up the damn 
station half the time anyway.

So there's your gatekeeper role, in a nutshell: protecting the world 
from bands who still pay to have 8x10 glossies printed up of themselves.

xo

Ross