Driving past Pittsburgh, I came across 91.3 WYEP, and heard, in the space of an hour or so, The Flaming Lips, Cassandra Wilson, Elvis Costello, The Housemartins (?!), and the Shins. Plus a bunch of artists I had never heard before but were really cool. Oh, and it’s a public radio station, so there were no commercials and they had NPR news on the hour and half-hour.
My question is, why the heck does Pittsburgh get a cool radio station like that, when D.C. is a radio wasteland? Unless I’ve missed something that’s come along in the last few years — if so, please tell me! As far as I know we got nothing much when it comes to eclectic/indie tastes like that, and one of our two public radio stations (WETA) just dropped their strong lineup of BBC/local news shows and went back to all-classical, all-the-time. Sigh.
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January 24, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Glen Engel-Cox
Actually, DC does have something like this, but only if you have one of those newfangled HD radios. WAMU is now broadcasting WTMD out of Towson on one of their HD channels, and they play the kind of mix you’d most likely be interested in hearing, not to mention the World Cafe at 2pm.
Personally, I’ve given up on radio. Viva la iPod and lala.com!
January 25, 2007 at 11:45 am
polytropos
Yeah, easy enough to give up on radio at home, but in the car (er, minivan) it’s still nice to have. Don’t think I’m gonna put an HD radio in there, though.
January 25, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Glen Engel-Cox
The iPod to the rescue for the car/minivan. I use the cassette adapter for mine, but newer radios have direct 1/8″ line-in to connect the mp3 device. The trick once you go the iPod route is making sure that you have some way of discovering new music. In addition to getting CDs for cheap through lala, I use last.fm, mog.com and rateyourmusic.com to get recommendations for stuff I may not have heard of yet.
July 12, 2007 at 8:00 am
dan
Dude! I used to live off of WYEP when I lived in the ‘Burgh. It’s like WYCE except way better inasmuch as they have regular, paid, professional DJs and something approaching a playlist, so, while you don’t hear the same 20 songs day in and day out, you do, over time, get to know some of the better ones that the staff appreciates. With WYCE-type community stations, you can listen all week and never hear the same song twice, no matter how awesome it was the first time. That’s better than top-40, but nowhere near as cool as WYEP.