Static Position

The WUOG Staff Battles School Schedules, Sleep Deprivation And Community Expectations To Keep The Tunes Alive

originally published October 10, 2007

Joe Kubler and Sarah Dutcher, WUOG's two music directors, are up to their armpits in CDs. In their office on the fifth floor of Memorial Hall, mail crates full of jewel cases swamp their chairs. The MDs have just checked the mail, and they've got their work cut out for them: set aside high priority releases for their staff of album reviewers; weed out obvious passes (major-label artists, unsolicited submissions bearing stickers that read "RIYD Sting"); file away the hundred or so records that are left and later figure out what to do with them. "Finding time to do everything," says Dutcher, is the hardest part of the job. "To get it done well takes so much time."

Kubler gave up that ghost soon after stepping into his role in January. "I can't try to be good at everything. I've realized that I just can't get everything done." Well, he could devote more to his volunteer post than the 15 or so hours he gives each week, but he can't justify the sacrifice of coursework, creative endeavors or sanity that such a push would require. "This could be a full-time job, and we're doing this for free, and we're students, and we have jobs. We have to prioritize." He resists the idea of asking the University's Office of Student Activities to begin paying WUOG executives, arguing that monetary incentives would attract the "wrong kind" of candidates. (Besides, don't Dutcher and he have a staff of 100 students to whom they can delegate tasks? "I like things to be done a certain way," Dutcher says, leaving it at that. Kubler cites a lack of incentives as a reason why no one else can be expected to do an MD's job. "With other clubs, staff members are working their way up to a management position. Here, everyone just wants to be a deejay, and then they don't have to work up any further… No one's going to yell at [Sarah and me] if we don't do things right. We're enforcing rules on ourselves."

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Talk with other members of the University of Georgia's all-student, all-volunteer radio station, and they will tell you about the height, the depth, the sheer impossibility of learning the ropes and taking ownership of an ambitious institution with no permanent members. "I've become very bogged down in commitments as an editor of The Red & Black," laments Alec Wooden, a local music staffer and deejay who recently abdicated his regular airtime slot. In December, Steven Swigart opted not to return for a second term as public affairs director so that he could "get a paying job" and "start focusing on graduating college." General manager Erika Frank acknowledges a similar sense of burden, but also sees a silver lining to the futility of her toil: "Every GM has different goals, none of which can be accomplished in a year. But that turnover is also good, because you get burned out so quickly."

Running WUOG is the kind of task that can cause a person to skip showers for days on end, grey prematurely, and post blog entries that make the book of Ecclesiastes sound upbeat. And when you consider that radio's a dying medium and the music business itself isn't doing much better; that the "alternative" approach to news and music programming that WUOG takes has become its own prefab niche in today's long-tail market; that your content, no matter what it is, is always going to alienate a goodly number of folks from our eclectic community who tune in - when you look long and hard at the downside, can WUOG offer to its members any significant payoff?

The station's staffers, weary though they might be, will answer a resounding "yes." In its 35th year, WUOG remains one of UGA's most heavily-funded student groups, attracting each year a fresh crop of overachievers whose intellect, creativity and charisma rival that of any fraternity or sorority pledge class or group of honor society inductees. "We allow a lot of creativity," Frank explains. "It's a very open environment - you can create your own show. There are a lot of opportunities for you to do your own thing, whereas with most clubs, you're just planning this one event you do every year."

Akeeme Martin, host of the Halftime Hip Hop Show, concurs. "A misconception or assumption about working at the 'O.G.' from people that I meet is that all the deejays have had some type of communication or journalism experience, and that's not really the case. All of us are not journalism/ communication majors. Personally, I'm a psych major, but regardless of our majors or background, there is one common denominator between us: we all have a love for music and we all want to be able to showcase that love over the airwaves. From my personal experiences at the station, what I've mainly taken away from being a deejay here is to not be afraid of breaking away from the mold and having the creative freedom to do something different. And most importantly, standing by your product 100 percent and then some, even if some people may criticize what you do and may not know fully what's really going on. In other words, just being passionate about what you're doing and not let anyone deter you away from that because your hard work won't go unnoticed."

Like a liberal arts degree, WUOG offers its participants the opportunity to develop broadly. Some students, such as Swigart, gain a basic literacy in the entertainment business. "My role as [public affairs] director really affected my career and life path. Before, I had changed my major five times, and I was clueless about what I wanted to do as a career. As public affairs director, I was able to get some great production experience with talk shows and making public service announcements. This experience partly inspired me to go into television and film production. I recently got back from an internship with a national cable television channel in Los Angeles. I think my radio experience was one of the factors that got me hired. Now I know that my career is going to be in the entertainment industry via television or film, and that's pretty exciting."

Frank also plans to use her experience at WUOG to explore a different aspect of communications; when she enters graduate school, she intends to study independent media outlets and their impact on communities.

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When a college radio station is staffed with people more interested in developing "life skills" (to use the words of training director Amanda Perofsky) than career skills, it attracts students who love underground music, local news and UGA sports, not up-and-comers in search of a resume-builder. And when a group of people devoted to a labor of love are involved in a medium that is losing ground to iPods and specialized Internet radio stations, they aren't necessarily going to take the "average listener" into consideration - he's not the one saddled with the thankless task of manning the deejay booth at 3 a.m., and he only listens to the music that Pandora.com recommends to him anyway, and besides, he doesn't even exist anymore, thanks to the music industry's increasingly decentralized structure.

"I want to please different people whose musical knowledge and sensibilities I respect," explains Kubler. "But if I thought only about how to please people, I wouldn't get things done… At the end of the day, we're all college kids who like music, and we're just trying to please ourselves." And who are these listeners whom he holds in such high esteem? Active listeners, audio-adventurers who reject "the mediocrity that plagues [most] college radio." According to Kubler, subpar college stations play a disproportionate amount of indie-pop, their programming directors taking style, not substance, into consideration.

"People kind of listen to music on a very aesthetic level, simply describing it as 'cutesy,' or 'rockin,' or whatever," he muses. "I definitely think that you viscerally feel music first, but it's unhealthy when there's no curiosity to try to look at it in any other way. This station cultivates musical curiosity, leading people to sounds unheard on blogs or even at local shows… We have one of the more diverse rotation catalogs of any college station. Just the fact that we have five to 10 jazz CDs at a time in there is huge."

In addition to giving significant chunks of airtime to non-rock genres, Kubler and Dutcher eschew college radio's cult-of-the-new by encouraging their deejays to explore older music, stocking rotation with reissues and "classics" from the station's extensive library. "I don't think it's a worse time for music," Kubler asserts. "We just don't realize what the [exciting] movements are until they've already happened."

Although a recent survey conducted by students in UGA's Music Business degree program indicate that the 26,000-watt station has 10,000 listeners, WUOG's challenging music programming also deters a large number of students and community members. Since its inception, some have charged the station with neglect of particular genres, snobbery and inaccessibility.

But in recent years, WUOG has grown increasingly callous to such criticisms. When The Red & Black argued in the early 1980s that WUOG was alienating the students whose activity fees kept it in operation, the station responded by relegating "difficult" music to late-night hours and filling primetime slots with party-friendly programming. When the student newspaper editorialized last spring against the abundance of out-of-tune, free-form music on the station's airwaves, this time around WUOG executives fired angry missives to the paper and assumed a pose of self-justification.

WUOG's critics often attack its "music philosophy," its rule prohibiting deejays from playing artists heard on mainstream radio or who've attained a certain level of success. Debates over the philosophy rage within the station, too. In the last two years, the Friday night Halftime Hip Hop Show has shifted its focus from socially conscious indie rappers like Lyrics Born and Aesop Rock to influential voices from all corners of the genre. Martin deems this eclectic approach "the Baskin Robbins philosophy of hip-hop."

But among his 31 flavors are artists such as Goodie Mob, UGK and Salt-N-Pepa, massively influential musicians who don't currently receive regular airplay on local commercial stations, but are nonetheless outside of WUOG's scope. Martin has continually been censured by the station's executive board, but he has been granted a limited right to play inactive artists whose music is of historic importance. For specialty shows like his, music philosophy fits like boxers rather than briefs.

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What do the staffers at WUOG feel they could do better? Work harder to make the most of their richest available resource - the Athens community. Non-staffers and non-students attend station-sponsored concerts, such as "Live in the Lobby" CD release parties and yearly anniversary bashes. And the station plays a key role in exposing students to the local music scene, encouraging them to go downtown and check out new sounds.

But Frank admits that too few Athenians know about the station's programming options - like its wide range of specialty shows or web-based features like podcasts and MP3 streams. Because of this lack of community presence, WUOG has been unable to learn from people who have dedicated years to making Athens a great place for those who play and love music. Executives and staffers need the wisdom of people who have been around town for longer than four years, and they've had difficulty building such bridges. It's complicated by the fact that only UGA students are allowed to deejay or work at the station.

So how can a community member help? Just ask local music director Evan Sheumaker for one idea. "What I would really like is help filling out our archive," he notes. "What frustrates me most is when people call up and request a song and we don't have it. I need someone to help me, to go back into the library and say, 'you don't have this, you don't have that.' That's something I can't do myself." And he's right. Neither he nor any of his fellow staffers have an additional 15 hours a week to put into their positions.

Phillip Buchan

WHAT: "WUOG 90.5 FM's 35th Anniversary" WHO: Hope For Agoldensummer, Bob Hay & the Jolly Beggars, The Squallz WHERE: 40 Watt Club WHEN: Saturday, October 13 HOW MUCH: FREE!