When number two on our campus radio station’s Top 70 list is categorized as “Soul Jazz,” it becomes immediately evident that WRCT is not your average college radio station.
“The radio station here is pretty unique in that it’s entirely free form, so all of the DJs have the ability to play whatever they want with only a few minor exceptions,” senior Alex Smith, general manager of Carnegie Mellon’s radio station, WRCT, explains. Each DJ needs to play three “bin cuts” per hour, which is music the station has received from record labels in the last 10 weeks. Also, DJs are not allowed to play anything that is currently on Billboard’s Top 40. WRCT is committed to showcasing the tastes of their DJs, whatever they may be.
The station has so much more to offer than a service like Pandora or Last FM because “it’s not an algorithm deciding for you what’s happening next, it’s somebody surprising you,” Alex explains excitedly. This is his favorite aspect of WRCT – there is someone behind each track besides the artist: a brain and a heart that feel a connection to this particular track for a reason.
With WRCT’s impressive span of genres, including everything from Disco to hardcore Rap, everyone can learn something new from the station. “The advantage of listening to a station like this as opposed to just listening to your iPod is that you really get the expertise of whoever the DJ is. Listening to our DJs is a really good way to learn about a genre from someone who’s really into it,” Alex says. “We want to show people that just because you haven’t heard something doesn’t mean that it’s not something that you really dig.”
All the different genres are great, but that doesn’t really seem like a cohesive line up. Can Alternative Country, Math Rock, and EBM really exist in a single place in harmony? At WRCT they can and Alex encourages it. “What I like DJs to do is to figure out the points at which the styles merge with each other. I try to play something from different genres every week during my show, which is only two hours long, so I have to find the one post-rock track and the one dub track that will mix into each other somehow.”
This kind of mesh and unity extends beyond the music to the WRCT staff and the entire Carnegie Mellon population. “WRCT really has a community built around music, which doesn’t really happen very much in other places. That’s why I joined the station, because I wanted to talk about music,” Alex tells me, “the thing that I enjoy most is still just hanging around the station, listening to someone’s show, and learning about some new band that I actually didn’t know was sweet.” Then WRCT takes this big chunk of sweetness, some tiny clip of creative expression, and they spread it to the world, or at least the world that exists within the Carnegie Mellon bubble, with the hopes that it will make an impact. According to Alex, “We expose people to all of these different things so that people can try to understand each other better.”
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