QotD: They Play My Jams

nobody@vox.com(Lilly) — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 01:15:16 -0800

What's your favorite radio station, past or present?

In my Connecticut town (and probably many around it) in the early 1980s the radio station to listen to if you were in-the-know or wanted to seem as if you were, was WLIR. This Long Island station was the first in the country to play groups like U2, New Order, The Cure, The Smiths, Modern English... I could go on. It was new wave. It was like a college radio station but it actually wasn't. Some of the songs I heard on there I never heard again and went searching for in the used record store bins years later. Some of the songs went on, it seemed like years later but was probably months, to become smash hits and defined the 1980s (like the John Hughes films' soundtracks). And, thinking back, the best part was that I didn't listen to it because everyone else was, I listened to it because I loved it. I was so sad to go away to college and not be able to hear it anymore, but it didn't matter because it changed itself to WDRE and kept cutting edge, which meant it left synth-rock behind and went grunge, retaining its audience of forward listening teenagers. I then lost track of what happened to the station and have now looked up its more recent history on Wikipedia. It's somewhat ironic. After some turmoil it went back to the call letters WLIR, but the 92.7 frequency was purchased and Alphaville's happy dance beat version of "Forever Young" (one of my all-time favorites which lost out to Modern English's "Melt With You" for our senior high prom theme) was played as the Last Song (I would've cried the entire way through). The station officially moved to 107.1 and eastward (out of range my town, though I never tried it -- the original location was difficult to get some nights as it was). There was a format change that didn't work out and now, after all those years, WLIR is back to playing what it was playing in the 1980s and 1990s. Only now I guess it's actually a -- shudder -- oldies station. And I'll have to check out their web streaming broadcast to see if they really are playing those lost gems ("Big in Japan", anyone?) or just the popular ones.

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Lilly on Vox

QotD: They Play My Jams