My New Radio is YouTube DJs
I spent a lot of time with my all-in-one stereo making tapes.
I used to tape songs off the radio to find new music. It started when I got grounded for some infraction and had to spend the whole weekend in my bedroom. It was just me, the Sears AM-FM Stereo Cassette / Record Player System, my favorite present ever from a previous Christmas, and a pair of over-ear headphones to “think about what I had done”. Whatever I was grounded for didn’t stick with me, but something else did.
Turns out that was the last weekend for WOWE-FM 105.5, “Rock 105,” a small station running just outside of my hometown Chattanooga. It had been sold and was changing formats that weekend. In an act of minor rebellion, Program Director Bill Burkett started a Beatles marathon that lasted from Friday night until Monday morning and people loved it. I certainly did.
That weekend I taped B-sides and deep cuts like “Rain”, “Hey Bulldog”, and “I’m Looking Through You” that mainlined Beatlemania straight to my teenage brain. I was already listening to the Beatles and had a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s, but this wasn’t stuff I had heard on the radio before. This sequestered weekend spun me out of heavy metal and towards the power pop and psychedelic revival playing out on college radio. My next several trips to Cat’s Records or Record Bar were all Beatles hauls, which then led me to XTC, Galaxie 500, and Big Star (thanks to an amazing store clerk who saw I was getting hip and guided me to a whole new world). The Beatles marathon ended and WOWE Rock 105 became WLMX “Lite Mix 105.” I’m all out of love,indeed.
I’m not alone in remembering taping off the radio and living for mixtapes. Kera Bolonik’s NYT piece “You Can Have My Walkman, Just Don’t Take My Mix Tape” collects a bunch of great stories about the value of mixtapes and how we discovered and loved songs. In it, Eleanor Friedberger talks about taping songs off the radio: “That was how it started, right?” she said. “Taping from the radio? I did that with friends, too. We’d kind of make our own radio shows.” The one thing my Frankenstereo from Sears didn’t have was a microphone or I might have made shows too. I had to wait until college to become a real-ass DJ and make shows.
Speaking of radio shows, my fav new way to find music is listening to YouTube DJs. I put these videos on in the background on my laptop or on Apple TV, then stream them to my stereo using a Sonos Port. If I hear something I like, I’ll Shazam it and listen to that artist on Qobuz, YouTube or Bandcamp. Like taping from radio, I hear it, grab it and play it back to see if I want to go deeper or buy a record. Unlike radio, I usually know who the artist and song are immediately unless Shazam doesn’t recognize it. If not, I start feverishly searching for the artist and song like I’ve found a hoard of buried Roman coins, and rush to buy the album on Discogs or Bandcamp. There’s probably a name for this kind of behavior, but I don’t want to know about it.
As I’m writing this, I’m listening to iiiiju’s Soul, Jazz, Psychedelic Funk & Global Grooves | A Vinyl Session.
During this set, I heard a song by Ricardo Dias Gomes and added his album Muito Sol to Qobuz. There are so many DJs who go deep on different genres on YouTube and Mixcloud that I usually end up finding someone who’s deep in something I want to know more about, like say, Ambient Jazz from Japan in the 70s. While I’m sure playlists get pulled from time to time, I’ve been able to save a ton of sets that I’ve found over the years that I sometimes go back to. That’s not always the case with streaming service playlists.
Case in point: the playlist that I put Eleanor’s song Roosevelt Island on. When I pulled the mix up to listen to it, I noticed Spotify dropped some of the songs, which is the modern version of the cassette player eating your mixtape.
Anyway, I’m back to finding new music through humans in a room where I sequester myself and make new mixes with modern technology. I am building new mixes and finding new artists and genres to get into in a way I haven’t with Spotify in long time.
Here are a few more of my favs: