South Florida college radio offers alternatives to Top 40

Old-school hip-hop. Folk. And tunes from popular video games.

They are not musical genres often played on mainstream radio. But South Florida listeners can tune into student-run stations for these types of alternative music.

Just set your dial onto Florida International University’s WRGP-FM (Radiate) from 7 to 8 p.m. every Wednesday for the Beats from the East show dedicated entirely to old-school hip-hop.

“I don’t really like the newer hip-hop. I like old hip-hop. It has more of a jazz influence. They brought in elements that you don’t see nowadays,” said 21-year-old Joshua Carisma, an FIU senior communications major from Kendall.

His show and others provide listeners a break from the standardized queue on many mainstream radio stations.

“A lot of people listen to us because they like hearing music aside from the same Top 40 songs they hear over and over and over on mainstream radio,” said 21-year-old Savanna Stiff, general manager at University of Miami’s student-run station WVUM-FM (90.5 The Voice). “We like to find and play small bands. A commercial radio station would not give a small band like that a chance.”

While University of Miami’s WVUM and FIU’s WRGP (heard on 88.1, 95.3 and 96.9) broadcast online as well as on FM, Miami Dade College’s MDC Radio is only streamed online. All three stations are nonprofits and do not play commercials but do air public-service announcements from their respective colleges or from the community.

WVUM was established in 1968. While in the beginning it was known as a station where listeners could hear local news and Top 40 songs, it started its underground music phase in the 1980s. Initially, the station’s signal did not reach all areas of the Coral Gables campus, according to its website. Over the years, there were several expansions and recently it underwent a more than $170,000 upgrade, allowing the station to have its signal reach as far south as Florida City and as far north as Fort Lauderdale. The expansion included the purchase of a new transmitter and an antenna, and it was funded largely by university donors. According to estimates provided by campus officials, it will allow students to reach about 1.5 million more listeners.

“It’s nice for students to have a potentially larger audience,” said Professor Paul Driscoll, vice dean of academic affairs at UM’s School of Communication and the station’s advisor.

WRGP at FIU is a younger operation.

Established in 1988, it relies on three towers and translators to help its signal reach different areas in Miami-Dade. For years, students have rented space on the NBC-TV (Channel 6) tower in the south part of the county that allows listeners from the north Keys to Kendall to tune in to the station’s broadcasts at 88.1 FM. Another tower atop the Green Library at the Modesto A. Maidique Campus translates the signal to 95.3 FM, the frequency listeners in the city of Miami tune into for the best signal. In 2008, another tower was built at FIU’s Biscayne Bay campus that translates the signal to 96.9 FM in North Miami, North Miami Beach and surrounding areas.

The limited bandwidth on the FM dial makes getting access to a single frequency that covers the entire county difficult.

“The FM frequencies are jumbled, so it is difficult to get your foot in the door,” said Kyle Pineda, general manager of WRGP. “The signal translators and transmitters are starting to be utilized by more and more stations.”

He added that the transmittal of the station’s signal over three different frequencies does not affect listenership.

“We’ve spent the last six years advertising it,” said 23-year-old Pineda, a senior majoring in anthropology.

FIU also has its own iPhone application through which people can listen to the station online.

“If they don’t want to jump from one station to another, they can stream in online and listen in the car, too,” said Pineda, of West Kendall.

WRGP and WVUM each have about 90 students who volunteer at the stations as engineers, production and music directors, and DJs. Only students in managerial positions get paid for their work.

Each station has an array of specialty shows during which a specific genre of music is played. The shows are usually pitched by a station DJ and must be approved by an executive board before they air.

Jackson Parodi, program director at WVUM, started his own show that focuses on music from video games.

From 7 to 8 p.m. every Monday listeners call in to The Warp Zone show to request a song from a video game. The most popular request, said Parodi, is music from The Legend of Zelda, a Japanese game originally released in 1986 where the protagonist’s goal is to rescue Princess Zelda.

Stiff, the station’s general manager, started her own show, The New Folk, featuring folk music from 7 to 8 p.m. Tuesdays.

On WRGP, even the long blocks of night airtime are filled with shows.

Dead City Radio, influenced by a William Burroughs album, airs from 2 to 4 a.m. Wednesdays and Fridays.

Students put together different segments, such as fragments from a Frank Sinatra song, and make it into a flowing sound that aims to evoke a feeling.

“We are going for the whole sound-collage, post-apocalyptic feel with Dead City Radio,” Pineda said.

Hector Mojena, programming director at the station and a senior majoring in English, also started his own specialty show, Audio Nasties.

Aired from midnight to 1 a.m. Mondays, 21-year-old Mojena, known to his listeners as “DJ Count Goldblum,” plays segments from old horror films and narrates his original stories while the fragments are playing.

With about 55 shows, WRGP also airs programs that focus on up-and-coming musical genres, such as Assistant Music Director Christopher Quintana’s new show Kick Drum.

From 4 to 5 p.m. Mondays, Quintana plays a genre of music consisting of beats and instrumentals from modern-day rap songs mixed with lyrics from famous 1960s or 1970s tracks.

“It has the vibe and sound of hip-hop instrumentals but also a sample of older artists,” he said.

According to DJs at WVUM, WRGP and MDC Radio, these specialty shows allow them to teach the listener about new music.

And that type of a disc jockey is “slowly disappearing” from most radio stations, said Pineda.

“It’s turning into commercial radio where they pretty much play what’s on the playlist,” he said. “An actual DJ who doesn’t have these constraints can play songs from the album that other people haven’t heard. That’s what John Peel did and that’s what most broadcast DJs did. They would play the hit and then they would play a cut off the album that nobody had ever heard. It teaches people.”

British disc jockey, radio presenter, producer and journalist John Peel, whose full name is John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, was a BBC Radio 1 broadcaster known for his eclectic musical taste.

“We have to bring that back to the listener,” said Pineda of the John Peel-style radio presenters. “We are trying to keep the disc jockey alive here long after they have put their headphones down.”
Coral Gables