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Raising a Fist at 103.3

[Words: Jen Moyse ‘94. DJ 1990-1999. Music Director 1992-94. Image: Original “Hey You Kids” playlist]

As I sit here trying to decide how to approach getting my thoughts on WPRB to paper, I’m browsing through my iTunes library, trying to identify which in my enormous virtual collection of albums I feel like hearing right now. I glance over to the bookshelf housing my 1000+ vinyl library, and back to the living room, where I still have an embarrassing number of CDs (in sleeves now) and 7” singles stored discreetly in not-terribly-unattractive boxes for easy access.

The cassettes, including a full box of recordings of Hey You Kids, Get Off My Lawn!, the show I delivered weekly with Mike Lupica for many years, are stored in the closet, since I long ago disconnected my cassette player. Which, now that I think of it, is still lodged deep in the closet as well.

The external hard drive includes a stash of music I haven’t even organized yet.

This is all WPRB’s fault, and I love it. It’s been 25 years since I arrived at WPRB, and I’ve been a different person since. And not just because of this wall of music. I can genuinely say that the station has influenced my life more dramatically than just about anything else (hi, Mom and Dad!). (more…)

WPRB and Me—Perfect Together!

By Sean Murphy ’94 [photo: Nicole Scheller]

I’m definitely not the first, and I hope I’m not the last, to be able to say that I majored in WPRB. Officially, I graduated with a degree in Politics, but my independent work and thesis focused on regulatory processes at the Federal Communications Commission. And that work resulted from many long and late nights spent playing and talking about records and bands and radio and what it meant to be non-profit, commercial, and independent all at the same time. From the music to the management lessons to the friendships, my WPRB experiences still reverberate nearly 25 years later.

I arrived at the basement of Holder Hall’s 11th entry in September 1990. I had some idea of what I might be getting into, as I’d spent the previous spring and summer interning at WMBR, 88.1 Cambridge, MA (MIT’s radio station). WPRB was different, from the rigidity of the program logs and actual paid 30- and 60-second ads to the presence of the main record library right in the control room. But the most important similarity was that WPRB saw and understood itself as an institution at, but not of, the university.

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