A young man is speaking in a halting, drowsy monotone. He's reeling off names of songs by bands that he's into. He is not sitting at a corner table in his high school cafeteria, nor is he driving with buddies to see a foreign film in a recently gentrified neighborhood. This young man is, it turns out, giving a recap of the songs he's actually just played on his very own radio show. His college radio show.
Warm and cozy in a little pocket of the economy carved out by academic institutions, young people at colleges everywhere can play great, different and otherwise unknown music just a knob's turn from the heavy-rotation radio climate of today — rock's dying dry heave and the triumphant glam-rap that is its heir. Student DJs are out there doing important work, recalling in their dishevelment the medieval monks who, in another era of calamity and idiots, preserved value and wore vintage robes. The large, impressive new facilities for Princeton's WPRB FM radio station, then, are very good news.
WPRB's old station in Holder bore all the classic marks of a truly great college radio station: enormous stacks of records, wall to wall postering, dilapidated furniture, shady longterm residents, and an intriguing, piquant scent. Renovation of that building meant a move for WPRB, and, thanks to the generosity of the station's trustees and its strong endowment, the station has a solid and sophisticated new home. And though the new setup in the basement of the ellipse dorm currently lacks that old shabby, shady delicious, Dan Ruccia '05 assures me it's only a matter of time.
Ruccia is obviously some bigwig at WPRB, probably the boss. He's giving me a guided tour of the new station. Whereas the old radio facilities were spread out across one wing of Holder, Ruccia tells me, this new station brings all the elements of a radio station together in one spacious zone. There are two on-air studios and a sound room for live music performances. Row upon row of records and discs runs along a broad hall, placed on sliding banks of shelves a la "the library." There is also a sound production room that Ruccia says contains equipment on which I can put together some sick tracks for my upcoming rap album. There is an office and a lounge. On the walls of the lounge are photographs of WPRBiatches running back to the late '70s. Ruccia tells me that if I look at the pictures, I'll see that the kids who work at the station haven't really changed for almost 30 years. He is exactly right. Aside from slight changes in hairstyle and photo quality, there are few means by which one could distinguish between one decade's staff and another's. Apparently, those kids put on "that type of clothes" 30 years ago and just haven't taken them off. I thank Ruccia for his informative tour and extend a congratulations from journalist to radio boss on the new place.
Not everyone, however, is all peaches and pecans for the new setup: "I'm afraid that WPRB may lose its aura permanently," says Jacob Savage '06, a WPRB DJ. "There was a certain mystique to the old studio that just can't be transferred anywhere else. But then again, home is where the heart is." When I ask Savage what it would take to restore the feel of the station, he looks down at his well-worn black Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars, then back up at me: "I dunno."
To drop a cheesy line: In the end, the only vibrations that count at a radio station are its . . . radio vibrations. As long as those within the far-reaching range of WPRB's transmitter (Jersey, PA, Staten Island (!) and beyond) keep tuning into whatever they're playing down there, then it'll be alright. Another thing that bears mentioning, a final note, is that I've heard repeated several times that prison inmates love to listen to WPRB, send in fan mail, try to get in touch with DJs when they're done with their time, etc. Comment.
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