DESTROY ALL MUSIC: WREK celebrates its thirtieth birthday.

   On April Fools Day, 1968, if you happened to be in Atlanta, if you happened to be listening to the radio, if you happened to be spinning your dial towards the lower end of FM, perhaps you might have come across a signal that was not there before, at 91.1. ‘Course at 10 watts, the precocious WREK had the same audible range as a pair of decent speakers, no more. But if you were listening, and you could in fact make out what was being played, you heard Spooky Four by The Classics. Atlanta’s first noncommercial station was born.

   Last Sunday, the weather was beautiful. Students all over Tech broke from their crams to throw baseballs, badly. It was much too nice a day to sit in a dank hole and play weird music, but that’s exactly what was happening at WREK, because that’s what’s always happening at WREK. I was early, so I took some time to look around the anteroom, which is wallpapered with layers of album posters feet thick, advertising Archers of Loaf, the soundtrack to Anne of Green Gables, Diamanda Galas, and bumper stickers that read “I’d rather be smashing the bourgeois state!” John Fahey was playing over the speakers, but he was succeeded by ambient bells and clicking noises, followed by a chorus of sqealing toddlers, followed by an interview with a science fiction author.

   “When I got here from India I didn’t know anything about music,” Hormuz Minina said. We were chatting about his total lack of qualification to run a radio station, as he has done for the past several years. “I never heard anything but MTV. I liked it. I didn’t know any better. In America the counterculture evolved right alongside the mainstream, but in India you had this well-oiled machine being thrust into a society. . . that simply wasn’t prepared.”
“In India,” I pointed out, “mainstream culture was never marketed the way it was here.”
   “Exactly, good point,” Hormuz agreed.
   “So what else is happening in India now?”
   “Nothing, besides MTV.”
   “So there’s no alternative to the Alternative?” Hormuz laughed.

   The question that WREK begs is, is there an alternative to the Alternative in America? At WREK there is. The most obnoxious example of this is the Destroy All Music show, which play the sounds of people washing dishes, boiling potatoes, ramming their heads into walls, much like the audience, I’m sure. The stations wattage has risen from a meek 10 watts to a strident 40 megawatts, making it the seventh loudest college station in the country. Depending on technical definitions, WREK was the first or second station in the world to broadcast online, yet the station’s budget is not enough to pay a single full-time engineer. Last year WREK was given the opportunity to make more money by allowing Cox Communications to broadcast Tech basketball games (commercials included) via WREK’s frequency. There was considerable support for this idea from all sides, but not from WREK.
   “We offered to do it for free, with our own sports department staff,” explained Hormuz, “but they weren’t interested. We said, ‘We don’t need the money, then.’” This hardheaded elitism has alienated many Tech students who have more democratic ideas about student stations, but others support their refusal to sell out to record labels and playlists.
   “But what does it really do?” Hormuz asked himself. “WREK doesn’t pull from any pool of sympathetic listeners. If you were to really look at it, you would say ‘This just doesn’t make any sense.’”

   Many compare WREK to WRAS, GSU’s more powerful, more accessible, more professional station. WRAS comes out on top of many of these comparisons. Hormuz agreed with every good thing people say about WRAS, but pointed out that WRAS does cooperate with record labels and therefore participates in the increasingly commercialized mainstream college radio. “They’re so professional,” he said. “Last night I turned on WREK and it was totally obvious the deejay was just asleep.”
   “Stranded on an island,” he continued. “Out of touch with reality. I think that’s good. . . The alternative becomes the mainstream, but WREK is constantly. . . Where am I going with this?”