tickets for entry

There are a collection of terms within the list which point towards specific markers of quality. These names printed on the backs of records, ultimately become tickets for entry into the rock show collection. Those same names in turn, when reiterated by the marking hand of music directors, become stand-ins for subgenres, scenes, and designations of quality. Here I look at these terms as related to producers and labels, and how they ultimately uncover the role the music director played at WNUR.

produced: Perhaps we are now getting a little closer to discerning how a record might justifiably enter the collection initially. If a word like 'ex' signifies the historical affiliation of an artist who is essentially already in the canon, the word 'produced' tells how canonized figures have the power to bring others into their midst by affiliation. 'Producer' is a slippery term in music. Sometimes the producer can be closer to a sound engineer or mixer who has an actual hand in recording the music; in hip-hop, the producer refers to the person who makes the beats themselves; in the commercial music industry, the producer can be the funder or business mind behind the artistic venture. In the 1980s in underground rock music, the producer role was often closer to the engineer and mixer. Within the underground, producers made a name for themselves from the sounds and scenes each of them became associated with. We can see this clearly in the WNUR stacks through the references made as justifications on the covers of many records. While it is not so much that producers actually 'produced' the sounds of the artist they recorded, they came to represent certain epochs of the underground music scene. This process was as evolving as the scenes themselves with geographies and initial recordings creating a precedence that would roll into reputations attracting artists of similar styles.  In many ways, these producers began as the documenters of their scenes and only later became the destinations of those influenced by the same scenes. I would like to examine three producers now who represent certain scenes and fixtures of the underground rock community within the WNUR Rock collection as a whole.

• steve albini - While the Albini name was certainly known and respected throughout the American underground rock community, the case of WNUR is unique in that Steve Albini both graduated from Northwestern and DJ'd on WNUR. Of the records accounted for thus far, Albini produced 6 of them, (local Chicago records are filed seperately, and currently unaccounted for) though, by the amount music director's mention his name, it would appear nearly every record produced by him sent to the station was added and marked. Steve Albini's relationship with WNUR is much mythologized around the station, many will say he hates WNUR, and he very well may, but from individual accounts of those around at the time, namely rock DJ Doug Conn, a more likely story is that Albini simply did not want to be a part of the organization WNUR was at the time, he didn't want to be a 'WNUR dude.' His own feelings about WNUR aside, one can not overstate the impact Steve Albini has had on the Midwest underground rock scene.  Albini's egoless sound engineering emphasis on capturing a band's unbridled live sound lent itself paricularly well to the unique brand of noise rock and post-hardcore emerging from the Midwest in the mid-1980s. His hand in recording bands like The Jesus Lizard, Slint and Crain and his own musical output as Big Black and Rapeman capture the sound of a scene. As his intial recordings disbursed themeselves, through outlets particularly keen on Albini like WNUR, bands whose sonic visions aligned with the Albini recordings booked time at his recording studio in Chicago. By this feedback proccess Albini's repuation grew, as did the seal of approval his name represented on the back of an LP for a station like WNUR.
• spot - No name is perhaps more synonomous with the West Coast hardcore scene than the Redondo Beach based Spot.  Most well known for recording Black Flag and many others on SST Records, Spot's name quickly became associated with a particular style of fast and loud hardcore in the early 80s that many would soon emulate and seek out. As with Albini, Spot's name for music directors became a red flag for admission into the canon, and a way to describe the music on the enclosed record.
• kramer - Though music directors mention his name less than Albini, Kramer has the most production credits in the collection with 16. If Spot represents the West and Albini the Midwest, Kramer served as an emblem of New York City for WNUR music directors. Kramer's production style, and more importantly the musicians he attracted, were often of the more experimental, lo-fi strand of rock finding home on record labels like Shimmy Disc in the lates 80s and early 90s.

Each of these producers represent a distinct scene and sound within the landscape of underground rock music during the period of 1980-2000. Their names on back covers of records became ways of describing sounds for music directors of the period, tickets for entry into the collection, and doorstops for countless other similar sounding releases that would find their way on to the shelves at WNUR. 

label: Much like the names of known producers printed in small letters on the back of record covers, certain record labels acted as tickets for admission to the WNUR Rock collection. In much the same way producers attracted a certain crowd and sonic aesthetic, record labels ceased to function as purely money-movers of the music scene in the underground music/art economy. This was partly due to the fact that there was very little money, and partly a reclamation of artistic control and autonomy from the forces who had capitalized and commercialized first Rock 'n' Roll and then Punk. Record labels came to function more as collectives of musicians with similar sonic visions in the 1980s and, like producers, the sounds they curated became emblematic of certain scenes within the sprawling American Indie Underground. With these curations and representations, came reputations that found their way into college radio stations like WNUR dealt with the task of making sense and piecing together that same sprawling and disjunct underground landscape for its listeners. Below you can see a visualization of the record labels with the largest number of records in the collection, each of these labels represents a particular scene and sound, collected together they form a picture of the American Indie Underground. 

In a sense, this was the job of the college radio music director: to piece together some cohesive view of the fractured and divided underground rock music scene for station listeners. If record labels and producers were responsible for creating these isolated scenes, the music director's job involved using the work of these various emblems as guiding points in a wild connect the dots of music and culture.