The basic component of most radio shows is the music the DJ plays. Most people become involved with radio because of their interest in music. There is no question that we will do other types of broadcasts at WHSD from time to time, but the majority of our air time will be devoted to music, and the majority of that music will be popular music (pop).

            Understand the broad definition used here to define pop music: Any and all music that was created to be listened to by as many people as possible qualifies as popular music. Some associate the term "pop" with only the most commercial, light-weight music put out by performers who have no interest in creating anything remotely like good music, but only cater to the lowest common denominator of the audience. Let’s correct the bastardization of this term by acknowledging that most musicians create music so that others will listen to it. In this sense, almost all music ever created qualifies as pop music. And that’s the meaning we intend for it to have. Virtually any artist in any genre qualifies under this definition, and our goal is to be as inclusive as possible, to open ourselves to all kinds of music. That leads us to our first sub-topic:

VARIETY

            Everyone has a favorite artist or type of music that he prefers listening to. There’s nothing wrong with this, and even if there were, there’s not much we could do about it. But we can do a great deal about exposing our listeners to as wide a variety as we can. This means that as a DJ, you will need to expand your horizons, recognize your own biases, and refuse to allow yourself to be limited to narrow categories of music when you are playing music for your audience. The curse of radio today is the narrow range of music any one station will play. One only plays country; another claims to be the home of classic rock; while a third restricts its play list to just songs which can be labeled alternative. What this does is to create small niche audiences for stations, and means that any individual station caters to only a tiny percentage of its potential listeners. This age of specialization has proved deadly to a variety of musical styles being heard on any one station. Our goal is to make sure that WHSD doesn’t fall into this horrible trap.

            So one of your first tasks will be to familiarize yourself with as much music as you can. There are several techniques you can use to broaden your musical knowledge base. First and most obvious is to listen to a bunch of different radio stations which feature the various different genres out there. A partial list would include the following:

This is hardly an all-inclusive list; there are lots of other stations out there—use your scan button when you’re in the car and check out as much as you can. You’ll be amazed at how your preconceptions and prejudices turn out to have little to do with reality. What you originally thought was garbage (not a reference to the alternative group) might be a source for some of your favorite music. Just keep an open mind and give the station a chance; don’t move on until you’ve listened for several hours, and check it out on more than one day.

            Other sources of variety in music will be your friends, retail stores, and your parents. But the source you really need to check out is your local libraries. You will probably scoff at this idea and not all libraries have the same quantity of music available, but one that definitely will give you the opportunity to listen to a wide variety is Downers Grove Library. Remember that if you are a member of one library, you can get access to dozens in DuPage County. You can’t beat this deal: the music is free, the variety is great, and you can try out all kinds of different sounds totally risk-free. There’s nothing worse than spending $15 on a CD that contains a song you love only to discover that that’s the only song worth listening to on the whole disc. Libraries help to prevent this disaster.

            A final good source for cheap music is the cut-out bins. When a disc doesn’t sell well, the retailer will cut out a portion of the jewel box to send back to the manufacturer for partial credit and then sell the disc at a huge discount. You can find quality sound for under $5.00, on down to 99 cents. Look around for deals; there’s no reason you have to join some music club or pay hundreds of dollars to enrich your musical background. But above all else, you need to have a familiarity with as much music as possible before you go on the air.

SETS

            Once you know a little about a lot of music, you are ready to start putting together the building blocks of any musical radio show—sets of songs. The most common way to do this is simply to toss together the songs without any thought or creativity. The first song played has nothing to do with the second or the third and so on. Sadly, very few stations ever do more than this. Instead, they rely on their specialization in musical types to draw their audience and give little thought to how they put together blocks of songs for that audience, playing a few songs that are popular over and over. That will never be the method we use at WHSD. So how do sets of songs get put together?

            The first thing to consider is how many songs make up a set. "Three or fifteen" would be a good guideline for anyone to follow. What this means is that sets should be no more than three songs or fifteen minutes, whichever is shorter. In other words, you probably shouldn’t play more than three songs in a row or fifteen minutes of music for longer songs without stopping to identify the songs played, tell the audience what station they’re listening to, provide information, or whatever other DJ tasks you have to perform. Why? Simply, your audience will have a hard time following which song came when if you string five, six, seven, or more songs in a row. And if you’re playing a variety of music, much of which will be unfamiliar to your audience, you will need to identify just what you played on a regular basis. There’s nothing worse than to hear one of the greatest songs you’ve ever heard for the first time and then not to be able to identify it because the DJ played so many songs after that one that you couldn’t figure out which one it was when the DJ finally told you what he’d been playing. Or worse yet, the song gets played and then the DJ never bothers to tell you what she played. This will be a cardinal sin at WHSD—WE WILL ALWAYS IDENTIFY THE MUSIC WE PLAY IN A TIMELY MANNER, AFTER WE PLAY IT. So just remember "3 or 15" when you’re putting your sets together.

            That magical "3" allows for many different creations as you design your show. One thing we will constantly be on the watch for is thought and effort going into your show. Interesting sets can go a long way toward demonstrating that you are working to learn and grow in your role as a DJ. Let’s go over the basic terms and techniques that you can use in making up the best sets on radio.

            THEMES: This has become a lost art on the radio, yet it is one of the best ways to make your listeners interested in what song comes next. All you have to do is to have a theme that connects the three songs you play. Those of you familiar with the feature "My Three Songs" on Q-101 already know what we mean here. Unfortunately Q-101 only does this once a day. You can use this many times in one show, and it will make it more fun for your listeners as well as more interesting for you as you try to come up with different themes. Samples? You got’em:

            SUBJECT MATTER THEMES: "Walking on the Sun"—Smashmouth; "Here Comes the Sun"—The Beatles; and "Walking on Sunshine"—Katrina and the Waves

            GROUPS TO WHICH ERIC CLAPTON ONCE BELONGED: Songs by The Yardbirds, Cream, and Derek and the Dominos

            GROUPS FORMED BY VINCE CLARKE: Songs by Depeche Mode, Yaz, and Erasure

            SONGS WHERE THE SINGER STUTTERS: "My Generation"—The Who, "Changes"—David Bowie, "You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet"—Bachman Turner Overdrive

            EDIBLE GROUPS: Songs by The Smashing Pumpkins, Meatloaf, and Cracker

            SONGS WITH GREAT TITLES: "How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?"—Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, "Every Time I Eat Vegetables, It Makes Me Think of You"—The Ramones, "I’d Rather Be Dead Than Wet My Bed"—Harry Nilsson

            GROUPS WITH A THREE IN THEIR NAME: Songs by Third Eye Blind, Trio, and Three Dog Night

            "I’M A…" SONGS: "I’m a Believer"—The Monkees, "I’m an Adult Now"—The Pursuit of Happiness, "I’m a Loser"—The Beatles

            SAME OR SIMILAR TITLES, DIFFERENT SONGS: "All I Want Is You"—The Cars, "All I Want"—The Lightning Seeds, "All I Want Is You"—Roxy Music

You get the idea. You can use musical styles, common band members, colors, or anything you’re wild enough to think of. One sub-category that deserves special mention is the Cover. Covers are simply songs recorded by one artist that were recorded earlier by another. "Because the Night" was done originally by Patti Smith and then later covered by 10,000 Maniacs. "When You Were Mine" first got done by Prince, but Cyndi Lauper did an interesting version of it later. Covers work especially well in sets as the first and third song. Sometimes it seems repetitive to hear the same song done by two different artists right in a row, but if you start off with The Wallflowers’ version of "Heroes," followed by Jamie Sherriff’s "No Heroes," and then end with David Bowie’s German version of "Heroes"; you’ve really got an interesting set.

            FEATURE ARTISTS: Another method for organizing your sets is to designate a feature artist of the day for your show. This is the group or individual who will get special attention during the course of your time on air. This doesn’t mean that you will play ONLY this performer’s music on your show (Remember: we want VARIETY all the time!), but it does mean that songs by this performer will crop up regularly. For example, if your feature artist were The Beatles, you might include "Hey Jude," in your set along with "Hey Joe" by The Byrds Another set might include "Yesterday" to start the set, followed by "Yesterday Girl" by The Smithereens, with "Tomorrow Never Knows" also by the Beatles to finish. Your goal with a feature artist is to familiarize your audience with the scope of the featured artist’s work.

            This approach would also work if you wanted to feature a particular type or era of music. You could feature the 70’s, punk rock, 1968, disco, girl groups, grunge, a particular producer, or new releases. Again, you wouldn’t play JUST that music during your show, but you would make sure that each set included a song or two that was from your feature. Feature artists, eras, or genres are just another way to organize your show.

Obscurity: There’s nothing better than being able to introduce your audience to something really great that nobody but you has ever heard of. Given the thousands of releases music companies put out each year, you’d think this wouldn’t be too hard, but when you listen to most commercial stations, you’d think that the music police were patrolling to make sure that nothing but the same twenty songs got repeated endlessly. Their monotony is our opportunity! Scour your collections for those unheralded but wonderful songs that should have been big hits in a more just world. Watch those cut-out bins for that gem that no one discovered. As with anything, overdoing it is a problem—listeners don’t want to tune in and not recognize anything for hours at a time. Bring in that band you love that never gets played anywhere else gradually--a song or two a show to start—and then increase their airtime until you know that your audience is familiar enough with the music to make the band feature artists on your show.

The bottom line in all this is that sets will allow you to show your personality without saying a word. They also will give you the opportunity to educate your listeners in short, easy-to-digest segments about all the different types of music that are out there. Themes connect your sets in interesting ways, and covers show how a song evolves over the course of time. Feature artists give you the chance to load up on one particular performer, time period, or type of music without neglecting the variety for which WHSD will soon be renowned.

MUSICAL GENRES

Classifying any music by genres is an odious, harmful habit that you should fight as much as you can. That said, the masses DO limit and classity their music, which may mean that your listening patterns over the years have fallen into ruts that you will have to make a special effort to escape. If you haven’t, make sure you check out music which has been labeled CLASSICAL, COUNTRY, BLUES, NEW AGE, RHYTHM AND BLUES, SOUL, DISCO, DANCE, TRANCE, HOUSE, GRUNGE, ROCK, SWING, NEW WAVE, POP, BLUEGRASS, SYNTHPOP, INDUSTRIAL, FOLK, HEAVY METAL, or any label that the small-minds feel compelled to plaster over the sounds that someone creates. Don’t ever make blanket generalizations like, "I’m not into (fill in musical genre here)," unless you want to incur your sponsor’s wrath. Every song deserves a listen—don’t let a label determine what you will or won’t like—let your ears make that decision for you. If you haven’t heard it yet, you have no idea if it is any good. Check it out!