Music plays such a big part in the way we define ourselves. From the genres we listen to on a regular basis to the guilty pleasures that we belt out alone in the car, every song we listen to says a little bit about us and who we are. And I often get the feeling that our generation tends to be a bit more eclectic with the music we listen to than our parents tend to be. I know just comparing what's on my iPod with my siblings' is certainly a trip every time. My one brother will go from Anime theme songs to heavy metal to something happy go luck from the 90s in the space of ten minutes. The other brother's iPod is mainly musicals but I also know that he has a Seether collection and some Taylor Swift on there as well. And while the collection of things my parents will listen to certainly isn't small by any means, we will often shock one or both of them with some of things that we enjoy. I think a large part of this range of interest comes from the way that we found music over the years.
Growing up there really weren't that many radio stations that really focused on playing the current hits. Even today I can really only think of maybe 3 that can be received clearly in that general area with this focus. Granted this estimate is a little skewed, country is about the only genre I generally avoid so I'm sure there were quite a few that played country hits that I wouldn't know. But by any means this is a rather small collection of stations that would come in and they would be the super popular hits mixed in with the usual go to classics. I can't say I really thought too much of it until I hit high school though. I had the things that I listened on a regular basis, which were mostly groups I had found on the radio, and then there were the things that my friends would listen to. Obviously by this point getting your music through the internet was becoming far more common practice, so the mix cds we would listen to during practice or parties definitely started becoming more and more interesting of mixes. You could usually tell who's playlist you were listening to with just two songs, especially when it went from rap to country in one song. Although I think what kind of woke me up musically were the trips to colleges I made during my summers in high school. After my Freshman year I became mildly obsessed with improving my swimming and managed to convince my parents to send me to a couple of local colleges for a week long swimming camp over three summers. (If I hadn't managed to impress upon you the special form of my nerdiness by this point, I'm fairly certain this is the clincher.) While I don't remember much from these trips at this point, other than the few pointers that got drilled into my technique, I do recall the fact that I would often come away from these trips feeling a bit behind. I would hear all of these songs on the radio there that I never heard at home. Conversations with the other campers would bring up bands and areas of the genres I liked that I wasn't familiar with at all. And while I would try to find some of it when I got home, I generally never remembered enough to successfully find anything. It was an exciting moment when a song I found during these trips would become popular enough to hit my stations and I could successfully listen to it. Granted keeping up with new music and introducing it to people is generally the purpose of radio stations around colleges. And tonight's sticker is actually the Pitt campus's local station, although I will shamefully admit that I didn't recognize it. To my credit though I had a large enough group of friends with varied tastes in music that I was constantly bombarded with new bands, so listening to the campus station wasn't a priority during college. Looking over the WPTS Radio site though it does seem to follow the music format you would expect. A fair amount of the bigger alt rock groups you immediately recognize, a lot of updates on the various teams stats, and a lot of smaller/local groups to help expand the genres. I listened to the station for a bit during work and I have to admit that I honestly hadn't heard any of it before. Although my main music outlets at this point are Pandora and Spotify so that's not terribly surprising. So even though I have definitely expanded my music horizons over the years, I'm probably always going to be a bit behind the music curve. But then again this does always mean there's usually a pleasant surprise in store for me when I get close to catching up and I can't really complain about that.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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