Before my life as a globetrotting mp3 blogger I was a humble student at Northwestern University. I fell in with a group of vagabond DJs at the campus station, WNUR, who had a show called the "Indie Rock Suckfest." The name was not exactly of our choosing, as I shall presently explain. WNUR definitely had some good people, like Will Butler of Arcade Fire fame and Justin, but as I imagine happens with a good many college radio stations, there's a glut of people who were not just pretentious but mean. When one of my friends first signed up for the show, it was left unnamed on a master sheet in the station's office. As the story goes, a malicious WNURite scrawled the epithet "Indie Rock Suckfest" next to his name, and he kept it as a mark of insurgency against the WNUR power structure.
I promised one of the Hey! Student faithful a mix of Jamaican music, so I'm posting a selection from one of the best shows I was part of, an all-Jamaican show that aired October 13, 2004. Our slot was from 2-3:30am, so when we got three or so phone calls for this show, we were pretty stoked. (This was an improvement, by the way, from the decidedly unglamorous 3:30-5am slot.) The chunk I'm posting has some of the all-time greats represented, namely Desmond Dekker (leading off), Lee 'Scratch' Perry (second) and Jimmy Cliff (at the end).
Indie Rock Suckfest - Jamaican show (excerpt)
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