Editor's note: The following opinion was posted by a staff member, Scott Watkins, on the public newsgroup git.club.wrek, as part of a general discussion about defending WREK's programming. These discussions typically flare up once or twice a year when some cretin decides that WREK is not playing enough MatchHog 182 and posts to the newsgroup to bitch about it.
i've stayed out of this whole talk, and since it appears to be on its dying legs i'll jump in since people don't usually respond to what i say anyway, but...

i've been reading these wrek wars for years. and as is almost always the case, at least some of the argument centers around one of these statements:

1) wrek sucks because they play a lot of bad music like ________
2) wrek sucks because they don't play good music like ________

admittedly, its not too difficult for people to have a reaction like (1) because wrek plays sooo many different types of music, most of it unlike anything anyone has ever heard before. when you're used to traditional mainstream music and all of a sudden you get 35 minutes of tibetan monks chanting, you're rightfully not going to know what to think. and that is where personal differences come in. some people are going to say "that's crap" and end it right there. some people are going to keep listening to see if anything is going to happen. some people are going to be confused but intrigued. and hey, some people are going to to like it right off the bat. who's right? who's wrong? welcome to the world of subjectivity...

closely tied to (1) is (2). as we've seen here (or in .flame, i don't recall), reggae and techno were singled out as genres that deserve recognition. in both of these cases, it was shown that wrek covers music of both of these fields, both in specialty shows as well as regular rotation (well, more IDM than techno, but its not horribly removed). this just shows that wrek needs to work with publicity a little more--i remember a couple of years ago when wrek started to send out weekly posts on what you'd be hearing that week, who'd be on live @ wrek (our showcase of predominantly local bands, some of which are not that "shitty", joe!), what the sunday special would be for the week (a 2-hour timeslot on sundays in which one lucky op/dj can bring stuff from home and make a theme-related show), etc. this lasted all of about 2 or 3 weeks and was canned--it'd definitely be worth considering to reinstate this...basically, you'd be surprised at the amount of music that wrek plays--and thanks to the black magic of modern technology, you don't even have to tune in at a specific time of the week to hear it!

but one crucial point, in fact the only point i had intended to try to make when i started this post. in these newsgroup wars that have gone on ever since i started tech (and surely before), a common statement is a mixture of the two above: the only good thing wrek plays is XXXXXX, and everything else they play is awful. well, you know what? its almost always something different each time! one time it was a guy complaining about how blues is the only justification for wrek. someone else said indian music. someone liked to study to atmospherics. and so on and so forth...see the point?

one final note: one of the main complainers about wrek in the past (like around 1995 or 1996) hated everything wrek played and wished they would play what he liked. the question was raised about what he was into. he responded with bluegrass. wrek explained that bluegrass was part of the weekend cornucopia format. he wasn't satisfied. well, by 1998, he became host of the country/bluegrass/swing show "Back Alley Pork Roost", playing exactly what he wanted over the airwaves. and i'm not going to neglect the fact that he still didn't care for a lot of the music, but i'll say that i got to know him and he started finding more he liked after getting involved, and he even put up with my nonsense when my sunday specials would come on before him like crazy electronic music or russian marching dances or radically deconstructed pink floyd songs. this has been stated with the subtlety of a icepick-in-the-forehead already, but if you choose to, you could possibly find out some interesting stuff about music (and yrself even) by attending a training session. or then again, you may not. different strokes for different folks, as one sylvester stewart was known to say...

scott watkins, March 2001

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Edited by Chris Campbell, March 2001