I started a radio show called Rare Sightings in Music, and it airs every week on 89.1 WBCX in Gainesville, GA. The reason I decided to started goes much more outside of “Well, I wanted to start a radio station because I’m a Mass Communication major.”
My stance on campus has always been very political. I have always loved writing, and fighting oppression. However, any student activist will tell you that it gets tiring to fight the power. I’ve always wanted to start a radio show, but I didn’t want to be the new Sae from “Dear White People.” I didn’t want to be on the radio station screaming about why white people are the worst, why men suck, and why cishet folks are trash in every way. That gets exhausting: being the political black girl on campus who is known to only care about “Black Lives Matter” stuff. Simplism in what I was going for. So why not music?
So where did I get the idea of “Rare Sightings in Music”? Like I said, I had been looking for something to do where I could get rid of my political reputation… or at least add substance to it. In October of 2016, I ran into an artist named Rayana Jay on twitter. My love for finding music on twitter is a deep one, because Twitter is where I found the love of my life, Chance the Rapper. I clicked on the sponsored link to Rayana Jay’s soon coming EP, “Sorry About Last Night,” and immediately fell in love with the pink album cover spotlighted with a side profile of Rayana Jay’s face. The only song that was available to listen to on Apple Music was the second track, “Too Good.” I fell in love and anticipated the day the album dropped. In the mean time, I wanted to find other music similar.
I found a number of artists who I couldn’t believe weren’t famous. There was the Chicago production duo, The Burns Twins, whose album, Sweet ASL, only was retweeted 100 times. I found Amber Mark, who only had a few hundred followers on Twitter. There was NAO, who had more followers than the rest of the artists mentioned, but I had never heard on the radio. So much talent was in the world on the local level, but no one was talking about them. I needed a solution. My solution was to at least get everybody at Brenau to listen and love these same people I loved by using my new found skills in Adobe Audition and my access to the Brenau radio station as a Mass Communication major.
My vision was to have a 15-30 minute show once a week where I profiled an artist of my choice. On occassion, if the artist was willing, I could interview them whether in studio or via the phone. I expressed this to Jay Andrews, the man in charge of the campus radio station. He told me he liked my idea, but unfortunately I woul dhave to wait Fall of 2017 to do it. While disappointed, this gave me all summer to work on my ideas and really fine tune everything I wanted.
I spent the summer editing music to make it the perfect amount of General Audience approved that I could for the station. I also emailed a lot of artists who I knew owuld love to be on the show. Things did not go as I planned. Because I worked 40+ hours a week on the night shift, I felt like I didn’t have much time to edit. No artist emailed me back. I was barely passionate about doing the show by time I got to campus, and I found myself stressed out about a $1,002 balance on my student account for the semester alone (Here is a link to my GoFundMe). I no longer wanted to do it. In August, I had given up, despite editing over 20 songs and emailing five different artists.
Fastforward to September 2017. I changed my idea up some to modify my needs. I needed a show that did not require interviews, but also did not require a 30-minute commitment. So why not a five minute spotlight, where I just talk and play music? And that’s what I did. My first episode of “Rare Sightings in Music” will air sometime this week and played multiple times on our campus radio station, 89.1 WBCX.