“You’re listening to 88.3 FM, WRCT Pittsburgh, for Massive Music Weekend. That’s our yearly 60 hour music marathon where we play our favorite bands and favorite artists from noon on Friday all the way ‘til midnight on Sunday! Up next I will be playing the Marias, because Bad Bunny isn’t the only artist from Puerto Rico you should know.”
Caity’s hosting a show for the first time, and she sounds good on mic. The speakers in the lobby of my college radio station at Carnegie Mellon crackle a little, and one of them is hanging a little off-center, but the imperfection matches the space. The walls and a central column are absolutely covered in overlapping stickers and posters, many for local bands that haven’t existed in years. I tried to count them all for a project once but I lost track somewhere above 250. A generous term for the overall appearance would be “maximalism.” Most of the members of the station just call it “chaos” and they actively contribute, putting up stickers for new bands or art projects or anything else that they enjoy.
Despite how decorated our space is, people typically can’t find our studios unless they follow the signs on the walls of the basement or get lost trying going to the mailroom. The radio station is hidden in the basement of the university center, because when they were designing the building they didn’t want to have to put in the structural supports for our huge record library on the third floor where the rest of the student organizations’ offices are. The rooms of the radio station are cut into angular shapes covered in sound absorbing foam and stickers, with wires tracing through the walls.
The air space our FM signal travels through is also spiky when drawn on a a map, but covers most of Pittsburgh– the result of 1750 watts of power. WRCT received permission from the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to expand that far in 1992, although it wasn’t a simple process. The power increase initially would have caused overlapping with a religious radio station called He’s Alive, Inc. based in Murrysville, so the negotiations were a drawn out process. According to alumni, it was both expensive legally and quite acrimonious as both stations tried to boost their applications for the disputed air space by reporting each other for any FCC violations they could find.
The solution ended up being to buy a new directional antenna to keep the signal from going too far east. The WRCT General Manager at the time, Steve Auterman, said that it was the way around a situation that “was looking pretty dismal for the both of us” in an archived interview with The Tartan, Carnegie Mellon’s student paper.
After that 1992 dispute, Steve graduated and moved away for a while. He lived for a bit in Memphis, but he couldn’t get away from WRCT forever. He’s been back since 2017 and rejoined the station as a community member – i.e. a non-student volunteer – to host “The Deep Blues Hour” on Monday nights.
The station has changed significantly since he was a student. Radio is no longer the most popular way to find new music anymore because of the rise of streaming services and digital media. To some extent, the difficulty that people have in locating WRCT on the dial is a shorthand for how college radio has become less prominent over time. Tiktok does more to introduce new songs to young people than the FM dial these days, but radio stations persist as a way to push back against algorithms.
Another longtime community member, Richard Gordon, got involved with college radio after his own college years. “I wasn’t cool enough to be a DJ when I was young,” he said. “But now I feel like there’s more space to belong.”
College radio stations aren’t really made up of the same people anymore. White men were by far the largest majority of WRCT at one point and still overwhelmingly constitute most of the people involved in broadcasting in the United States, even today. However now WRCT has ties to various campus queer organizations and, at least for now, has more women than men on the airwaves. Of the friends I have at other college radio stations, the majority of them are very similar to me: queer women with pink hair.
Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given the ties between college radio and indie rock. College radio was traditionally the staging place for indie rock and new sounds, especially before the turn of the century. For example, Nirvana rose to prominence on college radio before they went mainstream. And just like in the demographics of WRCT, women and queer musicians are becoming more visible in indie rock.
Every now and then a magazine will come out with a feature on how women are now leading the way in indie music, and it’s always a little funny to treat it as a revelation, because women have been critical to the indie genre since it formed in the 1980s in the UK. And beyond spreading sounds from the rise of indie, college radio was also entwined with the Riot Grrrl movement that formed in the United States.
Riot Grrrl was a 1990s feminist movement that started in the Pacific Northwest to push back against the sexism women faced in the punk scene. The most famous Riot Grrl band is Bikini Kill, known for songs like “Rebel Girl” and for the rallying call “girls to the front!” during their shows. The musical movement is linked heavily with the rise of third wave feminism. One of the first places Riot Grrrl music was played was KAOS, the college-community radio station in Olympia Washington, with DJs like Lois Maffeo (who also made her own Riot Grrrl music).
In Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl, Dan DiPiero argues that the successor to the Riot Grrrl movement is the current rise of feminist and queer indie rock that focuses on “big feelings.” This can be seen in lyrics which focus on the importance of feeling one’s emotions, especially the negative ones (continuing to express the anger of Riot Grrrl or veering into sadness and yearning). Sonically, this indie rock pulls more from 90’s grunge than punk, with overwhelming walls of sound and selectively used screams.
The big feelings version of indie rock includes Indigo de Souza, the Ophelias, Japanese Breakfast, and Blondshell. By channeling emotions and engaging with this music, people can find community in unexpected places. For example, the Ophelias help express the often-hidden queerness within the Midwest. You can find traces of the same sentiment in the mainstream, especially with new artists like Chappell Roan, who expresses pride both in being a lesbian and in being a “Midwest princess.” But the indie rock arena allows for more of a community scene, where artists create together. It’s no surprise that the most popular big feelings group is boygenius: a supergroup of Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers.
Boygenius’s most popular song is “Not Strong Enough,” which deals with the emotional space of not feeling good enough. My girlfriend once described boygenius as “music to cry to for gay people with self-esteem issues.” It’s certainly very queer – after all, one of the failings that the artists detail is that they’re not being strong enough to “be your man.”
I own a t-shirt with the lyrics from the end of “Not Strong Enough,” which promises that I will be “always an angel, never a god.” At one point, a man read my shirt and held up his fingers in the sign of the cross at me. I never figured out whether it was because he was somehow familiar enough with the stereotypes of boygenius fans to figure out that I was a lesbian based on my t-shirt (and Docs, and dyed hair) or whether it was just a reaction to the religious implications. I was worried that he might decide to escalate beyond just using the cross against me at the time, but I still wear the shirt regularly. After all, it is part of who I am. Sometimes I spend more time listening to music than I do sleeping. My show on WRCT, called “Lavender Hour,” has a lot of the same artists and queer feminist undercurrents as big feelings indie rock, but I typically call my music taste something else: sad girl indie.
Sad girl indie is often seen as a reductive label, and rightly so in the way that it reduces musicians to their gender and a singular emotion. Mitski is an example of a musician who has been distilled to sad-girl sensibilities, and she has pushed back on that in interviews. At one point she told Pitchfork, “Every time someone on social media is like, ‘I can’t wait to cry to your new album,’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know if you’ll cry. I’m sorry’” and pointed out how gendered it is to assume that she writes confessional songs instead of approaching song-writing as art. I’m definitely guilty of crying to Mitski on my bathroom floor, but her songs have far more substance to them than simply being a soundtrack for a breakdown. For a few quick examples from her most popular songs, she discusses navigating Euro-centric beauty standards in “Strawberry Blonde” and the overarching effects of capitalism in “Working For the Knife” – messages that get discarded if all that you’re looking for is sadness.
On the other hand, I do find sad girl indie to be a label that’s useful as a shorthand for my music taste. Earlier today, my mom told me, “You know, if you were born a little earlier, you’d be playing Tori Amos on your radio show a lot. She always sounds a little tortured, which is how you like it.” Sad girl indie spans rock and pop, and the focus is on negative emotions. Mitski and boygenius might be the most well-known faces of the genre, but there’s many other notable artists, such as Ethel Cain, Samia, Holly Humberstone, Soccer Mommy, and Beach Bunny.
Although these artists don’t all sound the same, the common thread is that they’re women, and that many of their songs deal both sonically and lyrically with being overwhelmed, burnt out, and depressed. It’s a genre I love dearly because it has helped me make sense of my own mental health and my limitations. I find a deep sense of catharsis and emotional release in putting on a song where the artist sounds more tortured than me, which was especially powerful when I was 15 sitting alone in my bedroom because of the COVID-19 pandemic and half-convinced that no other girl in the world had ever been as lonely or angsty as I was.
Many of these artists are also queer, and there’s a particular heartbreak that they channel best. It’s a stereotype among queer women that your first sapphic breakup is more heart-wrenching than you thought possible, and this was very true in my experience. But even amidst the pain of the inevitable end to my high school relationship, I didn’t feel alone. After all, even if my friends were all asleep and tired of hearing about it all, I still had my music.
I still listen to a fair amount of the same music today as I did when I was a teenager, but I’ve got more words to describe how it’s useful to me now. As anyone who has wandered a mall and heard the overlapping soundtracks of various stores can tell you, music is often meant to keep you happy and bouncy – especially when that mood can keep you shopping!
On the other hand, sad girl music, big feelings indie rock, and their roots in Riot Grrrl can all be seen as a way of creating space for the negative emotions that people otherwise might feel that they can’t put words to or express. The sounds and lyrics come together to focus on negative emotions, and often on complaint. There’s typically a reason that the singer is sad, whether that’s a relationship or burnout or some other situation. And because music brings people together, this can become a kind of collective complaint.
In her book Complaint!, Sarah Ahmed discusses the power of complaint for women and queer people, even in a world where all the self-help books tell you to stop complaining and go back to work. Yet a complaint is often the only way to create change, instead of pretending that everything is fine. Complaint is a form of resistance against oppressive systems, and a powerful way to bear witness against institutions and their flaws.
An example can be found in the song “American Teenager” by Ethel Cain, which became popular enough that Barack Obama included it on his 2022 playlist, surprising both Cain and my friend group. “American Teenager” has many of the classic structures of sad girl music. It’s rooted in girlhood, with Ethel Cain wearing a high school cheer uniform in the music video. It starts with a guitar riff and dreamy vocalizations that slowly become lyrics. But it’s profoundly anti-war. The chorus discusses “a long cold war with your kids in the front” and the first verse creates the image of a neighbor’s brother returning in his coffin as just “another red heart taken by the American dream.”
This complaint against war seems even more timely now than in 2022 as the United States’ war with Iran has commenced. And it becomes a collective complaint: fans sing it together at concerts, or on their own. I’ve sung it at midnight with my friends as I drive around playing my music on the speakers of my 2013 Subaru, and I’ve sung it with fellow WRCT DJs when I’ve played in the studio for my radio show.
One reason I could do that is that what I play on my radio show is largely unrestricted. I have to abide by FCC regulations – a curse word could cost thousands of dollars in fines – but WRCT holds on to a comparatively outdated radio format: freeform. Freeform is a dying format across the United States, as stations move to have more consistent programming that brings in more listeners to advertise to or who will donate more to the station. This is further intensified as stations get bought up by larger conglomerates or become part of the NPR network.
Luckily, WRCT is unlikely to get caught up in this. Our space and funding is heavily dependent on the university, but we’re not going to end up in the same position that the students and employees at Duquesne University’s radio station did. In 2007, the president of Duquesne forced the station to stop running underwriting from Planned Parenthood, citing the school’s Catholic identity. A few years later, in 2011, Duquesne University decided to sell off their broadcasting license. Duquesne’s student radio station continues to exist solely over the internet, and the FM frequency that they took up previously became WESA, Pittsburgh’s NPR station.
In contrast, WRCT’s license is not held by Carnegie Mellon. Instead, it’s held by a nonprofit formed for the purpose: WRCT Radio Inc, with a board of students and alumni. I get to play as much of my indie music as I want because WRCT is as independent as a college radio station can possibly be.
Both indie music and college radio have long histories with various conflicts about who belongs. These conflicts range from who’s cool, to who belongs on the air space in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh when WRCT was increasing the strength of our radio signal, to the oversimplified “sad girl” marketing that can cover the artistry of indie. But even amidst these conflicts, there’s space to push back against the algorithms that largely control music today and for young people to use music to help develop who they are as women and queer people.
