COLLEGE RADIO STATIONS CRITICAL OF FCC EDICT

In a world sodden with commercial copycats, most college radio stations have traditionally prided themselves on being individualistic, “alternative music” mavericks.

But that was before the Federal Communications Commission condemned KCSB-FM at UC Santa Barbara last April for playing “Makin’ Bacon” by the Pork Dukes.

“I think it’s pretty well accepted that the FCC is completely hypocritical and vague about the whole thing,” said Ken Freedman, general manager of WFMU-FM at Upsala College in East Orange, N.J. “Here they put people under threat of prosecution, and they won’t even tell you what the law is.”

Though the FCC made “Makin’ Bacon” an example of indecent music, the commission did not specify why it was indecent.

Indecency, according to the FCC, has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Like several other station representatives contacted at colleges across the country, Freedman sees the FCC policy on indecency as confusing at best and unconstitutional at worst.

“It’s an after-the-fact judgment,” said John Koski, music director of Vanderbilt University’s WRVU-FM. “Only after you get the complaint from the FCC do they tell you you’ve done wrong. That seems to be quite against the whole idea of ‘judgment by your peers’ and all that.”

College radio was once the cutting edge in defining where bad taste ended and indecency began, but college broadcasters tend to agree that stations are now confused, stymied and off-balance these days.

Consider the mind-boggling paradox posed by the B-H Surfers.

The University of Washington’s KCMU-FM does not allow its deejays to announce the proper name of the Southern California punk band on their shows “because it’s an excretory organ,” according to KCMU music director and deejay Faith Henschell.

But which euphemisms--even song titles and singing groups--are safe to discuss on the radio, she asks.

“When you had just the seven-word banned list from the FCC, it was so clear, and now it’s all so vague,” she said. “I mean, can you say sweat and spit? Because those are excretory functions.

“It’s a losing battle for us because there’s no way that I know what’s offensive. My standards of obscenity are totally different from someone who runs the local 7-Eleven store or someone who works at Boeing,” she concluded.

Of nine leading college radio stations across the country contacted by The Times, most had experienced a greater degree of self-censorship since the FCC leveled an indecency warning against the student station at UCSB.

“The University of Washington holds our license, and they’ve made it quite clear that they want us to know the lyrics of every song we play--which we don’t because it’s impossible,” said KCMU’s Henschell. “It only takes one violation or letter to the FCC.”

College Music Journal editor Scott Byron, whose publication surveys playlists of several hundred college stations every week, says many colleges are squirming since the KCSB indecency ruling.

“With college radio, it’s usually better for the stations to keep a low profile as far as the community is concerned,” Byron said. “Because if you go out and say, ‘We’re challenging, we’re weird, we’re unusual, we’re going to offend you,’ you’re looking for trouble. Most stations aren’t afraid to offend people, but they don’t advertise that fact.”

To protect themselves against the FCC, stations are revising their policies on admissible language and lyrics and making sure their student staffs understand what they may and may not say over the air.

WFMU instituted a new obscenity policy last December, five months before the KCSB ruling.

“Anybody who follows the FCC knew this thing (the crackdown) was in the offing at least six months before it happened,” said WFMU’s Ken Freedman. The WFMU policy specifies several four-letter words that cannot be spoken over the air, “and it says you can’t really go into descriptions of offensive bodily functions or sex acts,” Freedman said.

Before WFMU’s new policy, student deejays let obscenities slip out several times a day, he said; nowadays, they’re “pretty rare. I think there’s some resentment among the staff about it, but overall I’d say we still have such a great deal of freedom to play whatever type of music we want that the obscenity thing is more of an irritant than anything else,” Freedman said.

WRVU’s Koski said the Nashville station has instituted a phone-in talk show “to find out just exactly what our audience likes and expects and is not afraid to hear.”

Koski said it’s his job to screen all new records for “audible obscenities.”

“It’s a pain, and it stifles new artists from getting on the air, because of the whole process of it,” he said.

In the wake of the FCC decision, Northwestern University’s WNUR-FM created an indecency policy entitled: “The First of Lots of Handouts: Words and WNUR.” According to the policy, WNUR deejays are never to say the “big four” four-letter swear words. It is acceptable to mention the name of a band, including the B-H Surfers, but regular between-songs patter is supposed to conform to what they call the “Three’s Company” rule: If it wouldn’t get past television censors, don’t say it on the air.

Hassan Alamdari, general manager and deejay at Loyola Marymount’s KXLU-FM, sometimes takes risks despite the station’s official warning against obscenities.

“If a song says s--- once but it’s a great song, I’ll usually play it and say something like, ‘This song may have lyrics that will offend someone.’ ”

But decency and indecency calls are highly subjective, he says, and the FCC has failed the industry it is mandated to oversee by ordering college deejays not to play something on the air and, at the same time, refusing to tell deejays what that something is.

“A song I might find morally offensive may not have one swear word and may just be demeaning to women, speaking to them as sex objects or something. So how do you judge what a person should or shouldn’t hear?”

KCMU’s Henschell agrees.

“It seems like it’s a convenience tool to get us to monitor ourselves, and it’s working in that sense,” she said. “In effect, it’s helping the lazy FCC not to do any work because we’re doing it ourselves. They nail a couple of stations, make everybody afraid, and everybody will back down.”