the new semester is here! which means spring training is here ;-)
fill out this form to sign up <3 as always, email me (lex!) at sm@wybc.com with any questions!
signups for fall training 2023 are open <3 sign up at this link by thursday september 14! email sm@wybc.com with any questions!
click on this post to see photos by uri teague of the most recent WYBCx concert, featuring t!lt
{image filename="922932AA-8AB6-4FB2-AE65-49690C5A0758_1_201_a.jpeg" align="center" size="large" caption="" link=""}
{image filename="4154D6F5-0234-40DB-A042-1E6FBD5139A5_1_201_a.jpeg" align="center" size="large" caption="" link=""}
{image filename="872AB1CE-189D-4DE1-AA4D-1052EEACF217_1_21_a.jpeg" align="center" size="large" caption="" link=""}
{image filename="2BC8BBFE-3A07-4F28-8A33-BA183BCB81E9_1_201_a.jpeg" align="center" size="large" caption="" link=""}
This week Lydia chated with Chesed and Clara about their show Pink Freud, which airs on wybc.com on tuesdays from 4:30 to 5pm.
Lydia: Tell me a little bit about your show
Chesed: On Pink Freud we take dream submissions, analyze them, and make a playlist based on the themes or symbols. Interpreting dreams is just fun for me, but I think our dreams do shed light on parts of ourselves we can’t quite reckon with consciously. Radio is a weird place to pick apart dreams- you’re literally broadcasting thoughts so private you don’t even know what they mean, but there’s this cushion of never knowing who’s actually listening. Our show is like group therapy: everyone’s innermost desires and insecurities are strange and messy, but they’re funny, and shared. Our playlists mirror that too- we play a lot of stuff we’d never put on if handed the AUX, like musicals or country. PInk Freud is about guilty pleasures in more ways than one. Clara and I also know very little about Freudian psychoanalysis. We are theater majors.
Clara: The idea for the show came from the name itself— we wanted to bring together psychoanalysis and our favorite music, the sacred and the profane, if you will. It’s a send-up of Freud and Freudian analysts, but as our brilliant comedy professor Deb Margolin says, you can’t parody something that you have no relationship with or aspirations towards. So we get to take what we find useful— reading too far into things, finding symbolism and sense in mysteries from our subconscious— and make it our own.
Lydia: What was your most recent set of show songs about?
Chesed: Our most recent show was about a dream where someone was crawling through a playground slide with their brother and saw a girl playing violin with her mom at the end. The core theme of this was our dream donor wanted recognition for their successes- so obviously we played “Payday” by Doja Cat and Young Thug.
Clara: We picked a pretty eclectic bunch of songs, each reflecting a different moment or mood from the dream: brotherhood, longing, fulfillment, tunnel vision.
Lydia: How do you pick your guests for your show?
Clara: We pick submissions from dreams our friends tell us about, but anyone can send us a description of a dream they want us to analyze by filling out this form: https://forms.gle/GiN58xPei4cVzQVW6
Chesed: You can submit anonymously or be shouted out, and if we choose your dream we’ll let you know before broadcast! We also email you a playlist with your songs if you include your email on the form. We analyze really long dreams, and also ones that are a sentence long.
Lydia: tell me about some dreams you’ve been having recently?
Clara: I’ve been dreaming about being late to the airport recently— waking up and having to stuff all my belongings into a suitcase so I don’t miss my flight. Unsurprisingly, I’m anxious! This recurring dream is probably a sign from my subconscious that I’m in fight-or-flight mode, afraid that there’s always something I’m forgetting. I’ve also overslept and been late to class a lot recently, though that’s probably unrelated.
Chesed: In the last dream of mine I can remember I was meeting my friends parents, but their voices were extremely loud and distorted, almost parrot sounding. This is definitely leftover anxiety from parents' weekend.
Lydia: There have been many psychological debates about the purpose of dreams, why do you both think dreams exist?
Chesed: I’ll preface this with my qualifications: I took a two week course on psychoanalysis when I was in high school. With that, I think our dreams allow us to sort through our emotions. The best interpretation is when you wake up with a gut feeling about exactly what it meant.
Clara: Now for my qualifications: I used to be an English major. I think dreams exist to fuck with your head a little bit, as if waking life didn’t already do that enough. If you’re dreaming about something, you can’t look the other way; denying how you feel will just make you dream about it more.
Lydia: do you choose songs for dream submissions live?
Chesed: We pick beforehand. Sometimes I’ll be sitting with a dream submission for a couple weeks before I know exactly what songs I want to play. Other times, a submission will come an hour before the show.
Clara: We usually get together before the show to finalize the track list and narrow down the longlist into what we’ll have time to play, since the show is a short and sweet half hour long. Sometimes, we’ll both be thinking of the same song that’s independently been haunting each of our psyches, or one of us will include a song that’s new to the other but perfectly encapsulates that week’s interp.
Lydia: Who are your nightmare guests for PINK FREUD?
Chesed: Anyone that will be offended if we say they want to have sex with their mom.
Clara: Anyone who isn’t down to clown.
Interested in what WYBCx podcasters are listening to, reading, and working on? Get the updates from our Tinyletter at https://tinyletter.com/podcastdept!
RDBNPNG is currently accepting submissions through Dec. 15! The theme for this issue is Oracle. we want your poems, short stories, photography, essays, interviews, and visual art of any kind. With finals coming up, we know this is a busy time, but taking a break to work on something creative and look towards a brighter future (or darker, we don’t know you) could be a great way to decompress! And if you have any existing creative works in want of a home, the Zine would be happy to publish them!
Please email submissions to rdbnpng@wybc.com and email us if you have any qs!!!
Our station manager, Emily, sat down with longtime community dj and WYBC legend, Brainard Carey, for a little chat. Below is the outcome!
Q: What was the inspiration for The Lives of the Artists?
A: It was a way to meet artists I admired, like Marina Abramovic, and the late Christo [as in Christ and Jeanne-Claude], and of course there is a book by Vasari of the same title, he interviewed Renaissance artists - and the idea of getting to understand the lives of artists, not just their art, gives a new insight into the art and for me. It keeps me excited about the art world because artists are doing crazy, improbable things that no one asked for and find a way to keep doing it!
Q: How do you manage talking about visual art and visual artists on a purely auditory platform like a radio show?
A: I know, that's crazy, right? It always strikes me as really odd, especially when I ask artists to describe work and it’s conceptual. Like recently, I was talking about a work called “Solar Coochie” by two trans artists discussing performative aspects of gender and how gender in plants and animals is more fluid - so these ideas, these issues are really interesting, right? We are living in a world where art is idea-based, not purely visual, the visual points to ideas that the artist is exploring.
I’ve had some funny conversations! William Pope.L spoke to me in a made up language.
Q: What kind of art do you create? What’s your dream project?
A: I create collaborative art with my wife under the name “Praxis.” We gave out hugs and washed feet in the Whitney Biennial. Or last project was a “non-visible museum,” and we got James Franco to be part of our kickstarter project where we sold invisible art.
Those are two realized dreams. We have more, like a parallel art world.... That’s a work in progress, but essentially, the global art world is changing. Capitalism is broken, something must change, but art will always be made, and we are working on a way to create a kind of open source art world where everyone contributes and manages a separate reality that may have a market of its own but is not controlled by major players and the super wealthy, where art is somehow the means of exchange…. As I said, this is a work in progress, probably to be revealed this winter. I could elaborate but I know you want this concise and snappy!
Q: Please do elaborate!
A: The parallel art world (PAL) is the idea of a structure that is not the typical power system of capitalism or anything else. It is anarchy, but anarchy can be organized, like Alcoholics Anonymous is actually an organization with a structure of no leaders, no person “in charge” — they are anarchists! But of course they don’t think they are, and the same could happen with artists. We want to create a structure that prevents “leaders” and “visionaries” from getting credit. The PAL is a place that is for expression and exchange, and I can only say so much because we want to plant the seeds of this and encourage growth, not define it and create boundaries.
Q: What role do you think the artist has in society?
A: I think artists can help us all learn a new language. I mean you have to wonder, why do artists make art? They are not making it to just sell it; otherwise, they would try to make what the market wants, right? So they are making stuff no one asked for and probably no one wants, and that's almost like some kind of weird magician / shaman / weirdo stuff — and we have a lot to learn from those kind of eccentric or hard-to-define people, a new way of living, of seeing, of loving, of feeling, of expressing. Not in literal terms, but almost in a way that is not of this world, artists are already in a parallel reality and have the ability to pull others into it, which can be pretty exciting for everyone! Artists can also just make the world a prettier place, more color, more life. Just seeing the creative urge visualized can be inspiring.
Q: What was the most memorable fortune you’ve ever gotten from a fortune cookie?
A: Hm, good one. I think it was one that was misprinted or something. It was: “To truly find yourself, you should play hide and seek alone.”
Q: Do you believe in the paranormal?
A: Yes. How could I say no? Without the paranormal, we are pretty arrogant! I think there are all kinds of worlds and creatures and ways of communicating that we haven’t a clue about, but we see these signs… I was just thinking about gnomes and fairies today — kind of paranormal, I think.
Welcome to WYBC, Yale's best and only student radio! If you are looking to train with us to be a part of the family, applications are officially open until September 16th! Click here to learn more and sign up for training, and email sm@wybc.com with questions. long live radio.
the spring 2020 application is live at this link! apply by Jan 26th ~~
On October 18th, the hip-hop duo EarthGang performed at Toad’s Place in New Haven, CT. The two Atlanta-based rappers, Olu and WowGr8, brought their witty lyricism and quirky energy to the stage, amping up the crowd with genre-bending, Southern-fried songs from Mirrorland, their major label debut album under J. Cole’s Dreamville.
After a hype performance from Benji, the show’s opening act, EarthGang began their set with “LaLa Challenge,” the intro to Mirrorland, hitting the audience with trippy lines (“stop the world, give it a twirl, when I move my feet, make sacred ground”) and political punches (“cause you brown don’t mean you down, cause you white don’t mean you right.”)
This technicolor energy radiated throughout EarthGang’s entire performance, as the duo encouraged the audience to dance and sing along to bangers like “Top Down” and “Proud of U.” Before breaking into a rapid fire stanza of “Proud of U,” EarthGang pumped up the crowd with a goofy chant — “GO STUPID GO DUMB GO STUPID GO DUMB!” — the silliness always bolstering their lyrical message, especially during their performance of YG & Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT (Fuck Doanld Trump)” a song that relies on the audience’s singing along of the truthful yet comedic chorus “Fuck Donald Trump!” participation
This silliness shifted slightly when EarthGang shushed the crowd for a quick meditation, a moment of silence that contextualized “This Side,” the song that followed, welcoming the audience in their musical reflection on the horrors of fame, particularly in regard to the unexpected deaths of young talent. This somber yet cathartic mood was continued with the mesmerizing r&b tune “Tripping,” featuring a clever incorporation of shekere, a West African percussion instrument made of gourd.
Even in these slower moments, EarthGang never lost track of the audience, making sure everyone stayed hype. “I am Earthgang,” EarthGang chanted with the crowd. “You are EarthGang. We are EarthGang,” a statement that blurs the line between musician and audience, establishing EarthGang as not just a hip-hop group, but a collective movement.
In fact, this inclusiveness is what made EarthGang’s talented performance into a uniquely revolutionary one. Rather than agonize over traditional concert conventions, EarthGang pulled a number of crowd members on stage for a dance-off. This interactiveness only intensified as the concert progressed. When people threw their phones on stage, Olu and WowGr8 recorded videos on their devices; after the show, instead of rushing to their tour bus, the duo stayed behind to take photos and give autographs. It’s rare to find a music group that cares just as much about the fans as it cares about their musical vision. In this sense, EarthGang’s freaky Southern rap transcends concert stages, immortalizing their legacy in an all-encompassing hug.
- Kiddest Sinke, '20