Issue 12
Radio Utopia: GTFU
By Heather MurphyPhotos By Aaron Farley and Jeremy and Claire Weiss
Illustration By Justin Van Hoy
For every one song played on Get the Fuck Up (GTFU) Radio, there are approximately six references to genitalia. “First I want to grow a wiener and then I want a chick to blow me. Are my goals unattainable?” asks cherubic-faced Annie Hardy of the band Giant Drag. “No, I think those goals are good,” responds co-host number one, Aaron Farley, from his usual post across the table. “Good, then I will keep reaching for the stars,” says Annie in a raspy voice that registers somewhere between sexy and grandma.
Musical guest Eleni Mandell offers a tentative smile. She appears to be processing what hundreds before her have struggled to process: a) that such filthy words could come out of such a pretty little girl (although Annie is 25, she looks maybe 16) and b) that this is actually radio.
At some point, co-host number two Jeremy Weiss pipes up, “Could you play another song for us and stop us from talking?” Eleni picks up her guitar and launches into a dulcet little ditty about the “Make Out King.” Annie reaches for a tambourine and joins her, leaving the banana she was nibbling lodged firmly in her mouth.
It’s a good moment for 6-year-old GTFU, an online radio show that airs live every Monday night from 8 to 11 p.m. on LittleRadio.com. Already this evening, 12-year-old musical prodigy Dakota Floeter has defaced Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable.” A new webcam—thanks to a burgeoning partnership with stickam.com—is allowing a growing base of listeners to connect faces with words. The Aaron-Jeremy-Annie trio, simply by doing what comes naturally to them—hang out, get silly, play music—have managed to pull in several awards never before bestowed on an Internet radio show. Somehow, this potty-mouthed musical mini-party is proving that there is a viable alternative to commercial radio.
Except that would be too easy. Unfortunately, just a few hours after their Monday night gathering comes to a close, something potentially devastating happens: the Copyright Royalty Board, an arm of the Library of Congress, upholds a decision that threatens to shoot legitimate Internet radio right out of the blogosphere. The ruling would force stations such as LittleRadio.com to go from paying royalties based on a percentage of their revenues to paying flat fees per-song per-listener. According to most estimates, this translates into 300 to 1200 percent more than webcasters are currently paying—in other words, enough to put them out of business. Many say that only shows with few listeners or no concern for the law would have much chance at survival.
“This would mark not only the end of the radio station on Little Radio (a completely NON commercial station), but every Internet station in the U.S.,” wrote LittleRadio.com founder Dave Conway in an angry mass e-mail, the day of the ruling. No one at GTFU has been paying much attention to the case. Like their musicloving counterparts across the world, Jeremy, Aaron and Annie have come to take this new form of media for granted.
Why would anyone try to ruin such a good thing? To ensure that artists get the money they are owed—is the claim of SoundExchange, the D.C. based organization that collects and distributes royalties to artists and labels. The organization, the principal proponent of the legislation, blames Internet radio for a decrease in CD sales and insists that even non-commercial stations are unfairly profiting off of artists.
Carl Malamud, creator of the first Internet radio station back in 1993 and author of seven books on the Internet, has a different explanation: “Short-sighted policy-makers enabling big companies to keep their monopoly.”
Whether you deem the legislation as good or evil, the case of GTFU speaks to the potential of a medium at risk of being quashed. The program isn’t for everybody, but that’s the point. As conglomerates like Clear Channel have helped turn stations across the nation into homogenous top-10-repeating moneymaking machines, the only real space left for quirky shows with intentionally narrow appeal is the Web.
“It’s a wasteland. Radio used to be one of the most creative mediums in the world, but it’s all consolidated now, it’s a form,” laments Malamud. “That’s why Internet is so nice, it removes barriers to entry.”
The Listeners Are Out There
Rock-god Slash appeared as a guest on GTFU a few months back. Sitting in LittleRadio.com’s recording loft in a windowless brick warehouse in downtown L.A., he commented, “This is like the Russian underground in here or something. I feel like it’s the last radio station on earth.” He seemed to be having fun talking pin-ball machines and music history, the hosts recall, but he didn’t quite get what was going on.
“I think he asked us like five times, ‘Is this just your guys’ experiment? Are people actually listening?’” Jeremy says.
The answer to both questions is yes. LittleRadio. com is an experiment into what can happen when one takes the commercial out of radio. A media utopia, the station is powered—not on advertising—but love of music and biodiesel. Yes, bio-diesel. A damn innovative businessman, Dave Conway, the mastermind behind the company, raises funds through partnerships with do-gooder companies such as Zero Air Pollution (ZAP) electric cars. None of the carefully selected hosts are getting paid a cent; the payoff is simply pleasure and creative control.
Within the utopia, GTFU is a leader. One of the most popular shows on LittleRadio.com, the show has transcended the divide between Internet and “real radio” in a surprisingly exemplary way. For more than six years now people across the world have been tuning in to listen to the unpredictable weekly mishmash of live performances, bizarre stories, and musical discoveries. (The show lived on KillRadio.org before moving over to LittleRadio.com last August). In 2004, L.A. Weekly nominated GTFU as the best radio station of the year, a historic first for an Internet radio station. Just last year, they were honored with the L.A. Record readers’ choice award.
It’s hard to say exactly how many people are listening—no one at LittleRadio.com has much time for statistics. But the show has 900 or so subscribers to their weekly podcast (including the woman in Australia who sends them angry emails if they fail to post promptly), dozens of listeners instant message them while they are on the air and dozens more send weekly emails and send packages to the show.
The Guests Are Alright
In the beginning, there were no guests—just Jeremy and Aaron drinking cheap beer with a guy named Travis who got bored and eventually disappeared. It was not all that different from the late-night radio show Aaron had in college, which was largely oriented around getting ridiculously, publicly trashed.
In the past several years, though, the show has been overflowing with visitors. There are friends, friends of friends, musicians Jeremy and Aaron meet while taking photographs of bands (they are both photographers during the day) and then the random surprises, like Alexis Arquette “in drag” (that was pre-sexchange) and Alicia Silverstone singing karaoke on the arm of husband Chris Jarecki of Little Wolverines.
Some of them, like “Chrississippi” from Mississippi have become regulars, stopping by to talk about issues like the criminal justice system: “You can buy these women prisoners’ addresses through this website, WomenBehindBars.com,” he proudly declared on a recent Monday evening. “You log on and there are pictures of them, kinda like MySpace.”
Chrississippi’s correspondence with these ladies is well documented on GTFU; he read his first letter on the show many months earlier. Now he’s taken his relationship to the next level, he says; he managed to meet one of his pen-pals at the Greyhound bus station the day before, during her stopover from one correctional facility to another.
“Is she hot?” asks Aaron. Chrississippi thinks so; he tried to convince her to come to his car, but she was worried about getting in trouble, so she stuck to kissing him by the bus.
“It’s a bummer and not a bummer at the same time. Chrississippi got to make out at a bus station,” says Jeremy.
“And you don’t have to talk to her tomorrow,” adds Aaron.
Annie does what she does to all good stories; she turns it into a song:
“She gets to the bus station and she wants to be sure,” she croons to the tune of “Stairway To Heaven.” “That she chews gum in case there’s some making out.” Two bars of whistling. “And she is a-kissing a-Chrississippi.” Laughter. Bold, wacky Annie is the show’s most permanent guest thus far; she came on two and a half years ago and simply never left. She loved the show so much she married it, literally. The wedding pictures show her looking like a happy child bride, standing in a long white dress between Jeremy and Aaron. “It was all beautiful, we cried,” she recalls. Like any good wifey, she helped boost her husbands’ popularity, sucking her insatiable Giant Drag fans into the show and bringing in visitors of her own.
“Now I’ve moved up from guest to regular to third member of the show!” she explains, as if she was elected president. Five minutes earlier she was joking about suicide, so it’s a relief to see her smile.
If Jeremy and Aaron didn’t get along so damn well, GTFU would have died a long time ago. When talking to the pair about GTFU, they have a tendency to complete one another’s sentences, as if they were one easygoing, successful 32-year-old married photographer rather than two. They’ve been likened to Beavis and Butt-Head, but that’s selling them short. Sitting next to each other in Aaron’s home in Atwater Village, both in faded T-shirts, old skool sneakers and with decidedly scraggly hair, they fit the dorky-cute Silver Lake coolkid prototype. Off the air, it’s easy to see why they click, but it’s hard to differentiate them.
On the air, though, the pair could not be more different. Aaron becomes Bold Talker, no thought too dirty, no comment too provocative for him to voice. “Jared [Leto] tried to anal rape Matt and this is not allegedly. I am just trying to get sued,” he pronounced on a recent show before tearing into Tyra Banks, Lou Reed and old colleagues with equal gusto.
Jeremy, meanwhile, takes on the more subdued role of Music Master. While Aaron asks, “Why do Asian women have straight pubic hair?” he simply refills his beer and figures out what song to play next. It’s not that he is afraid to get silly—every now and then, he’ll pipe up with a bizarre X-rated remark of his own, but his most common question is, “Shall we play a song?”
Jeremy’s iPod is filled with referrals from the musicians he is constantly surrounded by—both as a photographer and partier. What he likes, he plays on the air at GTFU. Sounds like an obvious process, but it’s not. On commercial stations these days, DJs rarely have the authority to play what they want. Jeremy’s method has also pissed off several record labels. “We used to get stuff from labels but they actually check up on stuff and they’d say, ‘You’re not playing our CDs so we are not sending you any more!’ Send us something good and we’ll play it,” he says.
The Recording Industry Association of America claims that the new royalty plan benefits artists by ensuring they get money for radio play, regardless of the medium. It’s seems unlikely, though, that the bands featured on the GTFU playlist—many of whom have no shot of making it onto a commercial stations—would complain that the airtime is injuring their careers.
Jeremy and Aaron are too humble to try to take credit for launching anyone into the spotlight, but the fact of the matter is that their show has been full of up-and-coming musicians, prefame. Franz Ferdinand, the hosts’ good friends Brother Reade and Max Bemis of Say Anything, all played some of their first live performances on GTFU.
“They are starting to get bigger. It’s definitely not because of us,” explains Jeremy. “But it helps in a small way,” says Aaron, completing the thought.
Will They Survive?
There has never been any pressure on GTFU to be anything other than a source of amusement for its hosts. The fact that is has become something bigger is accidental.
“Part of the fun thing is that there isn’t any expectations; the expectation is just that we are having fun,” says Aaron.
“As long as it continues to be fun we would just continue to do it forever,” adds Jeremy, his words slightly overlapping Aaron’s.
The concept of creating radio for fun and for the love of music—without a focus on making money—is much more complicated as of last month’s ruling. LittleRadio.com’s advertisement-free, raise-funds-throughnoble- side-project business model worked when the station only had to cover the annual licensing fees. Not that this wasn’t a challenging sum for head-honcho Conway to come up with, but given that it was correlated with how much revenue the station pulled in, it was doable.
Now, every online station—no matter whether its programming is primarily ads or obscure local artists—owes 0.19 cent per-song perlistener. At first that doesn’t sound like much; even 100 songs heard by 1,000 listeners is only $190. But after a month of shows, and then a year, that adds up to thousands of dollars that many stations simply don’t have. Neither satellite nor “conventional” radio stations are required to pay per-song fees—satellite stations pay 7.5% of revenue—so why should Internet broadcasters have to cough up these sorts of royalties, Web-defenders ask.
Conway has hope that the decision will be reversed. “If not, I will fight it with everything we have,” he says calmly. “We will definitely be one of the last holdouts. That I do know.”
But, worst-case scenario, if the station was to die, GTFU would find a way to keep on living. “It would be the same time, just from my guest room or something and it would be so small scale they’d never know us,” plots Jeremy over IM. “It’ll be like Pump Up the Volume but way more nerdy since we’re old and it’s on the Internet!” How this inevitable response to driving Web stations out of business would benefit labels, musicians, or listeners is about as clear as Aaron’s political views after 15 beers.