Photo by Loubos Houska / Creative Commons 1.0
Do you think you might be suffering from the boogie woogie flu? It’s an affliction that causes you to become totally bored with your record collection or digital library, much of which is populated with either new music or old favorites. It happens to me sometimes. The best medicine is often digging deeper.
If I’m driving down the road and a track pops up from The Okeh Blues Story 1949-1957 collection, my toes start to tap and my heart skips a beat. The Complete King Recordings of Wade Manier makes me pull my banjo off the wall for some two-finger pickin’. If you haven’t lately listened to the Cotton Top Mountain Sanctified Singers or Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters or Fruit Jar Guzzlers, run out now and get yourself Yazoo’s Times Ain’t What They Used to Be. There’s something about those old dusty 78s.
Last week I was in the car and I tried to get my mojo back by twirling the dial up and down the FM band looking for inspiration. Of course “twirl” is a euphemism for pressing buttons on a digital readout, and “inspiration” was perhaps too much to hope for. But with millions of people from every nook and cranny in this whole wide world living in the city of New York, I knew I’d find something to whet the whistle.
What I found was a small station broadcasting from New Rochelle, a suburb not far from Queens and the Bronx. It caught my ear with Caribbean music, blasting in a style that blended old school rhythm and blues, a reggae back beat, hip-hop, dancehall, and toasting. Weird electronic sounds, songs shifting effortlessly in and out of each other, and a steady commentary in a thick Jamaican accent that made it impossible to know if it was part of the music, an informercial, or a news flash. I think it might have been all three.
WVIP-FM is owned by David ‘Squeeze’ Annakie’s Linkup Media Group, and some of the other businesses they own and advertise almost continually on the station include JAMROCK Magazine, Saige Skin Care, SqueezeCard, AAA Service Protection, BioLife Energy Systems Solutions, Vitaways, Value Health Network, USA Credit Repair, Fiction (a Jamaican club), and Immigration Link. Squeeze takes to the air himself and promotes like Reverend Ike on speed. And, as a special bonus to the island music (between all the ads), there is the option for anybody to buy a 30-minute block of time for their own show. I’m considering it.
While my reggae vocabulary mostly consists of Bob Marley and that “Bad Boy” theme song from COPS, I have to tell you that whatever the hell this station is playing, I want more of it. Although not Americana nor alt-anything I know about, it’s roots music of the stems and seeds variety. Ain’t no such thing as wrong music.
This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.
Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.