Sex and Broadcasting: A Film about WFMU

I've known about WFMU for about two decades. Moving to New York in the mid-aughts, the counter-culture scenes I'd hang out in would always have some sort of shared touchstone with WFMU, a stray reverence here or there that made it seem like so many different New York fringes all came out of the same mothership. By the early 2010s and social media being uniquitious, the reach of WFMU increased and its influence is still felt in radio and outsider entertainment curations. As I'm typing this, tonight was personally a big radio day for me so I thought I'd take in the WFMU documentary '*** & Broadcasting. '

There's a lot of great footage with talented people and an underlying urgency toward maintaining the triumph that is WFMU's existence, but the structure really throws the whole thing off. By beginning with a WFMU marathon showing the station's full cast of characters, and *then* going back to show the (interesting, but less interesting) history of the station, it damns itself into making the viewer instead want to watch a documentary about any of the charismatic hosts we've just seen or, better yet, listen to their shows. If there was ever a documentary calling for a fan edit, this is it.

That said, as someone who looks at every detail of a frame, the visible calendars makes it look like they spent a LONG time recording footage (earliest seems to be summer 2009 and latest is 2014/2015) so it's a very effective time capsule of what such a unique radio entity was going through…

What an exciting documentary full of great interviews and history around WFMU and music in general. Independent radio was such an important tool for discovery in the past and boosted so many great artists, it's fun to watch a dissection like this.

Didn’t really know anything about this going it, nice to go into something you know nothing about

The golden days of radio were the best

Goid movie