News broke today that WFNX, a Boston radio institution over the last three decades, will be going off the air tomorrow at 7 PM. Rumor has it they’ll be switching over to a Spanish-language format (didn’t D.C.’s WHFS do the same thing a few years ago?). Naturally, they were bought up by Clear Channel.
Without ‘FNX, we’d have never been turned on to Oasis, Redd Kross, Green Day, the Pixies, Love & Rockets, Nirvana, Too Much Joy, The Figgs, Stone Roses, Blur, the La’s, Teenage Fanclub, and pretty much every other new band worth their salt from the late ’80s to the mid ’90s… usually while driving around whiling away the hours, all hopped up on coffee. Hell, we even heard our own band once on Juanita the Scene Queen’s Sunday night local music show – to say that was a thrill would be a gross understatement.
But perhaps the most fun (and also most frustrating) thing about ‘FNX (and all alternative radio, such is – was? – the nature of the beast) was that they’d just glom onto some of the most ridiculous shit you’ve ever heard and play the holy hell out of it for a week, a month, or an entire summer. Most of the time, it sucked (we’re talking about you, Catherine Wheel and Soho) but every now and then, they’d uncover a true Nugget-in-the-making.
So thank you for shaping our tastes, 101.7. And more importantly, thanks for putting Ratcat and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin in our musical vocabulary.
