From the basement’s mute fluorescence to the studio’s warmth and noise, the entrance to Princeton-based radio station WPRB’s on-campus workspace is a transition to a place of alternate rules.
Some are spelled out in constellations of sticky notes on each of the studio’s surfaces. “NEXT DJ DIDN’T SHOW? STAY ON AIR. CALL HARRY!” reads the bulletin board. “WEAR PANTS PLS” advises the glowing console. “TOUCH ME!” instructs the phone dedicated to mid-show calls.
Other rules manifest in the room. Carefully alphabetized and annotated vinyls fill stacks upon stacks of storage space, while warm LED lights line the windows and shelves. A wig hangs from the ceiling above a LaCroix-patterned bin of headphones in the practice room. The decoration is haphazard, but the organization is meticulous.
After all, DJs and listeners alike take the art that happens here seriously.
That art ventures into unconventional territory. Show themes have ranged from “music to quiet your mind to” to “music I think robots would have sex to,” “animal noises,” and a “birthing playlist.”
WPRB’s DJs represent a combination of students, who operate out of the on-campus studio during the school year, and community DJs, who operate out of an off-campus studio or their own homes. Each of WPRB’s active DJs commits to a weekly 2- to 3-hour show during which they have freedom to explore music and themes of their choosing. From their seat behind the console, DJs flip between digital, CDs, and vinyl; upload song information on their show’s live page on WPRB’s website; take mic breaks; and listen for issues on air. They can choose to take calls or engage with fans via their live online chat.
Listenership is robust. WPRB Station Manager Adam Sanders ’25 (DJ Methuselah Mouse) described WPRB as “not a college radio station, but a community radio station.” At 103.3 FM, WPRB is located on the center of the FM dial, Sanders explained. This gives WPRB an easily reachable spot, high fidelity sound, and an extended broadcast range, reaching millions of people and hundreds of thousands of regular listeners.
WPRB Educational Advisor Mike Lupica shared a similar outlook, emphasizing that the station covers not only New Jersey — the most densely populated state in the country — but also the major metropolitan market of Philadelphia.
“No matter what you think, someone’s always listening,” said DJ Jon Solomon, who started DJing with WPRB in 1988 as a sophomore at Princeton High School. During his first season, his time slot was Sunday morning from 4–7 a.m.
Whether at 4 a.m. or at the end of a long day of classes, when a WPRB DJ shows up to host their show, they are committing to sitting, likely alone, in front of a console for hours at a time. Why do they do it?
DJs who spoke with the ‘Prince’ expressed a passion for the unique ethos WPRB has as a community freeform radio station. Program Manager Harry Gorman ’26 (DJ Hog) describes the station as “genre-less.”
Lupica discussed the “urgent opportunity that you have as a community radio program: you actually have the freedom to explore things and reveal things to people which they might never otherwise find out.”
He said he advises DJs to “take a risk that someone who’s trying to sell you something [a commercial radio station] would never take. The number of places that you have in this world to express that kind of freedom is vanishingly small.”
Solomon recounted DJ Commie Francis’ show of “all of the shortest songs she could find.” He estimates that she played around 273 songs in the span of an hour. He called it “exhausting and exhilarating” and celebrated “the fact that she had the freedom to come up with that idea and the interest in executing it.”
In fact, new DJs are trained to explore. For their first semester on air, they are required to source songs from the stacks in the studio.
“If you want a quantifiable measure of success [as a DJ]: when you graduate, look back at your first show’s playlist, then look at your last show — if you see all the same artists, you absolutely blew it,” said Lupica. “You can’t take listeners out of their comfort zones unless you’ve taken yourself out of yours, so you have to wander away from the things that you know — and you will discover yourself doing great things.”
By exploring new music, DJs broaden their tastes. “I think some people think that radio makes you more pretentious about your music taste, but I think it makes you actually more open to everything,” said WPRB Production Director Navani Rachumallu ’26 (DJ Navi).
According to Publicity and Promotions Chair Madison Davis ’26 (DJ Slayer), this exploration can lead to discomfort. “With WPRB, sometimes you’re going to play stuff that you genuinely don’t like.” As she said a sculpture professor once advised her, “sometimes the art that you make is not good-looking, but it’s still influential and substantial in a different way.”
The DJ’s task, then, is to somehow thread songs together into a cohesive and compelling show. According to Gorman, “it’s kind of like the DJ is guiding [the listener].” Even for music that is “kind of scary and difficult to understand, the DJ is able to construct it in a way that is comprehensible.”
Each DJ has their own approach to this challenge. Development Director Cailyn Tetteh ’26 (DJ Cailyn) selects her first song and final song, then orders the songs in between based on how their beginnings and ends transition. Gorman divides his show into hour-long acts, the first two freeform, and the final hour dedicated to ambient music, while Rachumallu uses mic breaks as opportunities to change her show’s mood. When the ‘Prince’ visited her show, she ended one mic break with a gentle announcement: “Get ready for a little bit of a change. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Regardless of how well-prepared a DJ is for their set, the show itself still requires some live decision-making. Gorman recalled a veteran DJ once telling him, “The magic of radio is that it’s something that really only happens once. The songs that you play will only ever be burned in this order one time.”
“You’re putting yourself out there [as a DJ] — and if you screw up, figuring out a way to make it work,” said Lupica. “I like that about it.”
While spur-of-the-moment decision making can be challenging, the immediacy of radio makes it uniquely equipped to respond to the present.
Solomon recalled WPRB’s ability to respond to the Northeast’s earthquake in spring of 2024: within 5 minutes of the event, WPRB played “Earthquake Shake” by Texan rock band The Skunks. Solomon described this as unique in a world where “stuff is so pre-programmed.” At WPRB, “[when] you get a good idea or something that's timely, you can do it. That’s why we’re here.”
The station’s responsiveness extends to politics as well. Several DJs recounted having reacted musically to the 2024 presidential election on air.
Community DJ John Weingart, who has DJ’d for WPRB since 1974, expressed that his career as a politics lecturer often influences his shows. “I try not to proselytize on the air,” he said, instead letting his songs do the talking. The Sunday before election day, he ended his show with an alternative folk song called “Put a Woman in Charge.” The Sunday after, he began with Bruce Springsteen’s rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”
Still, a show remains something “personal” for Weingart. “My primary audience is me,” he said, but he wants his listeners to feel the same. He hopes that “somebody listening can say, ‘It felt like you were playing that just for me.’”
For Weingart and other DJs, one powerful “personal” motivation is the desire to preserve and pass on musical memory.
During the pandemic, Solomon began featuring sessions from WPRB’s “rich archive of live performances” on his show as part of his “Wednesday Night Live Lookback Series.”
“It’s a good way to revisit some of these sessions, especially by bands that got markedly bigger since they got to WPRB, and give listeners a chance to hear something exclusive to the station and something that they might have missed previously,” Solomon said. “It’s amazing how much I remember and simultaneously how much I've forgotten … hearing them with contemporary ears is a real treat.”
Solomon has built up a musical legacy of his own through his New York Times profiled “Jon Solomon’s Annual 25-Hour Holiday Radio Show.” One of the traditions of the show is playing “Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail” — a twist on the story of Buddha, Siddartha Guatama — followed by a 42-minute electronic rendition of Little Drummer Boy.
“There are people who say it’s not Christmas until I hear ‘Snaildartha,’” he quipped.
After 36 years, Solomon’s show has “passed some sort of beyond-generational threshold,” he explained. “Not only do I hear from adults who have been listening since they were infants, because that was what their parents listened to, but we've now reached the crazy situation where it’s like, ‘Oh, I grew up listening to this show with my parents, and now we listen to it with our own children.’”
This applies to other shows, too. “We’ve had listeners call in and tell us they met because they were at a fan meet up for [Weingart’s] show in the ’80s and are now married,” shared Sanders.
Tetteh recalled listeners of her show reaching out to tell her, “Oh my god, I was 19 years old when that song came out, and it changed my life,” after hearing her play songs from the ’60s and ’70s. “Stuff like that makes me feel so happy, because this is what music is. It keeps you connected to so many people.”
Weingart has dedicated shows as tributes to musicians who have passed, including John Herald and David Maloney of Reilly and Maloney. “I feel motivated to try to keep their music alive,” Weingart explained. “There are a couple of specific musicians who, over the years, I’ve really loved their music and really felt like they didn’t get enough attention, or as much attention as they deserved … So I look for reasons to play a song of theirs at different times.”
But WPRB looks forward as much as it looks back. The DJs keep exploring — and inspiring new generations of DJs. In Solomon’s Christmas marathon last year, his daughter did an hour of the show at age 15, the same age at which Solomon himself started with WPRB. She called her program “Maggie’s Reindeer Rumble” and filled it with reindeer-themed songs. “She’s already asking me, ‘Alright, what are the new songs we found for this year?’ So we’re gonna run it back,” Solomon said.
Though the business of radio in general and WPRB specifically is not without its challenges, Lupica said he has faith in the legacy that the station is leaving. “Radio is like a rash that won’t go away.”
“[WPRB] has a pretty storied ongoing history [but] it’s not constantly living in the past,” according to Solomon. “I think it’s great that there can be folks who … can provide some institutional memory or context. But also, you get these newer, younger DJs who are coming in, who can get up to speed pretty fast, and forge their own paths.”
“You do have this constant ebb and flow of the air sound where there are constants, there are people who come and go, there are people who come back. It’s sort of ever-evolving.”
In WPRB generations past, present, and future, progress hinges on the community of dedicated DJs. This dedication can look extreme. Solomon described to the ‘Prince’ his preparation process for his Christmas marathon — including dealing with anxiety dreams and cutting out coffee and sugary sweets for the two weeks leading up to the show, stating he’ll “save that all … because I don’t want to get sick.”
But at its heart, this dedication also looks like searching the stacks, exchanging song recommendations, and finding inspiration in each other’s shows. Several DJs expressed that they are regularly listening to WPRB or thinking about their next show.
DJs find in each other both inspiration and a sense of community. “I think I’ve felt more at home here than I have with other groups,” shared Davis. “I think music is such a good community builder, and WPRB attracts people who have at least slightly eclectic music tastes and who somehow are willing to come to a basement.”
Helena Richardson is a staff Features writer for the ‘Prince.’
Ruth Rocker is a contributing Features writer for the ‘Prince.’
Associate Features Editor Raphaela Gold contributed reporting to this piece.
Please direct corrections requests to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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