Ode to FM 102/1
Someday soon, I will tune my radio dial to my favorite alternative rock radio station, and for the first time in forever, I will not hear a Green Day song.
The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
For as long as I can remember, any time I turned on my radio in Milwaukee, I’d be able to turn the dial to the right station and hear the glorious sounds of Alternative Rock coming through the speakers. This has been a true source of comfort — and a reason to Rock Out — since I was a kid growing up in the Milwaukee area suburbs. That era is, rather unfortunately, coming to an end.
The radio station WLUM-FM is being purchased by K-Love Inc., a Christian music radio network, and with it, bringing FM102.1’s time as a bastion of alt-rock glory to an end.
I was genuinely very sad when I tuned in on the afternoon of Aug. 26 to hear Michelle Rutkowski tearfully announce that the station “will no longer exist as it is now” following the corporate acquisition.
As soon as reports surfaced that FM 102.1’s parent company, Milwaukee Radio Alliance, was selling both this station and FM 93.3 to K-Love, it seemed like the writing was on the wall. As an avid 102.1 listener, I was immediately nervous. But I guess that’s how things go in this era of corporate consolidation in media. But I don’t want to take this column down that rabbithole today because I’d rather just bid a fond farewell to my favorite local radio station1.*
I love FM 102.1, and I’m going to miss it dearly. I love how it played all of the songs that made me a fan of alternative rock as a kid in the 90s, I love how it continued to play indie and alternative songs into the 2000s, and I love how it’s basically become a version of classic rock at times by still playing many of those same now 30-year-old 90s songs well into the 2020s, while still mixing in new rock music here and there.
I love how, if a song enters the rotation for 102.1, it seemingly never leaves — songs like “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins or “Self Esteem” by The Offspring or “Santeria” by Sublime or “Alive” by Pearl Jam or “Father of Mine” by Everclear or really any of the singles off of Green Day’s “Dookie” album (I’m pretty sure that every time I’ve turned on 102.1 in my car, a Green Day song has come on). I love how they still play songs off my favorite album of all time, Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” with such great regularity. I love the post-90s songs that have made it into this rotation, too, like songs from The White Stripes and The Black Keys, or The Killers and Vampire Weekend, or My Chemical Romance and blink-182, or The Lumineers and Noah Kahan. This being the format is also kind of funny, and part of me thinks the people running the station would agree, because they seem to have a good sense of humor and don’t take themselves too seriously. When I say the radio station can be formulaic, I mean that as a compliment. When I say it’s unpretentious, you better believe I mean that as high praise — especially for a station working in a world where certain approaches to the type of music they put on the air can often be quite the opposite.
Just now, pulling up their list of most recently played bands, it includes Incubus and Florence and the Machine and Death Cab for Cutie and Audioslave and Stone Temple Pilots and LCD Soundsystem and Gorillaz and Beck and Cake and Weezer. It’s like a shuffled playlist of everything that’s gotten a bit more than mildly famous in alternative or indie rock circles for the past 30+ years, and really, that’s all I want out of a radio station, all the time, always.
I think there have been times in my music consumption career where my appetite has been, perhaps, more adventurous than it is currently. There was a time when the discovery of new music was far more of a focus of mine than it is today. And perhaps it’s the natural evolution of aging, or becoming a parent, or even the realities of living through the pandemic, but I am no longer looking for discovery as a major component of my musical diet. Far more frequently, I am looking for the comfort food of “Come As You Are” for the gajillionth time. I am, at my very core, an alt-rock dipshit, and I have reached an age where I do not particularly care about being a washed-up Dad approaching 40 years of age on matters like these. I am who I am. There is a time and a place to hear Bush followed by MGMT and Jimmy Eat World and to not really know or enjoy anything by Twenty One Pilots or whatever but to sit through it because a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song or something else I like and know every word to will come on next. The place for that has long been 102.1, and for that I am truly grateful.
It is an enormous bummer that this place is going away. And I know I am only on the fringes of where this community resides. There’s a great piece by Piet Levy in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that really goes deep into this station and what it’s meant for the city and region and the “huge void” it’s going to leave when it’s gone. More than just those on the periphery like me, it’s the people going to “Big Snow Show” or to the 102.1-presented shows at The Rave or those who participate in contests or call in regularly are those who will really have a piece of themselves absent when this station goes away. I’m not even really a true diehard here, and I still don’t completely understand the whole shift from when “New Rock” ended and “Sounds Different” began (I assume this shift occurred when I was mostly living in Oshkosh from 2004 to 2009, but I don’t really know); I just know that when I tune in, I am probably going to hear something off of “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” or “The Colour and the Shape” or “Californication” and I am going to crack open the window and turn up the volume.
So I guess I’m writing this because this goofy little radio station has meant a lot to me over the years. There is going to be a time in the very near future where I habitually punch the preset in my car to go to 102.1, and for the first time in forever, a Green Day song will not be playing. And I am going to be wistfully nostalgic about the old days and I am going to mourn the death of rock and I am probably eventually just going to pull up some BS algorithmic playlist to deliver a similar, albeit colder and less human, version of what I’d hear on 102.1, and I’m still going to bang my head to the alt rock legends. But I wouldn’t be there without my old standby, and for me, at least, its absence is going to be felt on a nearly daily basis. When it goes off the airwaves for the final time, part of me — and part of Milwaukee — will go with it.
So, farewell, 102.1. You will truly be missed.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he became the Political Editor of Civic Media. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 23 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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