The radio station that introduced me to alternative music is going off the air today. Other radio stations I have listened to have come and gone (103.5, 94.7), but it didn’t impact me greatly because Q101 was still there. Well, now it’s Q101’s turn to hit the graveyard and I and the rest of Chicago don’t have another alternative music station to fall back onto. Sure, there are other stations (93XRT), satellite stations, mp3 players, and those of us (ME) who still burn cds for the perfect mix, but nothing similar to Q101.
This station has been a part of my life since 1992; I was eleven years old. It was my teacher, my guide, of music outside of Motown and the Top Forty. It gives me the willies to think about what I would have turned into if alternative music didn’t enter my life at that pivotal moment. Would I have been driving around, windows down, and singing along to Brittany instead of Gwen? Scary. “. . . Baby One More Time” instead of “Just a Girl”? I have a hard time visualizing that. I can say definitively, my adolescence would not have been the same with out the solace provided by Nirvana, Bush, and Rage Against the Machine, among others. Although I’m thirty and have since said good-bye to my childhood and teenage years, the finality and the nostalgia I feel are especially thick today.
In the meantime, it’s www.q101.com for me.
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