I thoroughly enjoyed the excellent article on the saga of WGTB (“Radio Free Georgetown,” 1/29). Alas, those were the days when Washington featured multiple independent stations on the FM dial, among them some who believed in and attempted to promote (however awkwardly) positive social change.
It’s a damned shame that the Washington City Paper doesn’t take a similar approach to that of the late WGTB, rather than its preferred style of knee-jerk hipness and intellectually lightweight feature stories. In this age of ever-constricting media ownership, a paper that would give its readers alternative information would be infinitely more valuable than one that provides an endless stream of mindless entertainment and navel-gazing.
A perfect illustration of this point is your inclusion of some utterly lame comic strips over the years juxtaposed with your perpetual exclusion of Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World. A quick comparison of this strip with almost any that has been featured in your pages over the last 10 years will instantly display the approach that I lamentthat is, the preference of disposable entertainment over substance.
Much less important, someone needs to call you on your synopsis of the Frank Zappa song, “Billy the Mountain.” As any true Zappa freak or a cursory listen to the song in question could have quickly told you, your rendition of the maple syrup episode was somewhat garbled: First, the character who performed this action was not Billy the Mountain, but rather the detective, Studebaker Hawk (whoever heard of a mountain wearing boxer shorts?!?); second, though those who want easy titillation may think otherwise, the maple syrup stunt was Studebaker Hawk’s means of transportation, not gratification.
Silver Spring, Md.
via the Internet