WPRB 103.3 is an FM radio station sponsored by Princeton University and has an antenna radius that reaches all of central to southern Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, up to Harrisburg. It is supposed to be the grand college radio station worshipped by Princeton alumni and by all of greater Philadelphia's alternative subcultures. Anyone with a car can tune in at “103.3” on their dial and listen in. You can be stuck in poverty in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and then tune in to hear Merzbow or Underworld at 2 pm against the grain of garbage rap music and pop rock being played on every other station. However, this comes at a price, as the WPRB staff is not only understaffed, but filled with the most pretentious and shallow people I have ever known.
Most drivers don’t tune into WPRB. The average American doesn’t even listen to satellite radio, let alone give FM radio a chance anymore. So who’s even tuning in?
You can listen in on their website, and they always want you to write a text in “the chat.” (And it’s always about the chat!). The entire station relies on a Spinitron server, which gives you all the tools to jukebox, record, and chat on someone’s personal DJ page. And those frequent chatters in every single chat seem to be two people: “TAndy” and “Rob from Maryland.” And it’s the same three DJs who never gave up their positions: Marvin Rosen, Jon Solomon, and Jerry Gordon (and I would also say DJs like Mike Hunter, Liz Bot, and Dan Buskirk, who have been on forever but nobody cares).
It’s not that I care about these legacy DJs in particular, but I am more concerned with the unorganized staff and catty women who plague the station’s identity and philosophy.
I had a friend who would prank call WPRB when they would ask for call-ins, and his main reasoning was that “it’s a bunch of women and Jews, so who cares what they think about us.” I too often would leave something in the chat under pen names and call in when I was bored. But it begs the question if the staff is in on us or not. Do they actually care who we really are? Or do they know and are embarrassed that we exist because it would make them look bad?
They must be bluffing.
I started listening to WPRB when I was only 18, back in the year 2009, when I found the station in the car. I couldn’t believe I found a single radio station in bumfuck King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, playing drum and bass music. That was an entire revelation for me, and I had to tell everyone to tune in.
But then when I would tune in again, it would always be some lazy kid or some insufferable girl talking about niche indie-rock music and such. It turns out that the New Brunswick basement scene rubbed off on many Princeton DJs in the early 2010s, and for hours it was nothing but post-hardcore and emo indie, which I became incredibly sick of. There was at least the fading hipsterism of programs like “Motor Funker Radio,” which would play 80s synthpop and other electroclash novelty tracks. I even remember in 2014, in that week of early April, WPRB had a special program that DJ Frankie Knuckles had died. They made a “shoutout” about his death, and decided to play only “classical House tracks.” The real displacement comes from the fact that these were white guys in their late 20s (now in their late 30s or 40s) pretending to be black. That was the first sign of pretenciousness on WPRB that left a lasting effect on me.
I only tuned into WPRB when I was driving back and forth from Montgomery County Community College or Villanova. Before there were convenient smartphones, I had to write the time and day when I heard the track, and then once I got back home or near a computer, I could look it up and save the track’s info in a .txt file. Today, I use Telegram and just smartphone-screencap the track being played and upload it to a personal “WPRB tracks” chat for myself. I still do it. And every time it’s usually some random oddball track being played for the sake of it being interesting and eccentric.
This was my breakthrough. I thought to myself, “How could you be stupid in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and not realize it is only a dial away to tune into KMFDM on the radio? Are people THAT dumb???”
I would say so. Nobody listens to FM radio, and it takes an eccentric like myself to take the time and dedication to care about what the whole institution is about and its history.
I cared so much for the station that I even got a tattoo of “the cheese man” on my right leg. WPRB has left a lasting impact on my musical tastes, and is why I believe living in the Delaware Valley is fucked up. It’s incredibly nihilistic and reactionary. It is “south of Staten Island” and escapes into a 1950s utopia that died long ago. It is only WPRB that actually cares about those outsiders who hate living here and educates the listener that there is interesting art outside the poverty of southern New Yorkers.
WPRB likes to say they are “Jersey’s only station,” but who are the actual listeners? I was born in Philadelphia, but I grew up in Norristown and King of Prussia. Those people live in Rust Belt poverty. Did WPRB actually think someone like me from that area would be so fanatic about a car radio station? Or are they looking for pampered girls who are debt-free, attending Princeton with bland musical tastes into New Order or The Strokes?
It’s exactly the latter that I am up against.
WPRB has changed in the decade since I was tuning in as a teenager and a twenty-something. Gone are the days when you could be an artsy white guy playing the latest in noise and industrial. Now it’s about anything “new,” released to the point that the release is so obscure that no one cares or has the time to invest in liking a new band that is a copy of another existing band with legacy. It’s a joke now in 2026. Another dumb young DJ, another dumb airplay of goth rock and breakcore.
And this year’s “porchfest” that was sponsored to happen and advertised on WPRB? Didn’t happen. It rained! All that for nothing. It makes me think if this was just a political ploy to raise money by think tanks and donors.
What’s the point of all this? Well, I think they outright lie all the time. Nobody cares about WPRB. They shake the tin can and ask for donations, and hardly anything moves. There is big talk that they are “community supported,” and yet they need that free cash in order to operate.
Last year, they had a Google Form up for at least a month, looking for new DJ applicants. And this year? There was no Google Form. They didn’t say they were looking for DJs on their site! It was advertised as a single picture on their Instagram, with no link other than “just look up ‘tryouts’ on our website.” It was posted July 28th, 2026, and that entire deadline was closed in just one week! Anyone who missed out now has to wait an entire year, close to 300 days, to apply again just for a minuscule window that opens up for an unpaid night shift hobby.
Lucy Pignuola, who bosses the station currently, doesn’t seem to understand this simple logic. It reeks of nepotism.
I sent the email within that week window, and I get a white lie of “go away.”
And by looking at the latest new DJs at WPRB who were recruited last year in November, they are all… women! So, what is going on here, Lucy? A woman who only hires other women and pathetic gay guys willing to follow orders!
WPRB has always been disrupted by forces willing to take over when nobody cares. One thing is taken for granted, and the lazy trans people who do the night shift come in. No one gets paid, and yet everyone is close to the red button to play whatever thing they find cool on YouTube. Sometimes, they will get in their friend’s band in the studio for credibility and because of a lackluster idea of “DIY” or “the community.” But what’s even sadder is their inspection and patrolling of what other DJs spin. If the music is too mainstream, you get called in for being too much of a philistine who isn’t “doing the work.” There is an itch to be as pretentious as possible without considering what the content of the music is. If I send a DJ list and they don’t like that I am spinning Nine Inch Nails or Front Line Assembly, well, that’s too “popular,” and they are not interested. It’s always supposed to be “new,” and “fresh,” and “you can’t play music you like!” This “out queering” one another is not productive and shows that there is anxiety when someone has the platform to be “the best DJ” by some ideological liberalism. Throw out any rules with regards that “it’s a good transition” or “it sounds right,” because it’s merely playing enough confusing and eclectic tracks to make the DJ look smart. And who are the only listeners in the chat actually enjoying this randomness? None other than TAndy and Rob from Maryland! It’s a lonely echo chamber, and they are not interested in new talent.
I get the so-called “chart” monthly emails from WPRB, and I don’t know how they would rank their tracks by “heavy” or “moderate.” None of these tracks are popular, and no one knows what they are. It’s like they are deliberately blasting these tracks on purpose to move their playcount number up by a notch.
Exactly like the Alan Sokal affair, why would a normal person care about tracks that don’t make any sense?
They even print the word “jouissance,” as if I have already read Jacques Lacan.
They will only throw in names like “Brian Eno” or “Oneohtrix Point Never” because the double standard is that these names are protected by liberal institutions as foundational. It is indeed the golden calf worship of idolatry.
I remember they would constantly play the work of Kaho Matsui. I thought it was so cool. I liked her music. But who’s pushing her to be on the radio? Who’s spinning her tracks? Is it total coincidence?
She was supposed to have a show in West Philly in early August of last year. Instead, she bailed on it because she didn’t feel like playing it. She let the brown kid do an ambient set, and then let the Texas couple who drove 14 hours do their Pink Floyd drone noise, and then she made the spoiled entitled declaration of “uhh, sorry, I am having mental health issues and I don’t want to play in front of people I don’t care about even though I am the niche headliner at that show and could care less what others think.”
A part of me wishes I should have driven to Red Hook to see Lucrecia Dalt talk to David Sylvian in person, then waste my time at Perfect Circuit answering phone calls to neurotic bumpkins with money to buy expensive Eurorack with. I thought I could make up for that loss by seeing Matsui. Nope. She couldn’t care either. She’s an entitled rich kid who couldn’t care less what you think about her.
Boohoo.
And this is the same type of entitlement and insecurity found within the current staff at WPRB.
I’m sick of acting like a politically correct stooge for NPR. It’s all a performance.
This is when I decided to take destiny into my own hands by airing my own WPRB DJ program. I’ll craft thirty of my own WPRB two-hour weekly shows, presenting my resume and skills, so that I know what I am doing as a DJ. All they do on the Spinitron is write a quirky bio and post Tumblr pictures of what they aesthetically like.
They always ask in these fake LinkedIn interviews, “And what would you do if I gave you two hours to play music? Would you mess it up? Do you know what you are doing?” This doubt— like I am going to say “shit” on air or fumble pressing buttons assumes that I am some weed-smoking high school student— is just so girly and out of touch with reality.
And I can’t do this???
They should know I have my MA at the School of Visual Arts and I don’t have debt. But they don’t care, because they think of “other minority voices that need a chance.”
Whoever is running WPRB right now relies solely on an isolated Instagram account of only 5,000 followers, which means absolutely nothing. I had 38,000 followers on Instagram, and people were buying my books. Instagram burned me anyway because of how controversial I was, or, in their words, “harming other people in the community.”
This is downright disrespectful not only on Instagram’s part, but on WPRB as a whole to negate my influence and overqualifications.
There is big talk about being “punk” and standing up for yourself. But again, if I were to do it, write about it, or stand up against any authority over what I do, WPRB cowers in fear. So I put this forth as a challenge and reminder that when WPRB offers their DJ training program again (hopefully sooner on their website than just on Instagram), they know who I am instead of backing away because of my voice.
I’m not giving up that easily. I am not going to listen to another babbling idiot DJ make up something on the fly and abuse their power over the radio and be forced to listen to mediocre tracks that I know I could make a better selection.
You might not like me as a passionate person, but that’s the point. WPRB is a completely gynocratic, unemployed group of friends uninterested when a helping hand comes along. They want to remain smug, condescending against the plebians in Norristown and remain bougie in Princeton.
If you are brave enough to put a Breakdancing Ronald Reagan flyer on the front of your website, you can also get me on your free training program if you want to.
Do I have to lie? Do I have to do a mustache and mullet and call myself “Safe Sleazy,” and you do the prejudice of who you want me to be?
Or do you want someone authentic, someone real, someone willing to stand up for the little guy who gets bullied and speaks his mind?
I am doing that right now.
It’s up to you.
Swallow your pride and actually give me a chance for once, then discriminate based upon “well, he likes Krautrock according to the email!”
I’m sorry, but WPRB is just another liberal afraid to walk or drive through a black community.
-pe
the 10th of August, 2026.
sorry to break kayfabe if this is the case because i'm very autistic but is this like a pale fire sort of thing? if so i'm digging it