Feast Your Ears

As a child of the DMV in the 1980s, you were force-fed the Redskins, Don & Mike, and three different varieties of Top 40 music. If you were adventurous, or 'urban', you listened to WPGC. But if your rebel base was in the suburbs, your only option for musical insurgency was WHFS.

Weasel!

Eclectic, unflinchingly uncommercial, and often just kinda weird (the station featured a deejay named
Weasel, who had neither a voice for radio nor a face for television - just a love of music), HFS played the music its deejays wanted to hear. And the music that musicians wanted to hear. When I was in high school, it made me feel cool to be on the cutting edge of progressive music, and that's entirely because I found HFS.

Later, when I was a young adult, HFS beat the rest of the market to grunge, to alternative hip-hop, to all the music that mattered. The annual HFSestival always boasted the best festival lineup in our area.

It is no exaggeration to call HFS the soundtrack of my youth.

I remember vividly driving to work one morning when the signal abruptly changed from alternative rock to Spanish-language music. I pressed the preset key a few times, assuming a glitch. It wasn't until I got to work and checked out the then-nascent internet that I learned that HFS as I knew it was no longer.

My own personal Day the Music Died.

Imagine my happy surprise when I found out this week that a local team has filmed a documentary about the history of WHFS. Entitled, 'Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3', the film is in post-production, working to secure rights to the music featured within.



"Weasel playing the rock and roll," and me 16 years old again. Can't wait to see this film.