The End of an Era

Jammin’ 95.5. Jammin’ ninety-five point fuckin’ five. Shit.

Jammin’ 95.5 was a hip-hop/R&B radio station. The main, if not only, hip-hop/R&B station on the FM dial in Portland. And now, it is gone.

Oh, sure, I’ve been told that it’s moved somewhere else, that it’s moved to some bullshit like 107.5. I don’t give a flying fuck. Jammin’ 95.5 was called Jammin’ 95.5 because it was at 95.5 on the radio dial. Anything else is, well, heresy.

I mean, shit! This station was Portland’s jammin’ist jamming station, Portland’s partyin’ist party station, Portland’s jammin’ist party station, and lastly, it was Portland’s partyin’ist jamming station. That sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook, and it is, but it meant something to me. It meant something very important to me.

Jammin’ 95.5 was a part of my youth. Kind of. I discovered the station sometime after I was legally an adult, so I can’t really claim that it was part of my youth. But, I would have liked to. Jammin’ 95.5, in all its vapidity, in all its inanity, in all of its shitty, shitty music, still struck a chord with me.

It might have been the DJ’s. Here’s Bootz. Here’s Freeze, and here’s K-Reeze. Over there, on the one’s and two’s, is the mighty mighty massive Juggernaut. Here’s Felix the Asian Housecat. These aren’t the names of disk jockeys; these are the names of superheroes. An entire pantheon on the radio! All of them dedicated to keeping Portland (in this universe of superheroes, “P-Town”) partying and jammin’.

It might have been the shitty shitty music that they played. I met L’il John on Jammin’ 95.5. I saw the ascendancy of the Dirty South, the rise of crunk music. I heard the scribbling of something evil and subterranean but which made me move motherfucker. I was there to watch the Dirty South submerge itself (oh, Atlantis of the Gulf Coast!), and in its place, from the city on the hill in the West, I heard the clarion call of hyphy, and that Sindarin-inflected tongue of T-Pain. I heard heavy shit, I heard light shit, I heard all kinds of shit on Jammin’ 95.5. It was mostly trash, but it was trash that made me jam, that made me party.

It might have been that Jammin’ 95.5 was so tied up with my memories and concepts of freedom and of easy rebellion. I only listened to Jammin’ 95.5 while in the car, while driving. My main memory of Jammin’ 95.5 is this: The window is down, the speakers are turned up, it is summer, and it is twilight, and the bugs are out, and I’m going to see my friends, and I’m jammin’ along with Jammin’ 95.5. I don’t remember what is playing, and it is not really important. What was important was that the radio was set to Jammin’ 95.5, and that I was jammin’ along with Jammin’ 95.5.

The name was an invocation; the name was a magic spell meant to call down a fucking party the likes not seen outside the halls of Asgard. Shit yeah, can you feel that bass? Doesn’t it make you want to move? It was stronger than booze, stronger than weed. It fucked me up. One time, I ran into a parked car whilst blasting Jammin’ 95.5. What else would you expect? It was a nonstop jammin’ party!

And now, Jammin’ 95.5 is no more. Jammin’ 95.5 has moved, or is off the air, or some other utterly whack bullshit like that.

Jammin’ 95.5 is dead. The party is over, the party people have all gone home, Portland sleeps.