This dance is gonna be a drag: Glenn Grothman takes over WORT

The Republican Congressman recently spun some oldies at Madison’s lefty community radio station.
 

Back in September, a strange murmuring took root among volunteers and staff at Madison community radio station WORT-FM: Glenn Grothman, the oft-inflammatory Republican who represents Wisconsin’s Sixth Congressional District, was coming in to record an access hour.

Why someone like Grothman would want be so enthusiastic about left-wing radio station not in his district is a bit of a mystery but, nonetheless, both Grothman’s office and WORT confirmed in September to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that this was indeed happening. (WORT’s listening area does reach into Grothman’s district, though, namely in parts of Columbia and Dodge counties.)

The station allows any community member to sign up for access-hour slots. The access hour has been controversial before, when a local trans-exclusionary radical feminist hosted a program.

As it turns out, Grothman wasn’t out to use WORT as a platform for his notorious takes on welfare and Kwanzaa. Instead, he came to share his nostalgia for the rock records of his youth, spinning a set of tunes he feels are neglected on commercial oldies and classic-rock stations. “Wow, that was great! It makes me wish I was one more time matriculating at [the] UW-Madison campus,” he proclaimed after spinning Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’,” amid a set that also featured tunes from the Dave Clark Five, Mason Proffit, and Emerson, Lake, And Palmer.

Grothman even kept most of his between-song chatter focused on music, bragging repeatedly about going a whole hour on the radio without playing “Hotel California.” He did at one point briefly say that Madison is “too liberal,” but he also praised the city’s variety of restaurants and spoke fondly of longtime Madison-area State Senator Fred Risser. Anyways, it’s finally up on WORT’s Soundcloud and, well, I think we can all agree that it’s surreal.