As expressive as Svenonius is, though, the musician doesn’t think everyone is entitled to an audience. He took that stance during his June appearance on WAMU 88.5’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show, and he drives it home in newest collection of essays, Censorship Now!!, out Nov. 3 on Akashic Books.

The man who once argued in song that “Music’s Not For Everyone” devotes a chapter of Censorship Now!! to the idea that rock ‘n’ roll’s “legacy machine” — including your favorite band’s attempt to reserve a place in the canon — must be stifled.

Excerpted from Censorship Now!! copyright 2015 by Ian F. Svenonius, used with permission of Akashic Books.

DIY was the byword through post-punk and on to the “indie” era. Now, with the economy destroyed by computers, DIY is no longer a philosophy as much as a requirement. Everyone is required to look after each aspect of their own art-making/proliferation because — ever since the Internet demonetized art, photos, film, writing and music — there are few resources to support adjunct workers and technicians.

DIY now extends from the production of records, fanzines and show-promoting to all aspects of the rock experience, including fandom itself. Once, people venerated others. Now, under indie’s DIY paradigm, people must venerate themselves. Historicization of the group is therefore now its own responsibility. Not only must the records and tours be DIY (arranged and administered by the bands themselves), but the hype itself — the historical biopics, the “remember when” nostalgia, the reunion demands and the reissue records — is all self-generated.

Ironically, The Beatles — the biggest group of all, whose “invasion” unwittingly ushered in the corporate takeover of rock ’n’ roll — started the DIY self-historicizing trend with their 1995 TV special Anthology, designed to hawk the group to an audience who had grown up without them.

The Beatles were, at the time of its making, three distinct and fractious individuals— as well as a deceased member who had been sainted in death after publicly disavowing the group and heaping scorn on their achievements for a full decade. Each Beatle’s competing agendas and recollections are on display; the group members are perverse and contrarian, with the exception of Paul, whose pride of the group’s songs, success and what they meant to people is resolute and unflinching. George, on the other hand, nurses old resentments, Ringo is a slightly melancholic bon vivant with a cranky, sentimental view, and of course Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow, is the anti-Beatle in many respects, who claimed not to know who The Beatles were or that the group even existed.

“For all of the punk rockers’ stoic claims to independence, societal rejection and aversion to fame, they really long to have their flesh rended by a Dionysian mob of shrieking Beatlemaniacs.”

John Lennon, meanwhile, is a ghost who hasn’t been absorbed into a modern context or narrative. Lennon is stuck in time as a ’70s self-help house-husband — isolated, manic-depressive and revisionist — shrilly denouncing the crimes of the Fab Four. Throughout, Paul tries to put a brave face on the malaise of the other members. The group is collectively hungover from the trauma of Beatlemania and the toll it took on them, the expectations and alienation it engendered.

Their myth, with all these conflicts muddying what would seem like a straightforward tale of unprecedented popular success and innovation, will continue to thrive, not in spite of these conflicts but because of them. Other, more stable groups — such as The Rolling Stones, The Who and Oasis — have contrived similar fractious interpersonal dynamics in order to give their own groups some Beatles-esque resonance, and thus generate more mystery, conjecture and sales.

Punk and indie rock’s DIY hagiographies, though, don’t suffer the same internal contradictions and therefore feel more like the desperate advertisements they are. Typically not nuanced by democratic infighting, they are usually dull veneration, utilizing hapless stand-ins as directors to pretend that every shot and quote wasn’t designated by the star of the film. These are often “crowdsourced”; paid for by the fans themselves before the abomination becomes public and makes money as a commercial item, propagating more revenue for the star-turned-“icon.”

Such a status for their star is what these films strive for, as “icon” is essentially a brand, and a brand is something that’s digestible to the fully detached, the otherwise oblivious; the reduction of the person to the slimmest, slightest object for the marginally engaged. This is self-objectification in the hunt for immortal status, like a poignant Greek myth wherein the hapless mortal, in a search for foreverness, reduces her or himself to a piece of plaster so as to have a place in the halls of Olympus.

For all of the punk rockers’ stoic claims to independence, societal rejection and aversion to fame, they really long to have their flesh rended by a Dionysian mob of shrieking Beatlemaniacs. The fearsome promise of these barely adolescent “maniacs,” occupying hotels, breaking police barriers and screaming nonstop for blood, constitutes a formative ur-text for the rocker, one which he or she can’t shake. Its cosmic portrait of danger, magic and Lord of the Flies anarchy figures centrally in the early programming of the group member, who wants, expects and needs some version of it. Therefore, the modern DIY band — faced with the nonchalant peer-fan — looks outward to the masses for their own “maniac” mob, and takes what it can get.

Ian Svenonius reads from Censorship Now!! Oct. 27 at Busboys and Poets on 14th Street NW. Elsewhere: Check out Bandwidth’s February interview with Svenonius, and read the musician on how NPR killed college rock.

If you listened to D.C.-area radio station WHFS in the early 1970s, you might have heard that station ID. Recorded by a local character named Fang, it was one of many wild-and-crazy sounds floated on WHFS’ airwaves during its scrappy heyday — long before the freeform station went mainstream and lost its, well, fangs.

Jay Schlossberg is one of many Washingtonians who recall WHFS as the coolest thing on the local radio dial. That’s why the North Potomac resident is leading the creation of Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3, a documentary about how WHFS went from occupying a room in a Bethesda medical building to owning space in thousands of hearts — at least those belonging to a more adventurous sort.

“This is what we called freeform progressive music,” says Schlossberg, 60. “No suits. No corporate control.”

Feast Your Ears, in the works since 2013, launched a Kickstarter campaign last week. Schlossberg and his co-producers hope to raise $60,000. It’s an ambitious goal, but he sounds confident that folks will chip in. WHFS lovers are “fanatical” about the station, he says.

Why? Because music radio now is “pasteurized and homogenized and corporatized,” Schlossberg says, “and WHFS was the antithesis of that.”

A station like no other

Asked what types of music WHFS played during its golden years from 1969 to 1983, Schlossberg responds with one word: “yes.”

“Name some music. Yes, they played that,” the director says. “Classical, yes. Jazz, yes. Country, yes. Bluegrass, rock, psychedelic, Celtic, you name it.”

Schlossberg worked a summer gig at WHFS when he was 17 years old, several years after the former classical and jazz station embraced rock ‘n’ roll with a short-lived but influential show called Spiritus Cheese. Schlossberg found himself in awe of WHFS — not only because he’d occasionally see a midlevel celebrity around the office, like the “Fifth Beatle” Murray the K — but because it felt like a true community resource.

“They had a vegetarian cookbook. They had a ride board. They had a housing board. They had a jobs board. Maybe between sets, they’d do the ride board, and you’d hear things like, ‘Steve’s going to Maine. If anybody out there is going to Maine, call Steve.'”

“[WHFS’ era] was like ingredients in a sauce. You taste it and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s delicious. What are the ingredients?’ And the chef goes, ‘I’m not really sure.'”

He misses that feeling on today’s music radio. “There’s nothing local about it anymore.”

The director hopes to capture that community feel in Feast Your Ears, which takes its name from an old WHFS slogan. He talks to original DJs and listeners who still view the station as an oasis in a vast radio desert.

“‘HFS had no ‘commercial’ competition on the FM band at all,” Schlossberg says. Other commercial stations played it comparatively safe, he says, and college outlets — like Georgetown University’s WGTB — didn’t have the same listenership or consistency.

Schlossberg suspects that today’s under-30 crowd would appreciate the free spirit of WHFS. Young folks are “really unhappy about the corporatization of everything,” he says.

As far as the filmmaker is concerned, no other station since has emulated the unique flavor of WHFS in its early years. He says it must have derived its special power from the era in which it began — namely that pivotal year, 1969, when Spiritus Cheese first took air. The moon landing. Woodstock. Social upheaval.

“Everything was changing, and that whole counterculture was just ready to explode,” Schlossberg says. “It was like ingredients in a sauce. You taste it and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s delicious. What are the ingredients?’ And the chef goes, ‘I’m not really sure.'”

A sea change

While WHFS 102.3 remained freeform for longer than a decade, corporatization eventually struck.

Amid loud protest from listeners — and many desperate attempts to save the station — WHFS was sold for $2.2 million in 1983. General Manager Jake Einstein and his partners later bought the 99.1 frequency, slapped the WHFS call letters on it, then sold that in 1987. WHFS changed hands many times afterwards, but it lived longest as the mainstream rock station that hosted an annual concert called HFStival and competed with the growing DC101.

In 2005, WHFS lost all ties to its original format: 99.1 became a Latin station. Now, it’s talk-radio outlet WNEW. The WHFS call letters live on at 104.9, “Baltimore’s rock alternative.”

Jonathan “Weasel” Gilbert, one of WHFS’ most popular DJs, now jocks at Baltimore’s WTMD — and he still lives in the Triangle Towers, where WHFS landed after it relocated from the Bethesda Medical Building in the ’60s. He’s a consulting producer on Feast Your Ears. So is former Washington Post music writer Richard Harrington. Maryanne Culpepper, ex-president of National Geographic Television, joined as an executive producer.

Feast Your Ears is about two-thirds finished, Schlossberg says, and if he makes his Kickstarter goal, he’ll spend that money filming more interviews, hiring a scriptwriter and continuing research.

The director says he has no clue what the film’s final price tag will be, particularly because the cost of music rights remains a question mark.

Then again, he wonders whether WHFS earned enough goodwill in its day to encourage some musicians — if they own the rights to their music — to donate snippets of songs to his film. Maybe even musicians like Jesse Colin Young of folk group The Youngbloods, who cracked the pop charts with “Get Together.”

“I interviewed [Young] a few weeks ago,” Schlossberg says. “I asked him, ‘Is there anything else you want to add?’ He said, and I will quote it exactly: ‘WHFS was the best f*****g radio station in America.'”

Top photo: An undated image of WHFS DJ Weasel, pop musician Cyndi Lauper, DJ Damian Einstein and advertising sales manager Patti Ebert (Courtesy Jay Schlossberg).

The original version of this post inaccurately referred to Jake Einstein as WHFS’ owner. He was the station’s minority owner and general manager.