Music Head

So how does he learn about new music and decide what to play? He works hard to stay informed, still reading Mojo and NME, and poring over more magazines, websites, and blogs (including The Current’s) than even most fanatics care to tolerate; he digests hundreds of press releases and prerelease CDs every month; and he listens when people on the street tell him there’s one band or song he just has to play. “I have a little notebook with me all the time,” he says, then recounts how a woman at the state fair told him to check out British singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore. “It turned out she was right,” Wheat says. “I played some Thea just the other night. That happens all the time.” He also takes e-mail requests, which appear on a computer screen next to his microphone.

Wheat’s colleagues and some professional critics say he takes his curatorial responsibilities seriously. For his part, Wheat considers DJing an art form. Mining knowledge and interacting with listeners are part of “doing essentially what all good artists do: learning a craft, then finding some way of giving individual expression to it,” he says.

“If you feel like you know Mark from listening to him on the radio, you probably do,” says Steve Nelson, The Current program director. “He’s got no act, no cultivated persona. When you listen to Mark from 7 p.m. till 12 a.m., that’s who he is.”

Some nonbelievers say Wheat’s a snob: pedantic, didactic, and achingly long-winded between songs. He agrees. “I was thirty-five before I came to the conclusion that music doesn’t mean as much to everybody else as it does to me,” he says. “I am a music snob. But, there’s an audience that deserves a station that doesn’t treat music as a commodity, like what seems to have happened on commercial radio.”

“If you say ‘aficionado’ instead of ‘snob,’ it sounds different,” says Heiruspecs bassist Sean “Twinkie Jiggles” McPherson. “To be the kind of music snob he’s talking about, he has to be obsessive—and he is—but in a way that enriches him and the people who listen to him.”

Wheat says he’d like The Current’s DJs to find a way to convey deep knowledge without coming off as pretentious. “We set high standards for ourselves about trying to draw lines through musical eras and genres,” he says. “We have to try to present it in an intelligent way without sounding like we’re lecturing people every time we play a new or old piece of music.”

He’s got other ambitions for himself and The Current—ones that transcends the Twin Cities. “Being a national presence rather than just a local presence is something that I’d like to happen at some point,” he says. “But that would be the result of a team effort—something that represents what we’re doing as a whole here at The Current. A lot of my success has been linked to the local music scene. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to be in the right position to champion it, and I’d like to think that the next step of my career would include some reflection of that. I’d like it to come from the Twin Cities.”