Bill Stephney, a veteran radio programmer and former president of Def Jam Recordings, pointed to his own family as evidence of these stations’ irrelevance: “I have a wife who teaches teenagers. They don’t listen to music on the radio. I have two teenage sons who do not listen to music on the radio. I have a daughter who listens to music on the radio, but she likes Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Brittany, all that stuff. So she’s not going to listen to [urban] stations.”
The younger urban artists like Chris Brown and Usher, Stephney said, sound more like electronic pop than soul music, leaving other stations open to take the Black youth market.
“[Kiss and WBLS] weren’t playing any of that stuff,” Stephney said. “So they really cut themselves in two ways. I always said that Black stations have the advantage. Instead of allowing the remaining relevant music stations to co-opt Black and dance music, it should have been the opposite. It should have been ‘BLS breaking music, wherever it came from, whether Justin Beiber or Justin Timberlake. They should have been up on that. Now you have an entire generation that doesn’t listen to these stations and doesn’t even think of radio as a listening option.”
Set aside youth for a minute. Even in serving adults, Stephney said, Kiss and WBLS didn’t really understand their legacy audience.
“If you were an 18-year-old fan of ‘Sucker MCs’ in 1983, you are now 47 years old. Yet, you were now unlikely to hear the song that changed New York Black radio some thirty years ago in gold rotation either on KISS or ‘BLS. The ‘adult contemporary, Urban station’ in 2012 still didn’t recognize that the anti-Hip Hop war was lost about 20 years ago.”
In other words, Kirk Franklin and Mary Mary are not legacy artists for people in their 30s and 40s. Biggie is.
Black radio stations, like any business, have the right to choose the constituencies they serve. But the conceit that you can represent a culture while denying a huge chunk of it is bankrupt. Writing off young people is tantamount to writing your own death sentence. And the idea on which these programmers based their business model — that Black culture is somehow “niche,” despite that fact that we live in a country whose pop culture is derived largely from Black culture — is laughable. Many businesses that serve core Black constituencies have found ways to prove their broad appeal: Russell Simmons did it with Def Jam. Jay-Z and Damon Dash did it with Rocawear, and Sean Combs with Sean John. And Emmis did it with Hot 97 in New York.
The irony of Kiss and ‘BLS is that these two stations practically invented the concept of the multicultural audience, the first to prove that Black-led stations could dominate diverse audiences with the power of Black culture. They were, despite their resistance, the first commercial stations to play hip-hop. The “tanning” or “browning” of America and the concept of a “Black planet”? Kiss and ‘BLS were among the first in media to attempt and succeed on those marketing models. They built the boat. They just didn’t get on it.
As the years went by, the management culture of both of these stations backed their properties into a cultural corner. While Black folks got bigger, Black radio got smaller. While Oprah conquered daytime TV and Barack Obama captured the White House, they allowed themselves to be limited.
98.7 Kiss FM and WBLS were essentially afraid to live in the Black planet they helped to create.
If this surprises you, it shouldn’t. To understand how this happened, one need only look back at the history.
Birth Of The “Black Liberation Station
In the 1970s, WBLS was nothing short of a miracle.
It was one of the first Black-owned FM stations in the country, bought in 1974 by a group of Black businessmen from Harlem — a group that included Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton and future New York mayor David Dinkins. Sutton called his company Inner City Broadcasting.
The man they picked to run their newly acquired property, Frankie Crocker, was already a hero to New Yorkers of all colors. He had started as a DJ in the 1960s at WWRL, an AM station that served New York City’s burgeoning Black community, where Crocker was known for his smooth, slick between-song patter (“I’ll put a dip in your hip and a cut in your strut…”) — proto-rap that would be a direct inspiration to the generation of young New Yorkers who later invented hip-hop. Crocker’s overwhelming success at WWRL led to an offer from one of New York’s top pop stations, WMCA-AM, where he became the only Black DJ in the late 1960s.