The Long Kiss Goodbye: Fear of a Black Planet Killed a Black Radio Station

Kiss And ‘BLS Miss Their Chance

Even though rap had won the young audience for 98.7 Kiss FM; even though the war between the two stations’ rap shows fostered an explosion of creativity; neither Kiss nor WBLS would commit to playing hip-hop consistently. Rap was “dayparted” — played during the weekend “mix” shows and, if the requests and sales for particular songs were huge enough, sparingly in morning and evening “drive time.”

Despite their longstanding competition, the stations began to sound and look more alike, as they swapped executives, programmers, and air staff. And on the subject of rap music, the management of both stations seemed to be of the same mind: Keep it down. Program as little as possible. Both stations downplayed the popularity of hip-hop as a young, ghetto, male thing. Well before the rise of gangster rap, Black programmers were calling the following artists too “angry, too “ghetto”:  De La Soul. Big Daddy Kane. Public Enemy. Jungle Brothers. MC Lyte. To the executives at Kiss and ‘BLS, hip-hop was dangerous, testosterone-laden music that stood in the way of their coveted adult female audience.

 

But the focus on adults, to folks like Bill Stephney and his boss at Def Jam, Russell Simmons, was beside the point. Simmons had  admonished Barry Mayo before Mayo’s departure: Rap is not Black music. Rap is teen music.

Simmons and Stephney thought that Black radio could vanquish pop radio by using rap to go after white teens, who by dint of their numbers were buying most of the rap records sold in America anyway. “Yo! MTV Raps” was already the video channel’s highest rated show. Given this reality, Stephney saw Black radio’s resistance to hip-hop as not only as foolish, but suicidal. At a Black radio convention in 1988, Stephney ridiculed and scandalized the Black executives in attendance.

If you ignore the music of your people, he said in an acrimonious panel discussion, you will end up providing janitorial services for a white pop station.

Hip-Hop Finally Finds A Home

Bill Stephney was essentially warning that mainstream radio stations would discover that hip-hop was pop music before Black stations overcame their cultural resistance.

Stephney’s prediction proved to be correct.

In the late 1980s, a pop station in San Francisco, KMEL, had begun programming hip-hop aggressively in the daytime, when the crosstown Black station, KSOL, wouldn’t: groups like Public Enemy and X-Clan, Gangstarr and Digital Underground. Then, in 1992, Los Angeles station KPWR, called Power 106, began to emulate KMEL.

L.A.’s Power 106 was property of the same company that owned New York’s Hot 97 — Emmis Communications. Both stations, at the time, played a similar roster of Latin Freestyle artists for a young white and Latino audience. But when Emmis’ programming chief Rick Cummings saw Power’s ratings begin to tank, a little research revealed that Power’s audience had moved over to rap.

Cummings then did something that no programmer in pop radio had ever done. Instead of half-stepping it, disguising  or “dayparting” hip-hop, he embraced the music wholesale, even in name. For the first time anywhere, a radio station branded itself with the term “hip-hop.” Power 106 became the place “Where Hip-Hop Lives,” trouncing its crosstown “Urban” competitor, 92.3 The Beat.

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