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

The Endgame

In early 2012, while WBLS fell into the custody of investors Yucaipa-Magic-Fortress (an alliance forged by billionaire Ron Burkle and Magic Johnson), Emmis Communications’  98.7 Kiss FM continued to struggle.

Then executives at ESPN approached Emmis about leasing the 98.7 FM frequency for a sports talk station.

Emmis’s Smulyan saw the overture as an opportunity to resolve his urban conundrum: Use the money from the lease of the Kiss frequency to buy WBLS, creating one powerful and more profitable urban station.

Smulyan began negotiations with Yucaipa-Magic-Fortress, who effectively controlled the fate of WBLS by this point.

“We really felt that we were by far the best buyer,” Smulyan said. “But they kept  holding out for a price that just didn’t make any sense to us.”

Patrick Walsh explained: “We began to get somewhat concerned that the longer our process dragged on, that ESPN would take  their money and go find another [frequency].”  Perhaps that frequency would be that of WBLS.

Smulyan added: “We said, ‘Do we really want to turn ourselves upside down to get more debt? Maybe we should play the other side of this hand.’”

So Smulyan and Walsh made the custodians of WBLS a offer: If you pay us to go away, we’ll take the ESPN deal.  You’ll have a profitable, top five station as a result. If you don’t, we may continue to fight it out with you.

WBLS executives eyed the proposal shrewdly. Even if 98.7 Kiss FM failed in that battle, Kiss’s listeners might not simply flock to WBLS. What Emmis was offering, in effect, was help in shepherding its current audience into the arms of WBLS by selling the “intellectual property” of the station — its brand, logo, trademarks, archives and, if need be, its staff. Which meant that WBLS would be purchasing something even more important: insurance that the 98.7 Kiss FM brand could never be resurrected to threaten it again.

Deon Levingston, the vice president and general manager of WBLS, had done these kinds of IP deals before. In fact, his first came when Levingston was an Emmis employee back in 2000, working out of the company’s headquarters in Indianapolis, when Emmis sold the intellectual property rights of a viable, popular brand, WTLC-AM and -FM, to Radio One; a successful transaction that effectively preserved the audience of a heritage station. Levinsgton hoped that WBLS could do the same with its rival’s audience.

As the deal became real last week, Levingston was in a daze: “I’ve been involved this day-to-day Kiss-‘BLS battle for eight years now,” he said. A 30-year-war now drawing to a close.

Many of the people he fought at Kiss were former colleagues from his Emmis days; now Levingston found himself negotiating with them. A few of his current employees at WBLS were, like him, Emmis alumni. Some Kiss employees — staff, air talent — would likely come work for him. Most would not.

The mood in the rooms where the former adversaries met to finalize the details — a weekend-long simulcast, the restructuring of air staff rosters, the linking of the Kiss and WBLS websites — was one of gravity, not elation. There was no gloating, as Barry Mayo did at a music industry function decades earlier, publicly thanking Crocker for all his anti-Kiss rhetoric. “Without you, we never could have gone to number one,” Mayo had proclaimed, while the audience roared.

Instead, the proceedings were somber. “There was no celebration like ‘Hey, we finally got Kiss out of the way,’” said Cummings. “We were talking about two heritage brands coming together with one voice.

Cummings says he “got kind of emotional” going through the Kiss archives in preparation for the simulcast. “It was a really painful day. Our listeners are just absolutely devastated. What has made me feel better is the spirit of the folks over at Inner City. We thought they were saying the right things. But they are actually doing all the right things.”

“It’s all been very surreal,” said WRKS GM Alex Cameron. “It’s very difficult. I cant help but feel for the folks who worked here. We are keeping very few people because financially we can’t support it. WBLS is going to be interviewing all of our employees.”

Cameron said that while WBLS has confirmed only two Kiss jocks in their lineup — Shaila and Lenny Green — they may be considering other Kiss icons like Red Alert and Bob Slade. WBLS is keeping the syndicated Steve Harvey show in its morning slot. Kiss’s similar arrangement with the Tom Joyner morning show has been jettisoned.

Emmis will use the money from the selling both the lease on the 98.7 FM frequency and the intellectual property of the Kiss brand — almost $100 million — to pay down a significant portion of its debt.

Though the past week has been filled with the surreal coupling of those two logos, WBLS has now kissed those lips goodbye.

“After we celebrate the Kiss brand,” Levingston said, “we will market the WBLS brand to the former Kiss listeners.”

The simulcast of WBLS and WRKS has ended,  the Kiss website now redirects to WBLS, where the Kiss logos have been scrubbed.

WBLS now reigns as the only adult urban station in New York.

What We’ve Lost

Barry Mayo, who recently left the presidency of Radio One, was in the middle of a trip to Canada when heard of the deal to end the life of the station he cofounded.

“I felt a little sad,” he said. “I can’t help but be melancholy. I helped build that station.”

Mayo’s old adversary, Frankie Crocker, died of cancer in 2000.

“If Frankie were alive, and he called me today and said ‘Barry, can you believe that shit?’ He and I would be somewhere tonight, drinking a bottle of red wine, telling lies and doing revisionist history of our battles.” And here Mayo leaves the language of radio and invokes the language of the Internet: “S.M.H. Shaking our heads.

“But I can’t wax too philosophical,” Mayo concluded, “because the industry that Kiss entered on August 1, 1981 is not the same.”

Neither is the world. The sorrow of this moment is wrapped up in the idea that a number of things are forever gone.

For New Yorkers of that certain age, it is the passing of the city they once knew. The core Black audience that had Southern roots, the ones who brought R&B and soul and funk north with them — those folks are gone. Gone too are those first wave of Puerto Rican immigrants who cocreated hip-hop with the sons and daughters of Black southerners, and with them that particular Spanish-inflected “Noo Yoawk” accent that graces much of that music. Gone is the hip-hop that once sounded so threatening to some and to others, worth fighting for; music that now feels so quaint.  Weakened is the demographic power of those constituencies that once elected a Black mayor, WBLS investor David Dinkins.

That New York can no longer support two urban stations — as it still supports two baseball, two football, and two basketball franchises — can leave those who identified with those stations feeling diminished.

But New York — and a new generation of New Yorkers — live on. That 98.7 Kiss FM ceased to understand and serve them is the real reason that the venerable brand is now history.

Dan Charnas is the Editorial Director of News & Information at InteractiveOne, and the author of “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop” (New American Library/Penguin)

 

 Article Appeared @http://newsone.com/2005493/long-kiss-goodbye-charnas-987-kiss-fm-wbls/

 

 

 

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