Crocker remade WBLS in his own image, creating an eclectic playlist designed to blow his listeners’ minds. The core of WBLS was always R&B and soul, but Crocker often added jazz, rock, and pop standards to that mix. You might hear Sinatra right after Stevie, or the Stones after Sylvia Robinson. He was the first to play songs like Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” — records that created the foundation of the dance music phenomenon that would become disco, and that made Crocker, the “Chief Rocker,” a celebrity on the disco scene. He also gave America some of the first exposure to an obscure Jamaican musician named Bob Marley. Crocker’s innovations and idiosyncrasies created an American singularity: At a time when radio was re-segregating along racial lines, Black artists were being purged from pop playlists, and Black radio stations left only scraps from advertisers, WBLS became the number one overall music station in the number one market in the United States.
The decisions that Frankie Crocker made had worldwide impact, determining not only which records would be hits, but what songs we would sing, what dances we would learn, which people would become stars, what ideas would be discussed. A Black programmer at a Black-owned station called all the shots.
A Crocker Fan Becomes An Enemy
By 1981, WBLS had long since trounced its competition. An FM station, WKTU, had taken a run at Crocker with an all-disco format. It won for a while, and then fizzled.
Only an arrogant fool, it seemed, could conceive of challenging Crocker and WBLS.
Barry Mayo was arrogant, for sure. In his job interview for an assistant programming position with WXLO, the flailing New York FM station owned by RKO General, the young Bronx native told general manager Lee Simonson to fire his program director and hire him instead.
But Mayo was nobody’s fool. He learned broadcasting at Howard University’s station, WHUR, and modernized a Black station in Chicago by using new business techniques like call-out research and focus groups. Mayo took the station, WGCI-FM, “from worst to first” in the ratings. He thought he could do the same for WXLO.
After Simonson hired Mayo, only one person stood in his way. Mayo, like most New Yorkers of his generation, had grown up idolizing Frankie Crocker. Shortly after taking the job, Mayo met Crocker face to face for the first time. Mayo complimented Crocker; Crocker blew a cloud of cigarette smoke in Mayo’s face. In that moment, Crocker transformed a fan into an enemy.
Building A “Black Top 40”
At noon on August 1, 1981, WXLO played a song called “Make That Move” by R&B group Shalimar to announce its own switch, to new call letters — WRKS — and to a new brand name, 98.7 Kiss FM.
Kiss was conceived as a “Black Top 40.” It would be hit driven, mounting a direct challenge to WBLS, whose programming was largely based on the wit and whim of Crocker. Mayo would achieve this, as he did in Chicago, through science: research and numbers.
“Kiss was more cohesive in what we stood for, musically,” Mayo reflected. “More consistent.”
Crocker’s WBLS was steeped in history. Mayo’s Kiss leaned toward the new. Crocker had relationships to the big power players in the music business. Mayo made new friendships with scrappy, local dance music labels like Profile and Prelude (whose artists Sharon Brown and D-Train, respectively, were signature Kiss-FM artists). Prelude Records, in fact, released a series of official “98.7 Kiss FM Mastermix” albums, produced by Shep Pettibone; albums that are a great tour through Kiss-FM’s musical ethos.
Said Mayo: “If I thought a record was a big hit and it didn’t fit WBLS, I would play the shit out of it, knowing he would either be late or he wouldn’t touch it.”
98.7 Kiss FM and WBLS served the same core audience: Black New Yorkers. But in the way they served their audience — WBLS by being musically eclectic, Kiss by being a bit more broad overall — both courted a larger constituency from the multicultural metropolis: progressive upper-middle class whites, outer borough European ethnic groups, Latinos. With a shared culture of fun, aspiration, sophistication and upward mobility — and with a format that elevated the “mastermix” as both a musical cornerstone and a demographic metaphor — both stations sought to transcend and blend racial and ethnic differences, the very definition of “cosmopolitan” or “urbane.”
Which was very close to the term that these stations actually came to use to describe their format and outlook: “Urban,” or “Urban Contemporary.”
The conventional wisdom is that Frankie Crocker coined the term. Barry Mayo insists that Lee Simonson first used it. Simonson said that he first heard the term from WRKS’s first radio consultant, Kent Burkhart. Burkhart isn’t sure about the origin of the phrase, either.
“I wonder if that term didn’t come out of a sales department somewhere,” said Burkhart.
Which would mean that the term may not have been derived to describe an innovative idea — that the acknowledgement and admiration of Black culture was a unifying principle for diverse urban audiences ready to leave racial and ethnic strife at the door to the disco. Rather, it was a euphemism created by radio sales people to subvert the racist perceptions of advertisers — that Black music and the stations that played it were for Black folks, and that Black folks didn’t have any money and thus weren’t worth courting as consumers. Better to call it something else.
This fallacy — and the game they played to deal with it — would plague both stations for their entire existence.