Family Feud
Barry Mayo took to calling Frankie Crocker’s “hotline” immediately before the veteran DJ’s evening shift, just to taunt him.
“Frankie, I’m beating the shit out of you!” Mayo would say.
Crocker would then take to the air and warn his listeners not to listen to “that station with the lips,” and call Mayo “ugly” on air.
Crocker’s rap ambassador, Mr. Magic, took on his boss’s feud, labeling Zulu DJs Jazzy Jay and Red Alert as “Jazzy Wack” and “Red Dirt,” respectively. Magic told his audience to “smack that lipstick off your collar.”
Mayo loved it. Crocker and WBLS were essentially advertising 98.7 Kiss FM for free. And Mayo knew why the reaction was so irrational, so emotional. Behind the invective was a palpable sense of indignity and entitlement: WBLS was a Black-owned station; WRKS was not. Crocker himself was a cultural institution in the Black community; Mayo was not. It made the folks at Inner City Broadcasting cringe to think they could be beaten on their own turf by an essentially white-owned corporate entity.
“We used to ask the the question: ‘Who would you say does the best job of serving the needs of the Black community.’ When we started, [the answer] was overwhelmingly WBLS,” Mayo said. “We decided to actually fight on that front.”
While WBLS rested on its legacy, 98.7 Kiss FM went to work, going out into the community to do “Kiss Neighborhood Cleanups.”
The Kiss research showed that New Yorkers began to notice. But Kiss-FM’s emphasis on community service wasn’t entirely altruistic. Kiss-FM’s parent company, RKO General, was embroiled in litigation with the FCC, which was bent on revoking the entire RKO chain’s broadcast licenses after the parent company admitted to bribery and corporate misconduct.
“As a result,” Lee Simonson said, “we had to be purer than Caesar’s wife in terms of our community service commitment.”
The Generals Depart, The War Lives On
“I’ll give you a Mike Tyson analogy,” Mayo told me a few years ago during the research for my book, “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop”. “The fight that changed his career forever was James Buster Douglas. This guy knocked him on his ass for the first time. He’d never been off of his feet before and he’s never been the same fighter. Frankie was the champ and after he got beat he didn’t know how to respond.”
The fates of the two fighters diverged. Barry Mayo was promoted to general manager of Kiss-FM. Frankie Crocker was fired.
But Mayo then extended the olive branch to Crocker: He offered him a job as Kiss-FM’s evening host in a meeting that, Mayo says, very few people know about.
“I remember going to his apartment on the East Side. We were drinking a bottle of red wine and talking about the possibility.”
But because of Crocker’s conviction on payola charges in the 1970s, and RKO’s desire to keep looking squeaky clean, RKO’s lawyers nixed Mayo’s idea.
Mayo left RKO shortly thereafter to start a new broadcast company with Lee Simonson. But even with Mayo and Crocker gone, the rivalry between the two stations persisted.
As it was before, the sloganeering was mostly one-sided, with WBLS urging its listeners to “Kiss off!”; they printed “Kissbusters” t-shirts and broadcasted “W-B-L-kickin’-S” promos.
The bad blood between Crocker and Mayo had long since infected their weekend rap DJs. WBLS’s Mr. Magic and his new lieutenant, Marley Marl, continued to go at Kiss-FM’s DJ Red Alert, often refusing to play records by Red Alert’s proteges. One of them, a rapper named KRS-One, tore into Magic’s entire stable of artists, who called themselves “The Juice Crew.”
War necessitates the invention of more powerful weapons. The antipathy between the two camps created a back-and-forth of lyrics and beats that literally changed the sound of hip-hop, with Marley on one side and KRS-One’s partner, Scott La Rock on the other, using powerful new “digital samplers” to lob sonic bombs across town.
Even groups not directly affiliated with the hostile parties were drawn into the conflict. When Bill Stephney’s own group at Def Jam, Public Enemy, handed Magic their first single, he dissed them on air: “No more music by the suckers,” he said.
Stephney’s partners, Chuck D. and Hank Shocklee, were so pissed off that they created a screeching retort. “Radio,” Chuck D. rhymed. “Suckers never play me.”
That record, “Rebel Without A Pause,” is considered a musical milestone, marking hip-hop’s entry into what some call its “Golden Era.”
Throughout all of this, most New Yorkers — rap fans or not — didn’t swear allegiance to either station. The war did, however, make for good theater, and even better music.