Area hip hop artists and fans are disappointed and angry that the area's sole radio station dedicated to the music has switched formats and now plays rock music. Rob Thomas of The Cap Times wrote about the change recently. His article highlights two key points:
1) It was a commercial radio station and thusly made its money from advertisers.
The problem was that the station, owned by Beaver Dam-based Good Karma Broadcasting, couldn't attract enough advertising revenue.
"We're all personally attached to it," Williams said of the hip-hop format. "It was just not supported by the advertising community to the level that we need it to be to continue operating in the format."
2) The closing is a loss to Madison hip hop community and the overall cultural milieu of the area.
But losing a full-time outlet for one of the most popular musical genres around, as well as a cultural force in American society, is dispiriting for hip-hop fans in Madison. Willie Ney, director of the UW Multicultural Arts Initiative, said he wasn't necessarily a fan of the station's mainstream rap playlist, although his wife and kids enjoyed it.
He still said the format switch leaves a void for hip-hop fans, both those who enjoy the kind of rap they see on MTV and those who support the more positive-minded underground forms prevalent among local hip-hop artists.
"Even though a lot of it to me is not positive, is not empowering, it's still a vital cultural element within this new demographic of our community," Ney said. "Now with that shut off, it's a terrible reflection of how limited we are, culturally, in this area."
While I'm sure many people in the area have commented online about the change, the person with whom I am most familiar who can most likely comment on it with some authority is local rapper El Guante.
El Guante wrote about the station's format switch at his blog in an entry called "Hot 105.9's new logo". In it, he basically concedes that the change was motivated by money, i.e. – the station wasn't making enough. But he follows this concession with this:
My knee-jerk response was like many other people's: "yet another example of Madison trying to destroy hip hop and wage a proxy war on people of color." Maybe that response is still valid. After all, if local businesses aren't advertising on hip hop stations because they don't want to attract black and Latino clientele, or because they view the music as evil or whatever, that does reflect upon the city. If the owners of the station didn't understand the culture and were just pimping it for money, that does reflect upon the city.
While he questions his knee-jerk reaction, he doesn't question the basic assumption that "Madison [is] trying to destroy hip hop and wage a proxy war on people of color." These same general sentiments were echoed at the Capital Newspapers forum by "roboto" and reprinted by Hastings Cameron, who writes a blog at the same site called "Emcees Without Voices". Here are some quotes:
To continually ignore this group [minorities], and shut down all outlets for promoting this hip hop culture, shows how small minded and non-cosmopolitan this city truly is.
The reason why hip hop has a bad rap and why there is violence in Madison at these events is because people there are frustrated, and have been feeling belittled and ignored for years.
The closing of this station, with no feedback heard from the public, is not a surprise, its merely the perpetuation of ignorant practices that the powers that be in this city will not stop.
Finally roboto wishes "good luck to the city of Madison in their fight against diversification."
Here are some thoughts of mine. N.B. - I am a pale face and am not a hip hop fan, generally speaking.
Why are the Janesville and Rockford businesses & communities exempted from criticism? Truth be known, I never knew about the station until I heard about it switch formats a few days ago so I honestly do not know what businesses advertised on the station or stopped advertising on the station. (El Guante refers to the blog of an employee of the station who wrote "Our company was not getting the financial gains from it that it had once received from playing this format.") What companies stopped advertising and why?
To blame the move away from hip hop by a radio station in Janesville, some 45 miles away from Madison, by imitating Kanye West and saying that Madison doesn't care about black people is, in my opinion, wholly unfair. El Guante postulates that businesses don't want black or Latino clientele. Maybe they don't, I can't say with certainty. But neither can he. What were the demographics of the station? Did advertising rates change?
Hip hop probably has a bad rap for many reasons but violence at shows is certainly one of them. In addition, middle class white America has a view of hip hop that is one dominated by thugs wearing baggy pants & lots of gold chains who wave pistols around, consider all women to be hos, and liberally use the word "nigger". Do you suppose this is the image that Willie Ney was referring to as not being positive or empowering? Fair or not, hip hop has a serious PR problem that is not the creation of the ruling cabal of whities here in Madison.
What was the reception of the station here in Madison? Roboto wrote: "Another problem was it barely registered since the airwaves were stretched all the way to Rockford." Now, I think he lacks an understanding of the transmission of radio waves but point taken. This WI State Journal article states, "Hot 105.9 is a regional station; it reaches from Rockford to Madison, where it enjoys devoted young audiences of teens and twentysomethings even if the signal crackles at times in Madison." And how about this blog post by David Muhammad, an active participant in Madison's hip hop scene. In it he says, "It was almost too good for Madison, at least the half of Madison who could hear it." Is it possible that listenership in Madison wasn't particularly high because of the less-than-optimal reception? If this were the case, just how much incentive did Madison advertisers have? Again, I don't know anything about the station's ratings here in Madison. Perhaps the majority of listeners were in closer to proximity to Janesville and Rockford.
Reiterating that I never listened to 105.9, I must say that I'm confused. Was it the case that half of Madison couldn’t tune in to the station? Or did it just suffer a bit of static? Why is Madison the sole bad guy here considering that the station was 45 miles away in another city? All of the blog posts I've referred to view what happened here from the starting point that Madison is waging a war against hip hop and that the city is racist. These are the lenses through which all else is filtered. Notice the absence of any statistics. Just how many people in Madison listened? When you view the situation here with glasses of "if Madison cared about black people, then this station would never have switched formats", then you are only going to see racism because those glasses don't allow for anything else. For instance, it doesn't allow for Nick Nice's comment:
I used to do a Sunday night show a few years back on 105.9 called Fromage (which I built into their top rated show at the time). I actually sponsored my own show since they were so hard up for advertising dollars back then. I was pretty much free to do whatever I wanted since I was paying for it. So when my store closed, my sponsorship ended. The fact that it was a hugely successful show would have made one think that they could have done something with it and actually made some money from it. But did they do anything? Nope. Unceremoniously dumped.
No regrets on my end but this whole thing boils down to a station that is run by people that don't get the radio business and how to actually make money from it.
Instead of asking what the hell happened to the station, the bloggers above generally just launched into screeds against Madison. "Oh, Madison liberals aren't really liberal and their beloved 92.1 sucks too; Madison liberals are afraid of black people who aren't Uncle Toms." The possibility that the station's management lacked business acumen was never on their maps. Deftly avoiding the management and businesses outside of Madison, they immediately attacked the white liberals here. And that is what irks me about the comments of the bloggers I've quoted. Is there racism in Madison? Of course there is. No one in their right mind would deny it. But none of these bloggers proved to me that racism was at fault here. In addition, that little, if any, allowance was given to the possibilities that the station changed formats for reasons other than the evil of the latte drinking, tree hugging, "diversity" bleating liberals of Madison bespeaks a much more serious problem than a radio station going from hip hop to rock.
So, is Madison really waging a war against hip hop? Maybe it is and I just don't know about it. Can any readers comment? Also, is anyone reading that listened to the station? If so, what was the reception like for you? What companies advertised?
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