Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [85]
“Eminem is not really the best example of what I would consider the white appropriation of hip-hop,” Chideya says. “I think the issue is so much larger. It’s not the appropriation by an individual, it’s the market choices that get made to appease what is essentially now a majority white audience. I’m much more interested in finding out what black artists are asked to do in the studio and how their labels treat them and how they’re positioned in a market that’s 70 percent white than I am in Eminem, who is white. The market forces that come to bear on black female artists I’m particularly interested in. Missy Elliot is the only one who has gotten away without showing T&A and it’s partly because she doesn’t look like a cover model, but she has to do some kind of music jujitsu to keep her place. That’s the real issue—how do black artists make the music they want to make? Nobody’s told that story from the perspective of somebody who’s been forced to make tough choices. Chuck D talks about it happening, but that’s only because he’s not in the same position he was before.”
The history of hip-hop on the radio is a clear-cut story between perception and profit and a good barometer of how race, rap, and the music industry, have arrived at their present state. In the late eighties and early nineties when hip-hop proved itself a commercially viable format, the industry fell into a racial quandary. Black “urban” stations at the time were formatted as predominantly R&B, reserving hip-hop mix shows for a few hours late at night on the weekends. There were maybe a handful of rap stations in the entire country. While advertisers paid top dollar for spots on Top 40 stations (dubbed “contemporary hits radio”), at urban stations, even those that were first in their regional marketplace, ads cost less.
In the late eighties, the term urban was adopted to distance a station’s image from the rebellious, violent image of rap; and many stations further distanced themselves by opting to draw an older audience, moving to a black adult contemporary format of mostly soul, funk, and R&B. It was a message to advertisers that a station’s listeners were older, affluent black men and women—the target consumer in marketing plans aimed at African Americans. Regardless of these efforts, advertisers were willing to pay more to reach Top 40 listeners, who were mostly white or Asian. When hip-hop truly exploded in the nineties, its multicultural appeal changed the marketplace. A few stations, such as KMEL in San Francisco, where Davey D was a DJ, abandoned pop for rap, as did New York’s Hot 97, losing their high-energy pop-dance format. These stations discovered that not only did their audience remain, but the station outdrew their local urban competition. Advertisers that were hesitant to hawk their products on urban stations strangely had no issue with a station classified as pop that played rap.
To the hip-hop community, urban stations that were careful with rap in order to still pay the bills looked like conservatives pitted against the spirit of the black community. It indicated a generational divide consistent with hip-hop’s acceptance in America. Urban radio programmers similarly felt that they were being robbed. The efforts they’d made to integrate rap into their stations’ playlists while balancing their image were useless