Breaks in the Air

The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City

John Klaess

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781478018872
  9781478016236
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478023500
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In Breaks in the Air John Klaess tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop's performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New York's African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Breaks in the Air
• One. Deregulating Radio
• Two. Sounding Black Progress in the Post–Civil Rights Era
• Three. Commercializing Rap With Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack
• Four. Programming the Street at WRKS
• Five. Broadcasting the Zulu Nation
• Six. Listening to the Labor of the Awesome 2 Show
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index