Looking for Community on the FM Dial

Like many Harvard seniors, I have no idea where I am going to be next year, or what I will do when I get there. What I do know is that I don't want to be here, for one very simple reason: Jam'n 94.5.

Let me explain. I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore, listening to "urban contemporary"--a mix of soul, rhythm and blues, go go and hip hop. When I picked Harvard over Yale, Brown and Princeton, I thought that I had lucked out musically because it also meant I was choosing Boston over New Haven, Providence and Princeton. Boston was an urban center, I figured, and how could there be an urban center without "urban contemporary"?

Instead I found Jam'n. Jam'n is the only powerful local station that is even tangentially devoted to R&B and hip hop. But Jam'n is listed as "Top 40", and it takes this classification literally. Each day, without fail, the station plays about 42 songs--Billboard's top 40 and two Bob Marley songs to add a little variety.

This makes the station almost unlistenable to anyone who is any more than a casual music fan. If you don't believe me, take it from Baltazar, the station's bad boy morning deejay. "I can't listen to Jam'n," he told The Boston Globe in a 1995 profile. "We play the same songs over and over."

The repetition might be tolerable, if the 40 songs were really the 40 you wanted to hear. But what Jam'n touts as its "new" music is almost always at least four months out of date. In a recent Globe article, industry expert Lionel Ridenour, senior vice president of black music for Arista Records, explained this lag as a consequence of the fact that Boston does not have a "major urban FM" to go along with Jam'n's "crossover format."

Which leads to an obvious question: Are Boston's demographics such that it can support a major FM-urban station? Many of the cities which have two competing urban stations, like Chicago, New York, Washington and Baltimore, are largely minority, while Boston, to say the least, is predominantly white.

But despite its relatively small minority population (or perhaps because of it), Boston has been the site of a number of racial turf wars, most notably the long-standing fight over school busing.

For this reason, a major urban radio station is Boston is desperately needed as a cultural institution, as a place where Boston's highly insulated white majority could meet the city's largely ignored black minority.

In a predominantly black city, hip hop and soul music, when played over the radio, can have the effect of taking the difficulties of urban life and depersonalizing them, making them a communal problem rather than an individual failure. As Ulf Hannerz points out in his 1969 ethnography of Washington, D.C., Soulside, "the ghetto cultural apparatus also assures the members of the audience that their personal troubles are only reflections of the public issues of the community."

In a mixed city like Boston, an urban radio has less potential to become a home for black community but more potential to serve as a sounding board for black concerns to suburban white listeners. A successful FM urban radio station in Boston could become a significant community institution, a meeting place for the two sides of the racial divide.

WILD (AM-1090), a small sunrise-to-sunset station, was able to fill this role in the '60s, as the late J. Anthony Lukas '55, a former Crimson executive, chronicles in his classic book on Boston, Common Ground. In particular, Lukas notes that in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King's death, WILD suspended its usual rhythm-and-blues format and devoted its hours to news and commentary on the assassination. While numerous black callers pelted the radio station with calls for an end to integration, Lukas' attention is drawn to a white woman from Lexington who called to ask Boston's lone black city councilor "what we can do to help the Negro community."

In the activist '60s, many suburban whites cared (even if rather naively) about the problems of urban blacks; in the materialistic '90s, suburban whites, like urban blacks and just about everyone else, care mostly about themselves.

In today's climate, it takes money to create community. At the minimum, for a radio station to be an effective community outlet, it has to sponsor festivals, concerts, job fairs and block parties, events which will get people out of their narrow routines and into contact with one another.

In Boston, WILD tries to fill the role of community station, but it is too small and too poor to do it. Jam'n has the resources, but, if anything, is anti-community. Its main selling point is its "Jam-Scams," essentially a grown-up version of a middle school prank, in which Baltazar torments his victims by telling them (falsely) that their cars will be impounded or that their houses will be foreclosed upon. The scammed person invariably gets angrier and angrier, leading to bleeped-out expletives, giggles from the 'Zar, and finally a promise from the scammed to "get the person who did this to me." Jam'n has a parasitic, Beavis and Butthead vision of community, where listeners join together to laugh at the stupidity of Baltazar, the pranked person and, implicitly, themselves for taking time to listen to it.

Jam'n's programming director, "Cadillac" Jack McCartney (the nickname says it all) would, I'm sure, not take the moral high ground in defending his station but simply point to its ranking as one of the most listened to stations in Boston for young listeners.

But while Jam'n's meaningless pop and Baltazar's endless scams may appeal to the pre-teen and adolescent crowd, the continued existence of WILD (now in its 50th year) and the success of black-oriented programming on local college radio stations-such as this weekend's "history of hip hop" orgy on WHRB--indicate that there is a Boston market for serious urban music.

A large urban FM could expand this market to suburban kids like me, who nationally are the number one buyer of rap records. When Chuck D of Public Enemy said that rap is "the black CNN," he meant that it was a way for blacks to get information from other black communities; by bringing this information to white suburban teens (most of whom don't watch white CNN), black artists, with the help of urban radio stations, have the potential to make the country's most serious social problems meaningful to the nation's next generation of leaders.

In Boston, an urban FM might break the city's unending complacency on racial issues. To take just one example, school busing has been almost entirely phased out, nothing has been put in its place, and nary a whimper of protest has been heard in the past decade. While Jam'n may insist that "the party never stops," the party never started for the Hub's minority children. It is this cycle of complacency that I want to escape; wherever I live next year I hope that it has the type of black musical presence that is both engaging to my ears and that can begin an inter-racial dialogue, the first step toward solving the problems of our urban centers.

Jal D. Mehta '99, a Crimson editor, is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House.