In early January 1987, Dennis McDougal of the Los Angeles Times noted that something was a little odd about the compiling of the Billboard charts. Each week, Billboard asked hundreds of radio stations across the United States what songs they were playing and calculated the “Hot 100” and other charts in the magazine based on these reports. But, he wrote, the most popular station in the second largest radio market in the country, the one that over 1.4 million Los Angeles area listeners tuned into every week, was not being included in the chart calculations.Footnote 1 The reason for this exclusion? Billboard staff and station management could not agree how to classify the station, Power 106, which claimed to be playing a “Fresh New Music Mix.”Footnote 2 According to Billboard, this fresh new mix included too much music by Black musicians for the station to count as a Top 40 station, but according to Power 106, the station was playing too much music by non-Black musicians to count as an Urban station. Playing a mix of music by Black and white artists, it seemed, exceeded the norms of the commercial radio industry; in the words of the publisher of Billboard's major competitor, Radio & Records, the station was so “violently different” from the programming status quo that it might necessitate the creation of a “whole new category.”Footnote 3
But McDougal's piece missed the most “violently different” aspect of Power 106's programming. It was not just that the station confounded the Black/white musical color line which the radio and record industries had relied upon for at least the last half century. Rather, the station also targeted Hispanic audiences alongside Black and white listeners, creating what consultant Don Kelly deemed an “Urban Coalition” station.Footnote 4 In the late 1980s, Power 106 and other stations like it challenged the structure of the radio industry by distancing themselves from the racially demarcated radio formats of the past and embracing multiculturalism as a method of understanding and commodifying the increasing diversity of the United States.
In this article, I argue that these stations, which coalesced into a format called Crossover, transformed the racial identity of the mainstream by finding ways to commodify and account for the tastes and identities of multicultural audiences across the United States. Beginning in Los Angeles, where the first nationally renowned Crossover station Power 106 began broadcasting in early 1986, I narrate the emergence of this format, examining how Power 106 challenged the organization of the radio industry by playing diverse styles of music to appeal to a multicultural coalition audience of white, Black, and—significantly—Hispanic listeners. From there, the narrative expands geographically as the format became popular nationally. Through an analysis of radio trade journals, I examine how programmers carefully created playlists to appeal to multicultural audiences, and how these stations monetized previously ignored demographics. These stations were so successful that by the end of the decade, mainstream Top 40 stations regularly played the same music, meaning that the tastes of Crossover stations’ multicultural publics were incorporated into the sound of mainstream popular music. But these stations were hardly without fault, and I end by critiquing the racial politics of Crossover stations and multiculturalism more generally.
Formatting Race on Commercial Radio Stations
To understand the impact of radio programming, we must first look to the business model that shapes this industry.Footnote 5 Commercial music radio stations operate by playing music to generate demographically specific audiences whose attention they sell to advertisers.Footnote 6 The radio industry categorizes stations that play similar songs to attract similar demographics into formats such as Top 40, Urban, and Country. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, commercial media of all forms increased the number of options available to the public, utilizing new technologies and more precise audience research and measurement techniques to target increasingly specific audiences.Footnote 7 On the radio, programmers during these years refined their playlist and station presentation based on research indicating relationships between musical styles and distinct demographics of listeners, generally assuming a homology between the racial identity of a performer and the racial identity of the people who might listen to that performer.Footnote 8 The Urban radio format, for example, played mostly music made by Black musicians to attract an age-diverse, gender-diverse Black audience.Footnote 9
Radio stations in the 1980s commonly defined their audiences by race and age to easily sell these audiences’ attention to advertisers. Companies that advertised on the radio typically preferred white audiences between twenty-five and forty-nine years old, and stations which attracted other demographics commanded lower rates.Footnote 10 In many ways, the radio format structure in the United States resembles the organization of major label record companies, which for most of the past century have structured their companies by separating music made by and for people outside the white mainstream into Black, country, or other divisions.Footnote 11 The Top 40 format, like the central pop division of a record company, attracted a so-called mainstream audience that, as David Brackett writes, is “nominally unmarked in terms of identity, but . . . implies a white, middle- or upper-class, urban subject,” by playing pop and pop-adjacent styles—what is often referred to as mainstream music.Footnote 12 Top 40 programmers in the 1980s played most of the songs on the upper portion of the Billboard “Hot 100” chart but, to maximize revenue, would often emphasize musical styles thought to attract white teens and their advertiser-friendly mothers—teens gave the stations hipness and energy, and older listeners paid the bills.Footnote 13 Minority audiences were tolerated but rarely catered to, as they lowered advertising rates.
The influence of this organizational model goes well beyond a radio station's profit margin. Jarl A. Ahlkvist argues that radio is a producer of culture rather than simply a disseminator or gatekeeper, because the radio industry creates new cultural products by combining music into sellable formats.Footnote 14 By linking specific audience demographics to styles of music, radio formats contribute to defining racial identities. Michael Omi and Howard Winant write that racial categories are created through “historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized,” projects that through repetition and reproduction become ways of making sense of people in the world.Footnote 15 I contend that radio programming is one such racial project, as formats create what Omi and Winant term “racial common sense” for understanding who listens to what.Footnote 16 Reporting in trade journals such as Billboard and Radio & Records documents the process of racial formation on the radio; in the pages of these journals, radio executives, programmers, musicians, and record executives debate what musical styles best generate demographically specific audiences.Footnote 17
In an era of increasing fragmentation, Top 40 radio produced the mainstream, every so often incorporating new styles and rebranding these to be part of US mainstream popular music.Footnote 18 As Tamara Roberts argues, the mainstream in the 1980s was not defined by a specific sound but rather was “an arena of racial confrontation and negotiation” between artists, listeners, programmers, and other music industry members, where all players debated the inclusion of new musical styles.Footnote 19 By introducing and popularizing new genres, the Top 40 format defined this zone, normalizing each new style's position in the mainstream once it proved it could generate the desired profitable audience.
Top 40 radio stations in the mid-1980s played mostly pop and rock songs by white artists for mostly white audiences—Madonna, Bon Jovi, and George Michael were some of the decade's biggest stars. But they also played the most popular songs from other formats that programmers thought would appeal to their audience, a process called crossing over.Footnote 20 In the mid-1980s, many in the radio industry noticed that an increasing number of songs by Black artists such as Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, and Tina Turner were successfully crossing over from Urban radio playlists to Top 40 ones.Footnote 21 Only a few years earlier, Top 40 stations had played very little music by Black artists, responding to white audience backlash against disco in the late 1970s.Footnote 22 But by the mid-1980s, realizing how lucrative crossing Black artists over to wider and whiter audiences could be after the multi-format success of albums like Michael Jackson's Thriller, record companies regularly asked Black artists to create songs that would appeal to diverse audiences.Footnote 23 The wide appeal of these crossover songs meant that Top 40 and Urban stations played many of the same songs; by the end of 1986, Paul Grein of Billboard heralded “the breakdown of the color line between pop and black radio” as six out of the top seven pop songs were by Black musicians.Footnote 24 But, as David Brackett writes, the very notion of crossing over depends upon the existence of boundaries; despite musical cross-pollination and evidence of superstar acts crossing over, commercial radio's “color line”—its race-based format structure—was still firmly in place.Footnote 25
Crossover Radio Begins
In 1986, a new station broadcasting out of Los Angeles began testing the solidity of that line. In February of that year, programmer Jeff Wyatt moved to the sunny City of Angels from Philadelphia, where he had been working at Urban station Power 99 for the last three years. In Los Angeles, Wyatt became program director at KPWR, Power 106, the month-old station owned by national radio group Emmis Broadcasting.Footnote 26 Industry insiders celebrated the arrival of what Billboard described as the area's first “high-powered urban outlet,” which came on the air playing up-tempo music mostly from the Urban charts.Footnote 27 But Power 106 was not quite an Urban station: Emmis's regional vice president Doyle Rose, who helped create the station, admitted that he was not sure what format it fit into, joking that Emmis was “considering having an industry ‘name the format’ contest.”Footnote 28
Rose's confusion demonstrated that the station's playlist and audience did not match the standard conception of an Urban station. Around two-thirds of Power 106's playlist consisted of R&B and pop songs also played on KIIS, Los Angeles's long-time-dominant Top 40 station.Footnote 29 The other third was made up of less popular dance and up-tempo R&B hits released on 12-inch records intended for playing at clubs as well as songs that had “crossover potential that ha[d] not yet been realized.”Footnote 30 The playlist, full of crossover music, was designed to attract an audience made up of Black, white, and Hispanic young adults, ideally between eighteen and thirty years old.Footnote 31 While radio stations all over the country have long attracted multiracial audiences regardless of programmer intent, so explicitly designing a station for this “Urban Coalition” audience had rarely been attempted on contemporary commercial FM radio. Reflecting on the station's beginnings, Emmis Vice President Rick Cummings claimed that the company did not know whether “something like this could reach two or three ethnic groups.”Footnote 32
Over the next six months, the station's ratings dramatically soared; by July it was the number one station in the Los Angeles area, the second largest radio market in the country.Footnote 33 Throughout the year, Power 106 and KIIS fought over the top spot in the market.Footnote 34 Regardless of exact ratings, the station was already making a mark on the industry: conventions that year were abuzz with discussions about the new hybrid format, 12-inch single purchases were on the rise, and in August, Emmis Broadcasting demonstrated their confidence in the concept by creating a similar “Contemporary Hit Urban” station in New York.Footnote 35
Or at least that was the format description Yvonne Olson of Radio & Records used for Power 106. The radio industry did not quite know what to make of this station and had trouble classifying it within its racially defined format structure—it was hard for those in the radio industry to make sense of a station aimed at “two or three ethnic groups” within the industry's long-standing Black/white binary.Footnote 36 Intended for a coalition audience of Black, white, and Hispanic listeners, Power 106's playlists, which Billboard described as “upbeat, pop/urban fare,” did not fit into the radio industry's preexisting categories, although radio journals tried: Billboard called it an “urban hybrid” and an “Urban/hit” station, while Radio & Records described it as an Urban station.Footnote 37 This word choice was not simply a question of semantics or identity—money was on the line, because the station's categorization, which denoted whether audiences were mostly white or non-white, determined advertising rates. Indicating the station's hybridity as well as his unwillingness to come down on one side of the debate for fear of financial consequences, Jeff Wyatt described the station as “CHR [Top 40]/Urban,” a term that Urban programmer Lee Michaels agreed with, saying that it “isn't really Urban and really isn't CHR [Top 40].”Footnote 38
The station's mix of Urban and Top 40 was the more comprehensible aspect of its programming. Yes, radio stations were usually Top 40 or Urban, not some “pop/urban” mixture, and, yes, they typically targeted majority white or majority Black audiences, not both. But some Urban stations had been attracting white audiences, given the cross-demographic appeal of Black superstars like Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.Footnote 39 And Top 40 stations, also noticing Black artists’ diverse appeal, were playing much of the same music; in early 1986, Los Angeles's Top 40 station KIIS reported that half of the songs they played were by Black musicians.Footnote 40
Harder to explain was Power 106 trying to attract a Hispanic audience, as the commercial radio industry was only beginning to target this demographic. Like other forms of media, radio was rather slow to target Latinx audiences, although a few radio stations had been broadcasting Spanish-language programming since the 1920s, when individuals purchased time on English-language stations.Footnote 41 Following the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, Spanish-language or bilingual public radio stations, Dolores Inés Casillas argues, have acted as “acoustic allies” for their local communities by acknowledging their presence and voicing their identities and political concerns.Footnote 42 However, the number of what Casillas describes as “Spanish-oriented” stations was limited; in 1980, there were only sixty-seven such stations nationwide, although this increased exponentially to 168 by 1986, 390 by 1990, and close to six hundred by 2000.Footnote 43
Defining and monetizing Latinx audiences was complicated. Casillas's “Spanish-oriented” stations defined their audience through language preference, broadcasting mostly in Spanish to attract audiences of Spanish-language listeners.Footnote 44 Advertising agencies in the 1980s also used language as a way to classify certain Hispanic audiences. As Arlene Dávila writes, advertisers assumed that more “acculturated” Hispanic populations, such as those whose families had been in the United States for several generations, were better targeted by English-language media.Footnote 45 Interestingly, until 1990, radio ratings measurement firm Arbitron identified potential Hispanic radio listeners by “Spanish surname” rather than language preference, and, as Casillas notes, the firm required the listeners they surveyed (or those around them) to have some English proficiency, as Spanish-language surveys were available only if requested in English.Footnote 46 This meant that, during these years, Arbitron failed to accurately measure the audience that Spanish-language stations were trying to cultivate, and almost certainly included the listening habits of English-dominant Latinx audiences in their Hispanic audience profile.Footnote 47 Until the mid 1980s, however, English-language radio stations rarely catered to these listeners.
Power 106, notably, acknowledged and took into account the distinct tastes and identities of English-speaking Hispanic listeners, creating an intentionally multicultural audience. Indicating the station's awareness of this audience, consultant Don Kelly, who devised the initial concept for the station, classified it as part of the “Urban Coalition Format.”Footnote 48 This formatting, what one programmer deemed “California Urban,” made the station unique; programmer Tony Gray noted that Los Angeles's large Hispanic population made it “diametrically different from any other market in the U.S.”Footnote 49 It is important to note that English-speaking Hispanic listeners in Los Angeles, of course, had already been tuning into other local Top 40 and Urban radio stations. It was not their listening habits that were remarkable; rather, it was Power 106's recognition of and orientation towards this “California Urban” coalition audience that deviated from standard commercial radio programming practices.
Power 106's monetization of a multicultural coalition audience aligned with the broader contemporary trend of acknowledging and profiting from the multicultural makeup of the United States.Footnote 50 Jodi Melamed writes that during the 1980s and 1990s, many in the United States adopted a racial attitude of “liberal multiculturalism,” advocating for pluralism in response to the growing diversity of the United States as well as mounting critiques of the failure of civil rights–era race-based movements exacting equal opportunities for all.Footnote 51 In contrast with the “more or less unchallenged ideological common sense of the first half of the century,” that is, the melting pot ideal of monoculturalism, multiculturalism challenged the idea that the diverse public of the United States should assimilate into a single, homogeneous culture. Instead, it highlighted the distinct identities of diverse racial and ethnic groups.Footnote 52 Liberal multiculturalism in particular advocated for reforming preexisting institutions and constraints to better represent diverse interests; liberal multiculturalism inspired heightened visibility and acceptance of the United States’ multicultural population, leading to more diverse reading lists in public schools, the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in universities, the coalition politics of Jesse Jackson's National Rainbow Coalition, and even the creation of additional skin tone–colored markers and crayons.Footnote 53 Like Power 106, each of these examples of liberal multiculturalism simultaneously recognized and commodified previously ignored minority groups, using inclusion to create larger markets.Footnote 54
The radio industry did not know how to adjust to Power 106's multicultural racial project. For more than a year, the trade journals argued with Power 106's staff about whether the station counted as a Top 40 station or an Urban station. During this period, Billboard and Radio & Records offered to include the station's playlist in their Urban charts, but staff at the station refused to report its playlists because they objected to trade magazines trying to “pigeonhole” the station.Footnote 55 As McDougal noted in early 1987, this meant that airplay on the most popular station in the second largest radio market in the country did not affect official measures of song popularity because the organization of the radio industry could not make space for a station that so overtly desegregated its local radio market.Footnote 56 Power 106 challenged the radio industry's unsophisticated racial logic, which simplistically assumed that white audiences mostly listened to Top 40 and other white-oriented stations, Black audiences mostly listened to Urban stations, and Hispanic audiences, if they lived in the right area, mostly listened to Spanish-language stations. Instead, Power 106 was defined by its multicultural audience. The station desegregated one part of the radio dial, monetizing multicultural audiences and normalizing their existence. In an industry that had for decades imagined audiences as racially segregated, Power 106 consciously created a multicultural public.
As the industry debated exactly how Power 106 fit within its preexisting format framework, other programmers around the country who were inspired by the station's success created similar stations, playing up-tempo dance music for multicultural audiences throughout the United States. Joel Salkowitz, for example, designed Emmis's New York station, WQHT, to have “enough of a twist to appeal to the typical [Top 40] audience, and a great percentage of Hispanics and some blacks.”Footnote 57 The popularity of these stations in places such as Milwaukee, New Orleans, San Antonio, and Honolulu inspired MTV, the music video outlet famous for its reticence towards playing artists of color, to create a Friday night show of multiracial dance music, “Club MTV.”Footnote 58 Power 106, in turn, was likely inspired by Miami's WHQT; in a similarly ethnically diverse radio market, WHQT had quietly yet successfully programmed pop, Urban, and dance music for white, Black, and Hispanic audiences since early 1985.Footnote 59 By the fall of 1987, Billboard tallied thirteen hybrid stations like Power 106 in the United States, mostly in urban areas, along with thirteen other Top 40 or Urban stations that leaned noticeably towards the other format.Footnote 60 Together, these stations’ success struck a blow to the radio industry's simplistic model of assuming whites and Blacks by and large listened to separate stations, not to mention the added complexity of what to make of Hispanic audiences listening to the same stations.
While these stations all claimed to play music for a multicultural mix of Black, white, and Hispanic listeners, the ethnic and racial composition of an individual station's audience varied depending on each city's demographics and the makeup of the local radio market. For example, nine months after Power 106 came on air, the station estimated that at least 48 percent of their audience was made up of non-Black listeners; on the other coast, a year after New York's WQHT began broadcasting the audience was reported to be “57% white, 31% Hispanic, and 12% black.”Footnote 61
But these demographic terms failed to capture the diversity of listeners on these stations. The term Hispanic—criticized for emphasizing a connection to colonial Spain while ignoring the “nonwhite indigenous cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, which historically have produced multicultural and multiracial peoples in Latin America and the United States”—collapses populations with diverse backgrounds, language preferences, and cultural histories into a single category.Footnote 62 Latinx, a term more recently embraced by many “because it has represented a more organic alternative to the government-imposed term ‘Hispanic’,” similarly erases the particularities of individuals’ national backgrounds, racial identities, and cultural experiences.Footnote 63 Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, among others, argue that Afro-Latinx identities in particular have been marginalized; in the United States, mainstream understandings of race and ethnicity often separate Black and Latinx into discrete, non-overlapping identities despite the government officially measuring non-white Hispanics since the 1980 Census.Footnote 64
Turning back to the radio industry, Arbitron and trade journals grouped together the tastes of all those who self-identified as Hispanic, even though—at the most superficial level—the self-identified Hispanic listeners tuning into Power 106 in Los Angeles had distinct musical tastes, not to mention racial identities and cultural backgrounds, from the self-identified Hispanic listeners tuning into WQHT in New York.Footnote 65 Industry personnel regularly overlooked the racial identity of Hispanic audiences, largely understanding them to be a discrete group that did not overlap with white or Black audiences. For example, while acknowledging their influence on his musical programming, Joel Salkowitz of New York's WQHT never disclosed how his station's racially diverse listeners of Puerto Rican background may have self-identified.Footnote 66
Just over a year after Power 106 launched, Billboard resolved the problem of how to categorize stations aimed at a multicultural coalition audience by introducing a new chart recording airplay at these stations, the “Hot Crossover 30” chart.Footnote 67 Programmers at stations in the format that was beginning to be called Crossover celebrated the creation of the chart, as they previously had been operating without the benefit of knowing national programming trends in their format. What's more, the chart demonstrated the popularity of Crossover songs that had not charted elsewhere because their airplay had not been previously recorded. This chart highlighted the rigidity of the radio industry, making it clear that stations which successfully challenged the racially demarcated radio landscape could not fit within previously existing categories. But it also gave Crossover stations an identity separate from Urban or Top 40, meaning that, as programmer Dave Allen put it, the stations could exist without having to be “lumped in with something we're not really doing.”Footnote 68
But the chart also “lumped” individual Crossover stations “in with something [they were] not really doing.” Like many charts, the “Hot Crossover 30” chart consolidated data from stations across the country, despite vast and obvious differences in geography, demographics, and local radio markets and despite Crossover programmers’ insistence that local demographics mattered more to programming their stations than any chart did.Footnote 69 Billboard acknowledged part of this complexity by categorizing Crossover stations according to their proximity to the Top 40 or Urban formats. But the diversity of these stations did not stop there; Joel Salkowitz noted that the particular ethnic and cultural background of the Hispanic segment of a Crossover station's audience—such as the large proportion of Hispanics of Mexican heritage in Los Angeles, Cuban heritage in Miami, and Puerto Rican heritage in New York—accounted for what Billboard recognized were “significant programming differences.”Footnote 70
Crossover Sounds
Due to the complex demographic makeup of their audience, each Crossover station played a unique set of songs, with the song selection often homologically reflecting the precise demographic profile of the intended audience. The stations, according to Billboard dance music journalist Brian Chin, did not try to cultivate a certain sound so much as they programmed records that other stations “generally ignored for an audience that was not directly served.”Footnote 71 That said, playlists at Crossover stations were unified by their proclivity toward up-tempo pop, dance, and R&B and their avoidance of the guitar-driven rock songs so popular on traditional Top 40 stations. The week that Billboard created the Crossover chart in February 1987, for example, most Top 40 stations in the United States were playing quite a bit of pop and a fair amount of rock; their playlists contained Huey Lewis and the News, Journey, and Bon Jovi's number one single for three weeks running, “Livin’ on a Prayer.”Footnote 72 Using slogans and descriptors such as “power,” “hot,” “The Fresh New Music Mix,” and “danceable top 40 without any hard-edged rock records,” Crossover stations rarely played these songs and instead played music that listeners might have heard in the club: up-tempo, danceable music with audible roots in disco or other Black dance music styles.Footnote 73 In Jon Pareles's belittling but largely accurate words, Crossover stations mostly played songs which “percolate and kick with an electronic drumbeat, an overlay of gleaming keyboard sounds and Latin percussion and, most important, a chirpy, girlish vocal dispensing come-ons or back-offs.”Footnote 74 This included up-tempo R&B music (by artists such as Club Nouveau and Cameo), dance-pop derived from disco (by artists such as Samantha Fox and Cyndi Lauper, who Pareles described as “Madonna wannabes”), and freestyle (by artists such as the Cover Girls and Exposé).Footnote 75 But the Crossover chart revealed that Crossover stations also played more stylistically diverse songs such as Janet Jackson's shimmery ballad “Let's Wait Awhile,” actor Bruce Willis's first foray into music with a cover of the Staple Singers’ 1970s soul hit “Respect Yourself,” and the Beastie Boys’ rap-rock hybrid “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!).”Footnote 76
At Power 106, playlists were aimed at women ages eighteen to thirty-four and were influenced by what Jeff Wyatt heard while strolling the Santa Monica pier; he claimed that he took notes at the beach of what tapes the “Hispanic kids” were playing, and advised other programmers to “be damned” with what was popular nationally because “it doesn't make a lot of sense to care about anything but your audience.”Footnote 77 Across the country in New York, WQHT's Joel Salkowitz considered the most acute similarity between Power 106 and WQHT, the two biggest Crossover stations in the nation, to be their “general affinity for up-tempo, high-energy songs with a lot of high-end in the mix—like the ‘Miami sound.’”Footnote 78
Power 106 and WQHT were not alone in this regard: many Crossover stations centered their playlists around the “Miami sound,” the genre more often called freestyle. Occasionally referred to as “Latin hip-hop,” freestyle arose in the 1980s from the same majority Puerto Rican and African American communities in New York from which hip hop emerged; venues would play freestyle records in between rap songs or would alternate between hip hop and freestyle nights.Footnote 79 The style combined the electronic-rich, fast-paced beats of electro songs like Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force's “Planet Rock” with vaguely Latin rhythms, repetitive synthesizer riffs, and often rather stifled female vocals.Footnote 80 Singer K7 of TKA, one of the few male freestyle groups, claimed that the group took the “same breaks and beats, the hardness of, say, a Rakim track,” but sang instead of rapped because “we weren't being embraced as rappers.”Footnote 81 As K7 describes, freestyle arose as a response to the marginalization of Puerto Rican artists in hip hop culture as rap gained popularity and became understood as something created primary by African Americans, and African American males in particular.Footnote 82
Developing playlists that appealed equally across their multiethnic audience was a problem for many Crossover programmers, whose careers in the radio industry relied on understanding (and generating) correspondences between musical styles and audiences of specific demographics. Despite a plethora of new releases designed to cross over between the R&B and pop charts, programmers found pleasing their coalition audience to be challenging, as their diverse audience segments’ tastes did not always align. Often programmers’ complaints about the difficulty of programming to a multicultural audience were based on a flawed conceptualization of their audience that racialized Hispanic listeners as a separate group apart from their Black or white audiences regardless of the actual racial identities of their Hispanic listeners.Footnote 83 Duff Lindsay of Miami's WHQT, for example, described his station's playlist as a careful negotiation between the tastes of the Black, white, and Hispanic segments of his audience. During music meetings, the staff would “openly discuss who [they thought] a song would appeal to, and who would be turned off by it,” and they tried to only play songs that they anticipated at least two out of the three discrete demographic groups they simplistically assumed their audience was made up of would enjoy.Footnote 84 Another programmer recounted the “nightmare” experience of trying to balance the sound at his station, especially because it was difficult to find musical common ground between Hispanic and Black audiences.Footnote 85 Other programmers noted that freestyle divided their coalition audience, as Hispanic listeners preferred the style more than Black or white listeners.Footnote 86 All of these accounts demonstrate the inability of a multicultural framework making sense of diversity within individuals or groups; indeed, as Angie Chabram Dernersesian writes, multiculturalism presupposes that diversity occurs as “a mixture on the outside of us,” rather than one that is also on the inside.Footnote 87
For all these apparent complications, most Crossover programmers began noticing that all their diverse audience segments seemed to agree on one style: melodic, upbeat songs with rapped vocals in them.Footnote 88 For most of the 1980s, commercial radio stations of all formats had been hesitant to play rap. While DJs were unsure whether the genre's unique sound could fit onto their playlists—programmer Ric Lippincott, for example, claimed that rap was “very hard to program” because it was “difficult to line up next to a ballad, a top 40 hit, even Van Halen”—station management and sales staff were more concerned with the people associated with the genre.Footnote 89 In the 1980s, rap was a sonic symbol for poor Black urban youth due to press coverage which, Mark Fenster has demonstrated, approached the genre “as the expression of an essential racial difference: an authentic expression of ‘blackness’ and particularly of urban underclass ‘blackness.’”Footnote 90 Radio personnel worried that advertisers would not want to associate their products with rap because of the perceived race and age of rap's audience, as minority and teen audiences lowered advertising rates.Footnote 91 In addition, programmers were concerned that playing rap would alienate adult audiences, who were understood to dislike the style.Footnote 92
But many Crossover stations questioned contemporary radio sales practices privileging older and whiter audiences. One of the Top 40 format's long-standing problems was generating sufficient advertising revenue because of the youthfulness of the Top 40 audience. Advertisers’ preferences for older audiences created tension between Top 40 station management, who needed to generate advertiser-friendly audiences, and programmers, who believed that teen listeners were important for the vitality of the format.Footnote 93 Crossover stations’ upbeat dance mix often attracted larger teenage audiences than traditional Top 40 playlists, which might have made generating revenue at Crossover stations difficult.Footnote 94 However, sales staff at these stations resisted the idea that pandering to adult musical taste was necessary for their stations’ financial solvency. Charlotte Crossover programmer Mark Shands claimed that his station made “a lot of money” from generating adult listeners despite playing teen-oriented music because “almost all teens have parents, and teens often control the radio in the home and especially in the car.”Footnote 95 Power 106's general manager Phil Newmark agreed, insisting that it was “bullshit to think you can't make money with teens.”Footnote 96 Crossover stations often modified their sales strategies; for example, rather than try for the highly coveted advertising accounts that preferred adult audiences between twenty-five and forty-nine, Newmark worked to find advertisers who favored audiences between twelve and thirty-four. He also priced commercial spots by audience demographic, charging the most for commercials aimed at teens. With enough teen and young adult advertisement buys, he calculated, the station did not have to work with companies who wanted older audiences.Footnote 97 This meant that the station, and others like it, did not need to cater to the tastes of older audiences, making it easier to add rap to their playlists.
What's more, rappers in the late 1980s were making tracks that fit well onto Crossover station playlists, creating songs that mixed sonic elements of hip hop with the pop, R&B, freestyle, and dance music styles that Crossover radio was already playing. As I've expanded on elsewhere, many artists influenced by hip hop found success in the late 1980s by combining the sounds of pop and R&B with rapped vocals, hard-hitting drum machine beats, record scratches, sampling techniques, and other musical elements of hip hop.Footnote 98 New jack swing singers used hip hop–inflected beats as their musical backgrounds, and their blend of danceable sung R&B and hip hop made the style easy to program on Crossover stations. Bobby Brown's “Don't Be Cruel,” for example, peaked at number two on the “Hot Crossover 30” chart thanks to Brown singing and rapping atop a sparse hip hop–inspired beat.Footnote 99 Pop rap artists used sung choruses and upbeat rapped lyrics to close the sonic distance between rap and dance pop; for example, Young M.C.'s 1989 pop rap hit “Bust A Move” featured a chorus with a catchy sung melody and clearly enunciated lyrics that Janine McAdams of Billboard noted are “inventive, humorous [and] don't offend.”Footnote 100 And occasionally, artists combined forces to replicate the kind of environment out of which freestyle originated; freestyle group Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam teamed up with R&B/hip hop group Full Force on the 1987 track “Go For Yours,” and rapper and member of the Boogie Boys Romeo J. D. rapped on freestyle group Sweet Sensation's 1989 hit “Sincerely Yours.”Footnote 101
Hip hop rapidly became an integral part of the sound of Crossover stations. The percentage of songs with rapped vocals on the “Hot Crossover 30” increased substantially between 1987 and 1990, from about 8 percent of the chart to one-third of it, and many other songs appeared on the chart that lacked rapped vocals but were otherwise sonically indebted to hip hop's musical texture. According to some program directors surveyed by Billboard, their Hispanic listeners’ tastes were “becoming blacker,” meaning that the listeners they simplistically categorized as Hispanic increasingly liked the same music as those they categorized as Black.Footnote 102 While this development failed to push programmers to acknowledge the diversity of their Hispanic listeners or consider the possibility that many of their Hispanic listeners might already have also identified as Black, it made programming their stations easier because all members of their diverse audience agreed on a style: pop- and R&B-influenced rap.Footnote 103 Indeed, they liked this style so uniformly that Billboard's Sean Ross hypothesized in 1990 that artists like Bell Biv Devoe and MC Hammer were safer to play on Crossover stations than the freestyle that these stations had been playing because not all demographics who listened to the stations still liked freestyle. Rap, on the other hand, was a “common denominator” between the divergent tastes of all three parts of Crossover stations’ multicultural audiences, meaning that rap songs were easy and convenient additions to playlists.Footnote 104 By 1989, Crossover stations were playing more rap than any other commercial radio format, and in 1989 and 1990, songs with rap in them charted better than any other style—pop, R&B, ballads, freestyle, rock—that the Crossover format played.Footnote 105
Broadcasting Multiculturalism
As Crossover stations tinkered with their playlists, they exerted influence on more mainstream Top 40 stations. When Billboard debuted the “Hot Crossover 30” chart in 1987, Joel Salkowitz noted the possibility of this format influencing mainstream Top 40 stations, claiming that were he programming a straight-ahead Top 40 station, he would “certainly be looking at this chart to pick up a competitive edge with some fresher music.”Footnote 106 And mainstream Top 40 stations did just this, watching the newest format closely for musical inspiration. Crossover stations had quite a bit in common with mainstream Top 40 stations: most of their operating staff had experience working at Top 40 stations, were familiar with Top 40 audiences, and understood the game of how to simultaneously satisfy conservative advertisers and more adventurous listeners. Recognizing these similarities, many Top 40 programmers treated Crossover playlists as testing grounds for songs that they were considering playing on their own stations, and began adding the most popular songs from the format to their playlists.Footnote 107 And, thus, as Crossover radio embraced “common denominator” rap songs to help soothe their programming troubles, they influenced Top 40 radio to start programming these very same songs.
By the end of the decade, Crossover programming had so influenced Top 40 programming that the two formats were virtually indistinguishable. In 1988, Billboard chart editor Michael Ellis described the relationship between Crossover and Top 40 stations by writing that Crossover stations “play a music mix that's a twist on top 40” that could be “the new top 40 for some large urban markets, particularly those with a large Hispanic population.”Footnote 108 A year later, Billboard renamed the “Hot Crossover 30” chart to the “Top 40/Dance” chart, reflecting its closeness to the Top 40 format.Footnote 109 By the end of 1990, the “twist” that distinguished the Crossover format from Top 40 was so negligible that Billboard eliminated the chart altogether.Footnote 110 While some Crossover stations had moved more mainstream since the chart's inception, this was not the reason Billboard cited for the change; rather, the periodical claimed that the format's “success has influenced the Hot 100 Singles chart to such a great extent that a separate chart to break out dance titles is no longer necessary.”Footnote 111 What had once been such a foreign formatting idea that it necessitated its own chart was now simply Top 40. The music that had once been only for specially cultivated multicultural audiences was now part of the mainstream.
But, of course, radio does not just play music—it commodifies audiences and formats racial identity. In recognizing and monetizing young diverse audiences, Crossover stations reshaped the radio industry. The Crossover format transformed the radio industry's understanding of local markets by acknowledging the presence and unique tastes of Latinx audiences. In so doing, Crossover programmers capitalized on one of the fastest growing demographics in the United States, as the Hispanic population increased by over 50 percent during the 1980s.Footnote 112 The number of Spanish-language radio stations also increased by over 500 percent during the same period, but Crossover station programmers acknowledged that Spanish-language stations did not always meet the needs of young language-diverse Hispanic listeners, who were the “linchpin” of Crossover station audiences.Footnote 113 Many Crossover programmers, like Jeff Wyatt walking along the Santa Monica pier, intently focused their programming on Hispanic audiences.Footnote 114 Bob Perry of San Antonio station KTFM, for example, understood his demographic “bull's-eye” as “Hispanic, aged 18–34,” or more precisely as a “25- or 26-year-old woman who likes dance music and thinks she's up to date on music, movies, fashions, and the new nightclubs and restaurants. She may not be a trendsetter, but in her mind she is.”Footnote 115 By 1990, Crossover station programmers recognized that musical taste was not bound by demographics—their multicultural audiences agreed on R&B- and pop-influenced rap—and they acknowledged that their Hispanic listeners’ tastes were not that different than those of their other audience segments. Perry claimed that “If you go to the Spanish clubs where they play Tejano music . . . you'll discover those artists and songs sound like [freestyle group] Exposé or [new jack swing singer/rapper] Bobby Brown.”Footnote 116 By playing music for a coalition audience of Black, white, and Hispanic listeners, and by recognizing the commonalities and distinctions of these demographic groups, Crossover stations embraced the type of pluralism associated with liberal multiculturalism.
However, representation on playlists did not often extend into representation in Crossover station offices. Most Crossover stations were owned and operated by white radio professionals who hired DJs, program directors, and sales staff who had experience at Top 40 stations, most of whom were also white.Footnote 117 And although these stations’ playlists were stylistically varied, their non-musical presentations rarely represented the diversity of the artists they played. Knowing that to do otherwise would lower their advertising rates, these stations tried to maintain a Top 40 identity, usually by encouraging white-sounding DJ patter to give their stations a white “stationality.” For example, when asked how a Black DJ could get a job at a Crossover station, Joel Salkowitz replied that any DJ he would consider hiring needed to sound like they fit on his radio station, implying verbal whiteness as the norm regardless of the multicultural musical sound of the station.Footnote 118
As Crossover stations generated multicultural audiences by capitalizing on the popularity of rap, a genre mostly made by Black artists, these same stations failed to represent their local Black communities. In his critique of multiracial political movements of the 1990s, Jared Sexton demonstrates that, although these movements claimed to be the “logical extension of the civil rights movement,” they had profound anti-Black effects.Footnote 119 He writes that multiracialism acted as a “rationalizing discourse for the continued and increasing social, political, and economic isolation of blacks,” as the coalition politics of these movements decentered Black interests.Footnote 120 Stations like Power 106, which Jeff Wyatt claimed was “not defined in color” but was instead “defined in sound,” downplayed their Black audiences, rarely playing advertisements from identifiably Black businesses and denying their closeness to the Urban format because of advertiser prejudice.Footnote 121 They were often criticized for, in the words of Urban programmer Michelle Santosuosso, “playing [Black] music but not educating or going into the [Black] community.”Footnote 122 Norfolk, Virginia Urban programmer Steve Crumbley complained that, unlike Urban stations, Crossover stations were not “going into the projects. They [were] not going into black neighborhoods—not even affluent black neighborhoods—because they [did] not want to ‘damage their image.’”Footnote 123 The rise of Crossover stations led Pittsburgh Program Director Keith Clark to conclude that “White people like black music, but they're not really into the black experience.”Footnote 124
Crossover stations’ failure to fully represent minority listeners had financial payoffs. Perhaps because their multicultural coalition audiences were not always reflected in their (largely white) management structures or their political leanings, these stations could choose to eschew these audiences when necessary to reap financial rewards. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, forms of “official antiracism” such as liberal multiculturalism have “steadied, rather than dissolved, race as a structuring force of capitalism.”Footnote 125 Although Crossover stations helped incorporate marginalized listeners and their musical tastes into the mainstream, they failed to dismantle racist advertising practices, as the format itself benefited from their very existence. Radio & Records columnists Walt Love and Sean Ross pointed out in early 1987 that this situation raised the specter of “two separate but not very equal drinking fountains dispensing similar music”: one with industry connections and advertiser backing and the other fighting for financial solvency.Footnote 126
Furthermore, the Crossover format chipped away at the cultural and economic power of the Black sector of the music industry. Previously, Top 40 airplay of Black artists was dependent on their success on Urban stations.Footnote 127 This meant that Urban stations—which were typically managed by, sometimes owned by, and certainly intended for Black Americans—had editorial control over what Black music crossed over to the mostly white audiences at Top 40 stations.Footnote 128 But as the Crossover format prospered, Top 40 programmers had another source for determining which songs by Black artists had mass appeal. Instead of looking to playlists on Urban stations, they began watching Crossover stations’ playlists, which some programmers thought were better indicators of what new songs the Top 40 audience might embrace. By the late 1980s, most songs by Black artists needed to demonstrate success on Crossover stations, rather than on Urban stations, before Top 40 programmers would consider playing them.Footnote 129
This declining relevancy of Urban radio changed the relationship between the radio and record industries, as record companies noticed that Urban stations were no longer as influential as they had once been.Footnote 130 In 1990, Kenny Ortiz, director of A&R for MCA's Black music division, revealed to Billboard that labels no longer waited to see how Black acts did on Urban stations before crossing them over. They instead marketed them towards Urban, Crossover, and Top 40 stations at the same time, meaning that the labels “almost d[id]n't really need [Urban] radio.”Footnote 131 And it increasingly seemed that labels no longer needed their Black music divisions. As Black music became more mainstream in the 1990s, thanks to the influence of Crossover stations, several major labels reduced the size of their Black music divisions without finding the mostly Black staff in these divisions other jobs.Footnote 132
Where Hip Hop Lives
But, of course, this is not how the story ends. Crossover radio, now referred to as Rhythmic CHR/Top 40 or Rhythmic Contemporary radio, still can be heard broadcasting music to multicultural audiences across the United States. In the fall of 2012, Nielsen counted 145 Rhythmic stations in the United States, and in the fall of 2018 the company reported that Rhythmic CHR was the thirteenth-most-listened-to radio format in the country.Footnote 133 And in an era in which hip hop is easily the most popular genre of music in the nation, it is clear that this format played a role in facilitating hip hop's mainstream popularity.
To get a sense of the complex legacy of this story, let's return one final time to Los Angeles. In 1991, Power 106 substantially increased the amount of hip hop the station played, eventually becoming the station “Where Hip Hop Lives” on the West Coast. Sister station WQHT in New York made a similar programming move a couple years later, in time adopting the same slogan and becoming what is arguably the most important radio station for hip hop in the country, Hot 97.Footnote 134 But even as Crossover radio more openly embraced hip hop's Black sound, the racial politics of broadcasting to multicultural audiences remained complicated. In 1993, Black community activists in Los Angeles denounced Power 106 for, among other reasons, playing rap songs with “racially demeaning” lyrics.Footnote 135 Nationally, many Urban stations responded to similar criticisms by editing out certain profanities and deleting the more offensive songs from their playlists.Footnote 136 But Power 106, like other Crossover stations which “didn't have to deal that much with community pressures and . . . advertising concerns,” according to the director of rap promotions at Polydor Records, continued playing songs that Black community activists objected to.Footnote 137 Indeed, the station justified playing this music by pointing out its multiculturalism; in response to these criticisms, general manager Doyle Rose claimed that the station only played songs that “unifie[d] the largest possible multicultural audience.”Footnote 138 Only after members of the local Black community launched a successful boycott of companies advertising on the station did Program Director Rick Cummings decide to bleep the n-word, saying that although he did not want to “tell [Black rappers like] Snoop Doggy Dogg how to address his homies,” he conceded that the station might be “doing harm by legitimizing the word for other cultures that can't or don't understand the black culture.”Footnote 139
Unsurprisingly, it seemed that simply listening to music made by and for minorities did not resolve centuries of racial discrimination in the United States. And the same was true for the Crossover format more generally; although these stations challenged the racial segregation of the radio and record industries by commodifying multiracial publics, the musical color line was simply too ingrained, as they failed to dismantle structural racism in those very same industries.
