"All your favorite hits, and no rap."

a survey from the station whose tagline is printed above, with a list of songs currently on its playlist. present: u2, creed, nickelback, natalie imbruglia, ryan adams, etc.

(i'm going to go out on a limb and posit that pink is on the playlist because she's from the area.)

There is absolutely nothing on that 23 poll list that I would want to listen to!

It's all about guitars & singing, apparently. (Even if the singing isn't all that tuneful.) It's also all about the FEAR of anything that doesn't involve guitars & singing. (Hence, every dopey rock station playing "Fight For Your Right To Party" every weekend, woo.)

There's a ClearChannel station in Hartford (WMRQ, 104.1) that actually "stoops" to play non-rock tracks by non-white performers - usually, though, it's @ 4:20 (and you know what THAT means).

bob marley teachin' the kids how to off it?

Twin Cities station probably using exact same format, owned by same owner, uses this same slogan. TV commercials for same feature happy radio listeners in their car cringeing in pain as supertall suburban blastin some bangin beats pulls up alongside them at a light.

Jammin in the name of the Lord OH YEAH!

What's great around here is when you hear station IDs that say "The Talk That Rocks Detroit" or "The Rockin' Sounds of Detroit," when a very large percentage of the listeners visit the actual city only when they absolutely must. "Oh we have Tigers tickets. I suppose we'll have to go into -- ohhh no -- Detroit..."

Should this be looked at as anything more than demographics distilled down to a brutally exact science?
No, and that's the scary part, assuming that radio programmers really just play what people in their target demo want to hear.

That same tag has been around for at least a decade. In the early 90s, there was a radio station in southern California called Star 98.7fm that used that same tag line.... Then, they turned into a new wave/80s retro station, then I think they fucked off and died.

I just remember of wave of "all your favorite hits, and NO RAP" parody logos at KUCI being produced, which in turn, increased hardcore hip hop airplay for a short while.

I would like to say, "Some people don't like rap," but I just heard this station for the first time at the gym yesterday and I must say it's pretty bad. Much as I don't care too much for hip-hop or current R&B, I would rather hear a mix of the two than the music that was being played by this new station. But still, I think a lot of people don't like rap, and I don't think it's fair to equate that with racism.

What I find is that whatever stations I hear when I'm at the gym become old really fast. I hear virtually the same songs every time any of these particular stations are played.

Haha, Josh- I've seen that commercial. If you listen to the music blasting out of the SUV you can hear that it's really like 5 DMX tracks playing over eachother. Unfortunately, that's probably what popular hip hop sounds like to the uninitiated.

The GWR monolith used to play much the same game in the UK.

five dmx tracks at the same time!

I think the pro-Kenny Loggins bias of 80's-centric stations can be explained in terms other than racial bias, actually. Loggins' disappearance from the contemporary music scene allowed the audience a certain ironic distance from the material -- you know, we can laugh at all that "highway to the dangerzone" jazz. In contrast, the audience doesn't have that luxury with Michael Jackson. When we hear "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," we're reminded of the utter embarrassment of what he is now, and that's something much too ooky to contemplate. This doesn't explain the relative lack of airtime for the Mary Jane Girls or Cameo, though -- I haven't noticed them on any of these Totally Eighties stations.

Radio stations boasting of their musical apartheid is real and revolting of course, but it's genuinely disturbing to see any kind of music demonized on a commercial. Stations who define themselves in terms of what they don't play are trying to tap into the fears and biases of its audience as cravenly as any smoke alarm commercial.

In a similar (if not as sinister) fashion, you may have noticed that radio has utterly disowned the fifties. I remember one local Baltimore/DC station used to advertise that it played, you know, old songs but not OLD OLD songs, and illustrated this point with a guy clutching his ears in agony as Rosie and the Original's "Angel Baby" skipped on a phonograph. Most stations of that ilk, though, will just say that they "play the hits of the 60's to today," or some such nonsense. I'd say this was a case of Boomer Stalinism (the sixties are better than the fifties, hooray!), but some of these stations have also dropped sixties stuff from their formats as well.

(Suddenly decades have become genres -- what gives?)

the "diverse"-DMB-fan-with-a-belly-ring description was truly classic.

Here's what I hate at the moment about demographics: there is no such thing as a Top 40 station in America--that is, a station that plays the 40 most popular songs in the country, no matter what they are.

And I would listen to this station in my car _all the time_ if such a thing existed.

As it is, I just listen to Hot 97 ("blazin' hip-hop and R&B").

"the "diverse"-DMB-fan-with-a-belly-ring description was truly classic."

I prefer Maura's RHCP quote, considering its source.

aaaaaaaaaah GWR! Growing up in the West Country this was impossible to escape. Has there ever been a more bland radio station with a narrow playlist? They even hired DLT when he left Radio 1 in a strop. The scary thing is how popular it is, and I think they own loads of franchises around the UK too.

yes to douglas! probably related: i remember reading articles on the splitting of the 'america's top 40' radio show shortly after the singles chart changed its formula for success & added soundscan reports because the 'new' charts had too much hip-hop for some listeners' tastes. (now the shows' playlists are based strictly on the airplay charts.)

ps, the hip hop station here also uses the 'bangin' hip hop and r & b' tagline.

(also, a confession: there was a period in the early '90s when i owned 'blood sugar sex magik.' now we all know.)

R&B/hip-hop fans constantly feel the need to defend their music from even the slightest reproach, like it's an endangered species, conveniently forgetting that the boom-thwap is fucking EVERYWHERE now. Ragging on a 'no-rap' station is chartpop triumphalism gone berserk. (I know fans of jazz, classical, and yes, hip-hop who won't listen to any guitar music ever, and I sure don't feel the need to subject them to the Brainbombs because of some siege mentality.)

Besides, if you truly care about music, what are you doing with the radio on, anyway? 'Love in a whorehouse', and all that

Fair points Dave, and I totally agree, but its the use of the exclusion as an advertising policy that's interesting. I don't listen to Hot 97 for fairly obvious reasons, but I'd be surprised if it enticed in your guitar-hating friends by saying "...AND NO GUITARS!!!" It's the idea that a person's taste is based on negative reactions to one set of sounds rather than positive reactions to another.

"...AND NO RAP" is used quite a bit in Australia as well. I don't know whether it's racist - to me it suggests more a certain attitude towards what counts as proper music, and certain perceptions as to what is threatening to the integrity of said proper music. Interestingly, "...AND NO DANCE" was never used until very recently following trance and house's successive assaults on radio here. I wonder if maybe it's because unlike rap, dance music's lack of personalities or frontmen meant that it literally didn't register on the radar of the of radio stations or their audiences (the fact that it wouldn't be played in effect went without saying in the same way that not playing rock is a given on Hot '97). Dance = "other", but only recently joined rap as being a "threat".

This no rap or no dance thing, or any blanket hating of genres is so often just a nice way for people to label the music they like and conversely label themselves. The radio stations know that theres loads of wankers out there listening to a few bands like U2 or whatever and thinking they're too smart to listen to "ugh.....rap"or "dance". I don't know about the people you all know but when Kid A came out it was all quite funny, theres people I know who just 100 percent won't admit it has electronica influences. And instead they talk as if Radiohead invented electronic music. er.......full scale rant here and kind of off the point. but I think the radio stations know who their audience is and know that a pretty overtly negative attitude to rap or dance or whatever will please alot of them.

Hmmm...I don't know what it's like in Australia, but in Canada that was a fairly common thing, radio stations ragging on their 'competition' (i.e. "You won't hear the crap you'll find further down the dial", etc.) The print ads for radio showed various artists with the red-slash through them, the audio ads would have an 'offending' record start only to be scratched, then sound of vinyl breaking etc. Maybe that's why it doesn't seem like anything remarkable to me whatever. (Of course, in Canada most stations are owned by the same people, so if you switched from one to the other the ad revenue would go to the same place, anyway)

That wasn't a slur on Radiohead, or even their fans. It's just Kid A made their fans who are not interested in music work as nice lab rats for anyone who wanted to look at genre prejudices. right now I'm totally off the point.

it's more the anti-strategy that bothers me, although there's also an album rock station here that proudly proclaims itself as playing no rap metal and that doesn't bother me as much. mind you, i'm not much of a rap defender—i just find the 'no rap' tagline to have a lot of racial telegraphing in it, especially when other white-aimed stations seem to have not as much of a problem playing eminem.

(dave q: you never flip around stations in the car? also, if i could walk into every public place where i ate lunch, bought my 11:30am soda, etc, and tell them to change the music they were playing and put on whatever cd i had in my pocket during my stay there, i would. alas, i have a feeling this would blackball me from many places, and i don't really feel like walking more than three blocks for lunch until the spring starts at least.)

It would annoy me more in terms of the musical prejudice of it. I mean they wouldn't have qualms playing Marvin Gaye or something would they?

oh they absolutely would not play marvin gaye, under any circumstances.

mind you they might play the 'london mix,' or whatever the one with only bono is called, of the 'what's going on' tribute.

It would annoy me in the way it bugs Douglas - All the hits and no rap ISNT ALL THE HITS. I feel the same way about pop radio stations here not playing Gordon Haskell incidentally, at least my head does even if my heart is kind of grateful.

VH1 were proudly displaying their hilarious new slogan the other day "MUSIC TELEVISION THAT'S NOT FOR KIDS" but then followed it with Steps in concert, which I thought was a bit odd.

MTV2 had a particularly awful one along the lines of "IF YOU HATE POP AND LIKE YOUR MUSIC LOUD, INTENSE AND DANGEROUS THEN YOU'RE IN THE RIGHT PLACE"

Am I the only one who gets murderously angry by that sort of thing, maybe I wasn't clear enough in my other post. er maybe I'm wrong but like I say it seems to be just aimed at idiots who want to label themselves as liking "loud, intense and dangerous" music or whatever and it encourages people to hate whole genres they've never even heard. correct me if I'm wrong.

Sorry to bring up your age again, Ronan, but if I were 18 then yes I might get murderously angry at such crassness. But now I just think it's quite funny.

I do think it's funny too. but I guess it comes from you not having to deal with all the products of it, ie people my age who think all rap is puff daddy and all dance is brandon block.

But they're funny too!

no they're stoopidheads.

Mike Daddino: "radio has utterly disowned the fifties". I can confirm that the same thing is happening in the UK with Radio 2 and the Gold stations, both almost completely ignoring the 50s compared to 10 years ago and increasingly leaving the first half of the 60s behind as well. Now of course constant R2 airplay puts Train and Gordon Haskell in the charts. Progress?

Most-watched music channel since I got digital = MTV Base. I cringed at that VH1 slogan too, Nick.

There are oldies stations out here that play stuff from the fifties, most notably WCBS.

But they suck, by and large, because they're as conservative and demographic-whoring as any of the other stations. OK, while I remember a time when WCBS still made token attempts to play the hits of the day (even things like "Word Up" and "Raspberry Beret" and the totally unavoidable "Mony Mony" remake by Billy Idol), I understand that seguing from The Skyliners to S Club 7 must sound awfully weird no matter who's the DJ. Still, these stations' playlists seem to shrink and shrink 'til only the most overexposed artifacts of two overrated generations are played. (I predict that by the year 2015, most oldies stations will restrict their playlist to only those songs featured on the soundtracks to movies with Meg Ryan in them. And everything by the Beatles. Except for "Revolution #9.")

Come to think of it, Radio Disney is the closest thing to a oldies station worth listening to 'round here.

FUCK DEMOGRAPHICS. Fuck that shit. I mean it. I'm tired of the mass media making and solidifying these razor-sharp divisions between black and white, kid and adult, new and old, hip and unhip. It makes pop culture insular and predictable and downright retarded as well.

Mike's last sentence above - absolutely OTM

But I still hear some hits format stations here in Philadelphia (again, mostly when I am at the gym) playing black and white music side by side. It's not as though there aren't any top 40 stations that don't play an integrated playlist. For all I know though the one I am thinking of may have gone under. I think it was B100.

Mike's understandable plaint is why I don't listen to the radio...

Today I was listening to the very station Maura mentioned in her initial post. I was more on the fence about the issue earlier, but I'd forgotten how smug-sounding their tagline was. It really is even more obnoxious than it looks on paper, they say "rap" in a way that heightens its rhyming with "crap", and with a tone of voice usually reserved for things like noticing dogshit on the bottom of your shoe.

And their playlist isn't much, indeed. I listened for about 45 minutes, and it was a tremendous relief when, after a long string of like Creed and Nickelback, the Cure's "Love Song" came in -- and I'm not even much of a Cure fan at all, really, but it was obviously light-years better than nearly anything else they'd been playing.

One thought: of all the "major" genres, rap is probably the one most frowned upon in corporate listening environments.

btw, I still own the RHCP BSSM album, and I still like it.

I live in the Philadelphia area, and they often do delibreate slips----"We have no crap--I mean rap!"----and yes, it IS blanketed racism, to be specific, Democrat racism, where you sound like you're 'with it' and 'hip', but in fact you're just a stuck up poser wigger-ofay that lives in the suburbs and reads Readers' Digest and People so that you're "in the know"(instead of actually going to clubs and parties and concerts and to the city to see what's actually going on in culture and trends because you don't want anything to do with the "bad" black people[instead of seeing them as people period], you like the "good" black people, the ones who never break laws and never rap, but shop at Aeropostale and the Gap like the good little house niggers they are) . As long as white people(and I'm one) continue to blame blacks for high taxes, crime, and lowered property values, they won't see rap as anything more than vile and vulgar. Unfortunately, inrecent years, rappers have deliberately been trying to live up to that image in order to sell themselves to white audiences that are way too scared to confront the realities of the ghetto, but are more than happy to live throught them vicariously in glamorized gangsta-style. And in the long run, who gets hurt? The nieghborhoods that bred rap music in the first place. Instead of drawing attention to social ills, they praise them because it's the new shiek. So no one gets help. Hell, the may even LOSE supporters who are dumb enough to think that blacks take pride in dilapidated housing projects, lack of employment opportunities, insufficient medical care, and widespread gang violence. Meanwhile, rappers today(which are more and more coming from middle-class backgrounds) live in luxury, limos, gold chains, jewelry, sexy groupies, wads of cash, champagne, caviar, chronic, and Carson Daly, all the time growing less and less interested in their 'hoods and more interested in soft drink commercials and movie deals. In other words, they are becoming slaves to big business. Listen to earlier rap records; they have none of the stylized affection for the 'hard knock life'. Some did portray themselves as outcasts, but it was an accurate description, since rap was a very new and unusual form of music. It was spoken, not sung, it used record scratching as its primary instrument, and the first rap artists came frome the streets. But it wasn;t violent or offensive or inappropriate. It was just different(which, for some people, was reason enough to hate it, whetherv they ever listened to it or not). To this day, I'm not entirely sure how it became the bullet-bloodied, fucking-fortified abhoration it is today. I miss old school.

So when radiostations don't play rap because it's crap that's racism but when you denounce rap because it's now BECOME crap that's er...

you lost me

. . .instead of actually going to clubs and parties and concerts and to the city to see what's actually going on in culture and trends because you don't want anything to do with the "bad" black people

When I lived in the suburbs, I remember people talking about being afraid of going into Philadelphia, etc. and I remember thinking that was pretty funny. I live in a nice part of center city (where I am paying more for rent than I probably should be on my lower middle class income), and I have to admit that, realistically, there are a predominantly black clubs I would not want to go to as a Caucus Asian. (No, I'm not really a white five percenter.) But also, given the whole image around hip-hop, given the way a lot of the kids I see who wear the gear that goes with it behave, I would not want to go into that atmosphere. I could see myself maybe checking out some sort of underground hip-hop that might draw a more mellow crowd, but I don't think I would be comfortable at most hip-hop shows. Frankly I can't help thiking that a white person, who was not obviously heavily into the scene, might be made to feel unwelcome at most hip-hop shows. However, I can't base this on experience or even hearsay.

I do remember going with a bunch of friends to a dance party sponsored by a black fraternity at Penn, I think it was, that one of us had been invited to (she was black). Anyhow, they left to go to another party at a certain point, but I hung around afterwards because I was into the music, whatever it was. When the lights came up, one of the brothers looked at me and said, "How'd that motherfucker get in here?" (I have to add that someone else who was there told him to be quiet, or something to that effect.) Of course, if I remember correctly that this was a Penn. fraternity party, then maybe that is the explanation for his obnoxious behavior. He probably sniffed out that I was a lowly Temple graduate.

I think I am saying all this defensively, to allay guilt or something.

after a long string of like Creed and Nickelback, the Cure's "Love Song" came in -- and I'm not even much of a Cure fan at all, really, but it was obviously light-years better than nearly anything else they'd been playing.

That's funny, when I heard that station briefly on Sunday they also played the Cure's "Love Song," and I had a similar reaction. I don't like the Cure, but it seemed preferable to virtually everything else they were playing. I also noticed that one rock song they played (I don't know the band or the name, but it has a lot of "Hey now"s in it) actually has a little scratching in it, which I thought was kind of ironic.

Actually, I've met a lot of nice students from Penn.