Radio Is Not Black and White

To the editors:

It wasn't enough for Geoffrey C. Upton to complain about Boston's "White" station, Kiss 108; now we have Jal D. Mehta spouting about Boston's "black" station, Jam'n 94.5 (Opinion, Jan. 25). Both writers seem to agree that each of these stations represents a lack of "integration" in Boston's radio market that reflects a corresponding lack of integration in Boston's social world.

I have been listening to a wide variety of Boston radio stations for nearly four years now--and working at one, Harvard's own WHRB 95.3 FM--and I have to say that if the only stations that your writers listen to are Jam'n 94.5 and Kiss 108, then they probably don't have a clue about the Boston radio scene. Upton is mad that Kiss 108 doesn't play enough "black" music; Mehta cries that Jam'n isn't serving as the "sounding board for black concerns to suburban white listeners" that it would be, while WILD (which was supposedly a great "sounding board" in the 1960s) is too small.

Forgive me for questioning the assumption of your writers that radio should play "black music" to teach white people a lesson or two. And excuse me for pointing out that both of your writers seem to look at their home cities--suburban Baltimore for Mehta and somewhere in the New York area for Upton--as the standard-bearers of racial integration and harmony, while claiming that Boston is a backward, segregated, parochial city.

Let me tell you about a show I saw on New Year's Eve. The band, playing at the Hynes Convention Center, was called Babaloo; it played Spanish hip-hop and salsa music. Oddly enough, the lead singer was Hispanic, but the lead guitarist was a white women, one of the drummers was black, and the bass player was this grungy blond dude wearing a beat-up Red Sox hat and chewing on a cigarette. And as the lead singer called out the choruses in Spanish, the mostly-white audience jumped, bounced, danced, waved their hands and responded as best they could in a language most of them barely knew. Your writers might know that if they got out to some live shows a bit more often. Instead, they like to deconstruct the commercial-radio big boys and pretend they have discovered the key to race relations in Boston.

What they have to realize is that commercial radio stations will never play more than 40 songs because they know that suburban dupes and office managers will keep their stereos and walkmen tuned in for at least a few minutes at a time--in other words, there's a market for the stuff. And those 40 songs will tend to be from a narrow range of tastes--the rule in commercial radio is "specialize to capitalize." If you want to hear a broader range of music, you have to look elsewhere. This is as true of classical music, for example, as it is of "urban contemporary." When you get tired of hearing Beethoven's Fifth for the 900th time, it's time to tune out Classical 102.5 WCRB and tune in WGBH 89.7 or WHRB.

As for the bit about music providing the key to social change--I don't doubt that it can, in as far as it can create a broader awareness of the human condition, in a particular place or in every place. But to assume that getting kids to listen to hip-hop is the key way to bring about that awareness and that change is really to misunderstand the way both music and the phenomenon of social change work. And if you expect commercial radio stations to be on the front lines of political or cultural battles, you need to realize that commercial radio in Boston, like commercial radio everywhere, is not about black and white--it's about green. But good music is still out there in Boston, and so is a community of multiracial, multilingual, multiwhatever musicians and listeners. JOEL B. POLLAK '99   Jan. 25, 1999