Hip Hop and Madison Racism
Area hip hop artists and fans are disappointed and angry that the area's sole radio station dedicated to the music has switched formats and now plays rock music. Rob Thomas of The Cap Times wrote about the change recently. His article highlights two key points:
1) It was a commercial radio station and thusly made its money from advertisers.
The problem was that the station, owned by Beaver Dam-based Good Karma Broadcasting, couldn't attract enough advertising revenue.
"We're all personally attached to it," Williams said of the hip-hop format. "It was just not supported by the advertising community to the level that we need it to be to continue operating in the format."
2) The closing is a loss to Madison hip hop community and the overall cultural milieu of the area.
But losing a full-time outlet for one of the most popular musical genres around, as well as a cultural force in American society, is dispiriting for hip-hop fans in Madison. Willie Ney, director of the UW Multicultural Arts Initiative, said he wasn't necessarily a fan of the station's mainstream rap playlist, although his wife and kids enjoyed it.
He still said the format switch leaves a void for hip-hop fans, both those who enjoy the kind of rap they see on MTV and those who support the more positive-minded underground forms prevalent among local hip-hop artists.
"Even though a lot of it to me is not positive, is not empowering, it's still a vital cultural element within this new demographic of our community," Ney said. "Now with that shut off, it's a terrible reflection of how limited we are, culturally, in this area."
While I'm sure many people in the area have commented online about the change, the person with whom I am most familiar who can most likely comment on it with some authority is local rapper El Guante.
El Guante wrote about the station's format switch at his blog in an entry called "Hot 105.9's new logo". In it, he basically concedes that the change was motivated by money, i.e. – the station wasn't making enough. But he follows this concession with this:
My knee-jerk response was like many other people's: "yet another example of Madison trying to destroy hip hop and wage a proxy war on people of color." Maybe that response is still valid. After all, if local businesses aren't advertising on hip hop stations because they don't want to attract black and Latino clientele, or because they view the music as evil or whatever, that does reflect upon the city. If the owners of the station didn't understand the culture and were just pimping it for money, that does reflect upon the city.
While he questions his knee-jerk reaction, he doesn't question the basic assumption that "Madison [is] trying to destroy hip hop and wage a proxy war on people of color." These same general sentiments were echoed at the Capital Newspapers forum by "roboto" and reprinted by Hastings Cameron, who writes a blog at the same site called "Emcees Without Voices". Here are some quotes:
To continually ignore this group [minorities], and shut down all outlets for promoting this hip hop culture, shows how small minded and non-cosmopolitan this city truly is.
The reason why hip hop has a bad rap and why there is violence in Madison at these events is because people there are frustrated, and have been feeling belittled and ignored for years.
The closing of this station, with no feedback heard from the public, is not a surprise, its merely the perpetuation of ignorant practices that the powers that be in this city will not stop.
Finally roboto wishes "good luck to the city of Madison in their fight against diversification."
Here are some thoughts of mine. N.B. - I am a pale face and am not a hip hop fan, generally speaking.
Why are the Janesville and Rockford businesses & communities exempted from criticism? Truth be known, I never knew about the station until I heard about it switch formats a few days ago so I honestly do not know what businesses advertised on the station or stopped advertising on the station. (El Guante refers to the blog of an employee of the station who wrote "Our company was not getting the financial gains from it that it had once received from playing this format.") What companies stopped advertising and why?
To blame the move away from hip hop by a radio station in Janesville, some 45 miles away from Madison, by imitating Kanye West and saying that Madison doesn't care about black people is, in my opinion, wholly unfair. El Guante postulates that businesses don't want black or Latino clientele. Maybe they don't, I can't say with certainty. But neither can he. What were the demographics of the station? Did advertising rates change?
Hip hop probably has a bad rap for many reasons but violence at shows is certainly one of them. In addition, middle class white America has a view of hip hop that is one dominated by thugs wearing baggy pants & lots of gold chains who wave pistols around, consider all women to be hos, and liberally use the word "nigger". Do you suppose this is the image that Willie Ney was referring to as not being positive or empowering? Fair or not, hip hop has a serious PR problem that is not the creation of the ruling cabal of whities here in Madison.
What was the reception of the station here in Madison? Roboto wrote: "Another problem was it barely registered since the airwaves were stretched all the way to Rockford." Now, I think he lacks an understanding of the transmission of radio waves but point taken. This WI State Journal article states, "Hot 105.9 is a regional station; it reaches from Rockford to Madison, where it enjoys devoted young audiences of teens and twentysomethings even if the signal crackles at times in Madison." And how about this blog post by David Muhammad, an active participant in Madison's hip hop scene. In it he says, "It was almost too good for Madison, at least the half of Madison who could hear it." Is it possible that listenership in Madison wasn't particularly high because of the less-than-optimal reception? If this were the case, just how much incentive did Madison advertisers have? Again, I don't know anything about the station's ratings here in Madison. Perhaps the majority of listeners were in closer to proximity to Janesville and Rockford.
Reiterating that I never listened to 105.9, I must say that I'm confused. Was it the case that half of Madison couldn’t tune in to the station? Or did it just suffer a bit of static? Why is Madison the sole bad guy here considering that the station was 45 miles away in another city? All of the blog posts I've referred to view what happened here from the starting point that Madison is waging a war against hip hop and that the city is racist. These are the lenses through which all else is filtered. Notice the absence of any statistics. Just how many people in Madison listened? When you view the situation here with glasses of "if Madison cared about black people, then this station would never have switched formats", then you are only going to see racism because those glasses don't allow for anything else. For instance, it doesn't allow for Nick Nice's comment:
I used to do a Sunday night show a few years back on 105.9 called Fromage (which I built into their top rated show at the time). I actually sponsored my own show since they were so hard up for advertising dollars back then. I was pretty much free to do whatever I wanted since I was paying for it. So when my store closed, my sponsorship ended. The fact that it was a hugely successful show would have made one think that they could have done something with it and actually made some money from it. But did they do anything? Nope. Unceremoniously dumped.
No regrets on my end but this whole thing boils down to a station that is run by people that don't get the radio business and how to actually make money from it.
Instead of asking what the hell happened to the station, the bloggers above generally just launched into screeds against Madison. "Oh, Madison liberals aren't really liberal and their beloved 92.1 sucks too; Madison liberals are afraid of black people who aren't Uncle Toms." The possibility that the station's management lacked business acumen was never on their maps. Deftly avoiding the management and businesses outside of Madison, they immediately attacked the white liberals here. And that is what irks me about the comments of the bloggers I've quoted. Is there racism in Madison? Of course there is. No one in their right mind would deny it. But none of these bloggers proved to me that racism was at fault here. In addition, that little, if any, allowance was given to the possibilities that the station changed formats for reasons other than the evil of the latte drinking, tree hugging, "diversity" bleating liberals of Madison bespeaks a much more serious problem than a radio station going from hip hop to rock.
So, is Madison really waging a war against hip hop? Maybe it is and I just don't know about it. Can any readers comment? Also, is anyone reading that listened to the station? If so, what was the reception like for you? What companies advertised?
1) It was a commercial radio station and thusly made its money from advertisers.
The problem was that the station, owned by Beaver Dam-based Good Karma Broadcasting, couldn't attract enough advertising revenue.
"We're all personally attached to it," Williams said of the hip-hop format. "It was just not supported by the advertising community to the level that we need it to be to continue operating in the format."
2) The closing is a loss to Madison hip hop community and the overall cultural milieu of the area.
But losing a full-time outlet for one of the most popular musical genres around, as well as a cultural force in American society, is dispiriting for hip-hop fans in Madison. Willie Ney, director of the UW Multicultural Arts Initiative, said he wasn't necessarily a fan of the station's mainstream rap playlist, although his wife and kids enjoyed it.
He still said the format switch leaves a void for hip-hop fans, both those who enjoy the kind of rap they see on MTV and those who support the more positive-minded underground forms prevalent among local hip-hop artists.
"Even though a lot of it to me is not positive, is not empowering, it's still a vital cultural element within this new demographic of our community," Ney said. "Now with that shut off, it's a terrible reflection of how limited we are, culturally, in this area."
While I'm sure many people in the area have commented online about the change, the person with whom I am most familiar who can most likely comment on it with some authority is local rapper El Guante.
El Guante wrote about the station's format switch at his blog in an entry called "Hot 105.9's new logo". In it, he basically concedes that the change was motivated by money, i.e. – the station wasn't making enough. But he follows this concession with this:
My knee-jerk response was like many other people's: "yet another example of Madison trying to destroy hip hop and wage a proxy war on people of color." Maybe that response is still valid. After all, if local businesses aren't advertising on hip hop stations because they don't want to attract black and Latino clientele, or because they view the music as evil or whatever, that does reflect upon the city. If the owners of the station didn't understand the culture and were just pimping it for money, that does reflect upon the city.
While he questions his knee-jerk reaction, he doesn't question the basic assumption that "Madison [is] trying to destroy hip hop and wage a proxy war on people of color." These same general sentiments were echoed at the Capital Newspapers forum by "roboto" and reprinted by Hastings Cameron, who writes a blog at the same site called "Emcees Without Voices". Here are some quotes:
To continually ignore this group [minorities], and shut down all outlets for promoting this hip hop culture, shows how small minded and non-cosmopolitan this city truly is.
The reason why hip hop has a bad rap and why there is violence in Madison at these events is because people there are frustrated, and have been feeling belittled and ignored for years.
The closing of this station, with no feedback heard from the public, is not a surprise, its merely the perpetuation of ignorant practices that the powers that be in this city will not stop.
Finally roboto wishes "good luck to the city of Madison in their fight against diversification."
Here are some thoughts of mine. N.B. - I am a pale face and am not a hip hop fan, generally speaking.
Why are the Janesville and Rockford businesses & communities exempted from criticism? Truth be known, I never knew about the station until I heard about it switch formats a few days ago so I honestly do not know what businesses advertised on the station or stopped advertising on the station. (El Guante refers to the blog of an employee of the station who wrote "Our company was not getting the financial gains from it that it had once received from playing this format.") What companies stopped advertising and why?
To blame the move away from hip hop by a radio station in Janesville, some 45 miles away from Madison, by imitating Kanye West and saying that Madison doesn't care about black people is, in my opinion, wholly unfair. El Guante postulates that businesses don't want black or Latino clientele. Maybe they don't, I can't say with certainty. But neither can he. What were the demographics of the station? Did advertising rates change?
Hip hop probably has a bad rap for many reasons but violence at shows is certainly one of them. In addition, middle class white America has a view of hip hop that is one dominated by thugs wearing baggy pants & lots of gold chains who wave pistols around, consider all women to be hos, and liberally use the word "nigger". Do you suppose this is the image that Willie Ney was referring to as not being positive or empowering? Fair or not, hip hop has a serious PR problem that is not the creation of the ruling cabal of whities here in Madison.
What was the reception of the station here in Madison? Roboto wrote: "Another problem was it barely registered since the airwaves were stretched all the way to Rockford." Now, I think he lacks an understanding of the transmission of radio waves but point taken. This WI State Journal article states, "Hot 105.9 is a regional station; it reaches from Rockford to Madison, where it enjoys devoted young audiences of teens and twentysomethings even if the signal crackles at times in Madison." And how about this blog post by David Muhammad, an active participant in Madison's hip hop scene. In it he says, "It was almost too good for Madison, at least the half of Madison who could hear it." Is it possible that listenership in Madison wasn't particularly high because of the less-than-optimal reception? If this were the case, just how much incentive did Madison advertisers have? Again, I don't know anything about the station's ratings here in Madison. Perhaps the majority of listeners were in closer to proximity to Janesville and Rockford.
Reiterating that I never listened to 105.9, I must say that I'm confused. Was it the case that half of Madison couldn’t tune in to the station? Or did it just suffer a bit of static? Why is Madison the sole bad guy here considering that the station was 45 miles away in another city? All of the blog posts I've referred to view what happened here from the starting point that Madison is waging a war against hip hop and that the city is racist. These are the lenses through which all else is filtered. Notice the absence of any statistics. Just how many people in Madison listened? When you view the situation here with glasses of "if Madison cared about black people, then this station would never have switched formats", then you are only going to see racism because those glasses don't allow for anything else. For instance, it doesn't allow for Nick Nice's comment:
I used to do a Sunday night show a few years back on 105.9 called Fromage (which I built into their top rated show at the time). I actually sponsored my own show since they were so hard up for advertising dollars back then. I was pretty much free to do whatever I wanted since I was paying for it. So when my store closed, my sponsorship ended. The fact that it was a hugely successful show would have made one think that they could have done something with it and actually made some money from it. But did they do anything? Nope. Unceremoniously dumped.
No regrets on my end but this whole thing boils down to a station that is run by people that don't get the radio business and how to actually make money from it.
Instead of asking what the hell happened to the station, the bloggers above generally just launched into screeds against Madison. "Oh, Madison liberals aren't really liberal and their beloved 92.1 sucks too; Madison liberals are afraid of black people who aren't Uncle Toms." The possibility that the station's management lacked business acumen was never on their maps. Deftly avoiding the management and businesses outside of Madison, they immediately attacked the white liberals here. And that is what irks me about the comments of the bloggers I've quoted. Is there racism in Madison? Of course there is. No one in their right mind would deny it. But none of these bloggers proved to me that racism was at fault here. In addition, that little, if any, allowance was given to the possibilities that the station changed formats for reasons other than the evil of the latte drinking, tree hugging, "diversity" bleating liberals of Madison bespeaks a much more serious problem than a radio station going from hip hop to rock.
So, is Madison really waging a war against hip hop? Maybe it is and I just don't know about it. Can any readers comment? Also, is anyone reading that listened to the station? If so, what was the reception like for you? What companies advertised?
posted by Palmer at 2:55 PM
21 Comments:
Reception was poor in downtown Madison, both in a car and indoors.
I think saying "madison is waging wear on hip-hop" is a blanket statement - but there is a scent of something foul in the air. Many venues that support hip hop are shut down for one reason or another. I'm too new to Madison to really be able to dig into the history, but what happened at Club Majestic is a good example. In order to end hip hop shows, the police or city (one of the two) made a deal with the club that they could no longer host shows that feastured a DJ.
just caught your post via Dane 101. One of the things that I found most frustrating--given that I called and emailed the station 3-7 days before pieces ran in TCT and WSJ: reporters who actually seem to have gotten someone from the station on the phone still wrote pieces that were effectively: "loyal listener base" [insert generic quote, cite Arbitron rating]; "business decision" [insert generic quote from station mouthpiece]. There wasn't a single hard (or soft/fuzzy) number thrown around that in some way reflected "flagging advertiser support".
And the Arbitron rating is googleable.
Arbitron ratings put 105.9 at something like 15th or 16th in the Madison market--but last night the Arbitron market definition I found actually excluded Rock County [i.e. the county immediately surrounding the station]. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong place, but that seemed bizarre, because I couldn't find the market Rock County was supposed to be linked to.
Nick Nice's comment echoed the point of a user who was posting a bunch on a forum on radio-info.com, basically saying that the Karamazin's son doesn't have particularly astute management skills, and that Good Karma stations churn through formats like this all the time. [i haven't had a chance to verify this]
And yeah, if I come across ad-rate sheets or have a chance to speak to an ad-buyer... i'll put that up right away.
If the reception was truly poor in downtown Madison, then it seems like that would 86 a lot of the station's potential audience. This being the case, I wouldn't be surprised if Madison advertisers bailed or never jumped on the bandwagon.
As for the whole thing about waging war on hip hop, there's just too much that I don't know about the situation. Is racism involved? Very possibly. There's also probably a lot I don't know about the situation at Club Majestic. Like a lot of the white liberal types that got harangued in some of those posts, I never went to one of the hip hop nights and got my impression from the papers and Isthmus forum. Did the city/police harass the patrons or owners of the club prior to violence breaking out? Or is the issue that the city would never have done what they did had that level of violence broken out at a club that had a mostly white audience watching bluegrass bands?
i think you make some good points here-- particularly about the fact that this discussion shouldn't be so madison-centric.
here are my thoughts on the "war."
i think the bigger picture here isn't hip hop or 105.9, it's the tension between establishment madison and communities of color within the city. when i say "proxy war," i mean a proxy war with hip hop in ADDITION to direct conflicts involving the police and selective enforcement, racial profiling, juvenile imprisonment, UW's diversity problems, gentrification and more-- the "lack of cultural avenues" that's at the center of the hip hop debate is symptomatic of those things, but it also plays a part in creating a climate of hostility, or at least coldness.
it's a deep and multifaceted issue, and i wish a writer with more time and talent than i would analyze it in depth.
when i write about the "war on hip hop," i try to connect it back to this bigger, more important picture, but hip hop is often such a contentious issue that no one really pays attention to the larger stuff.
and racism is a slippery issue. we can shut down clubs and radio stations for all kinds of non-racist reasons, but if the people affected by those actions are predominately people of color, the overall effect is a racist one. that can be hard to grasp for a lot of well-meaning people, but that's the nature of racism today. we have to start looking at things more holistically-- not just at actions and intentions, but at the consequences of those actions and the impact of those intentions.
kind of all over the place-- just some thoughts.
Reception was fair in the hip hop enclave of Stoughton and would get better as you drove south toward Rockford. I listened ocassionaly and thought the format was pretty similar to Z104. (the same dozen songs in rotation and then a countdown every night to see what's moving up and down.)
If I remember correctly most of the advertisers were Janesville/ Rockford businesses. Mostly dance clubs with ladies and hip hop nights.
I never thought of Hot 159 as a madison radio station. I always thought it was a rockford station.
I can understand why people we listen to the station would be upset, unless you can get V100 jams out of Milwaukee you're out of luck if you want to hear the new Ludacris song.
And that does raise some interesting questions.
Why would a radio station that plays the most popular music of that young demographic that advertisers covet so much fail? Maybe the kids weren't voting with their pocketbooks.
I don't agree that Madion is waging a war on hip hop but I would agree that madison is waging a war against fun. If it's not a block party or some other drunk fest that's been going on for 30+ years the hippies don't like it. They shut down that portal music place and the isthmus closed down that club in the warehouse (who's name escapes me). They'll cry into their organic fair trade Chai latte if the blues festival gets shut down, but anything that some one under 30 would go to musted be stamped out at all costs.
Hi Mr. Hastings - I agree with you that the TCT and WSJ coverage was pretty bland. Has The Madison Times weighed in it? I'm not surprised that Rock county isn't part of the Madison market. I've always thought of Janesville, Beloit, and Rockford as being a corridor unto themselves.
But ratings don't seem to be the salient point here. As with The Mic, you can have good ratings but, if you can't attract advertisers who want to appeal to your audience, ratings don't matter much. And I don't recall the bloggers I quoted making a big deal out of them. It was more about Madison businesses. Not Janesville businesses, not Beloit business, nor Rockford businesses. Madison businesses. This is what I found most irritating about the bloggers' posts - everything got laid at Madison's doorstep right out of the gate.
Regardless of the numbers, we've got to remember that the station is gone. We can dissect statistics until the cows come home but that's not going to bring Hot 105.9 back. If you or anyone else holds a rally or starts a petition or does anything to try and get a hip hop station going again, let me know as I'd be happy to mention it here.
But right here and right now the lesson to take away from this is, for me anyway, the anger of the bloggers I quoted. They didn't prove to me that racism was at fault in this situation but they certainly did prove to me that Madison doesn't seem to offer much to young people of color as far as culture and giving them a voice and venues to be themselves and be heard. I can imagine that young colored people look around Madison and see very little that appeals to them, few places that they can go and feel comfortable, and very people speaking to them and their situation. We've got our Overture Center and condos everywhere so now it's time for Madison to look at its small but growing minority population.
Aside from the actual format change, the great tragedy here is the lack of outcry. I wrote about the almost total silence when the Palace Latin Club was the victim of arson and I see virtually the same thing happening here all over again. Someone commented on that post by saying that one of the owners was a jerk and the commenter was happy the club was gone. That, to me, was incredibly selfish. "I didn't like something so fuck everyone else - I'm glad it's gone." I never listened to 105.9 nor did I ever go to the PLC but I can understand how they were cultural magnets for people totally unlike me with very different tastes. I as a white person have plenty of places to go in Madison where I can feel comfortable and be with like-minded people and enjoy music and other elements of culture that appeal to me. And I would like to see this extended to folks around here who have more melanin in their skin than me.
How much of the situation in Madison is racism and how much is indifference?
Crikey! I publish a response to Hastings and I get 2 more comments. I'll reply to them when I get the change.
AS - Your impression of the station matches that of others. As far as your incredulity about the station failing, I am not sure what to say. I'd read Hastings' comment, for a start as there is mention of site with more info/bitching about this very aspect of the topic.
What happened with the Portal Music club? I remember it closing but cannot recall why. Was somebody playing "Blue Moon of Kentucky" too loudly?
I do think there's some merit to the whole "Madison is waging a war against fun" thing. Or maybe it's just my skewed perception of things. Perhaps it's more of an effort to put a nice middle class face on Madison. I don't think it's a war on fun so much as making the downtown less working class. The people who run this town don't want to project an image of the people who bust their asses at the Oscar Meyer plant day in and day out, they want an image of the people who study stem cells. Madison is not courting blue collar jobs, it is courting white collar ones. I think that the desires and concerns of wealthy condo dwellers of whatever color will always trump the desires and concerns of club goers of whatever color.
wow this is a busy blog. i just wanted to point something out:
"people of color" is generally considered more acceptable than "colored people."
i'm not trying to be an ass, just thought you may want to edit that or something. innocent mistake.
el guante - you too bring up some good points. I hope you don't think that my post was dismissive of them. If so, I hope to rectify that here.
I agree with you about the bigger picture. That's part of what I meant when I wrote that this is a "much more serious problem than a radio station going from hip hop to rock". You wrote that "if the people affected by those actions are predominately people of color, the overall effect is a racist one" and I can understand that. As I wrote in my reply to arch stanton, I think that the city's objective is one of projecting a middle class image. Monied interests in town want to fill those condos with people in the biomedical field who will go to the Overture Center and send their kids to the UW. Because of this, the interests of the working class and the poor get pushed to the side, regardless of color. A lot of people of color are poor and hence, like you said, the effect is racist. I don't think that raising the minimum wage or giving part-time employees time-off is a bad thing but I also don't think that these measures are going to eliminate poverty. They're band aids and not cures. A person working minimum wage jobs doesn't need the minimum wage to go up to $7.75/hour or whatever it is, these people need jobs that pay twice that. I say all of this because I think it shows that the city is not particularly keen on addressing the issue of poverty here in Madison. And when I say the city, I don't mean just the mayor of Common Council, I mean all 225,000 of us. Some people are dead serious about this issue but most people aren't. I am extremely disappointed to have a mayor who goes around trumpeting trolleys when he should be out there trumpeting plans to help alleviate poverty and improve schools. That Wisconsin has the highest rate of African-American incarceration in the country is a scandal that we are sweeping under the rug. I guess that when I read "war on hip hop" I didn't interpret to be what you meant, i.e. - as being connected to these larger issues. I had my blinders on and thought of it as being a really narrow "war". So that was my fuck up.
What do you think would happen if a hip hop club opened on the south side away from the precious condos and retired librarians from Arizona? It would be very interesting to see what the city does.
Also, what do you think Madison (i.e. - we white liberals) can do to open up more cultural avenues for people of color? What can we do to change the climate of hostility and/or coldness? I think that there's this assumption in the conversations I've been reading and in my writing as well here in which we take it for granted that being a youth of color means that you automatically like hip hop or that hip hop culture is the prime factor in their lives. What other cultural avenues can we open?
el guante wrote: "wow this is a busy blog."
Not really. This was just because it got mentioned at dane101 and thedailypage. It's usually pretty quiet. (Except when arch stanton and I get into it.) Perhaps this is because I don't talk about hip hop very often. ;)
As for the "colored people" bit. I'll take a look for it. I admit that I'm not up on up on my PC terms. I guess at 34 I'm too old and set in my ways.
i definitely agree that ratings aren't the salient point--what I was initially trying to call attention to was the fact that every article cited "stable ratings" and gave an actual number (regardless of the value of that number) but no one really got around to "dissecting the numbers" as far as advertisers and ad-buyers were concerned. When the lack of ad revenue was the reason for the format change, that seemed like an extreme lack of "reportorial oversight" (sorry can't think of a better term).
As for the Janeville market being excluded--i was basically paraphrasing my most recent post (in which i kinda included the caveat "yeah, what's done is done" in re: to continued numbers parsing)
Nielsen supposedly lumps Rock County into the Madison market for their various ratings.
I mentioned this not to dwell on the ratings, but because it seems like the fact that the station's actually in Janesville has been downplayed/overlooked, beyond the issue of reception quality.
i.e. there's a listener base there. How have they reacted? I'm completely sidestepping race--but I never even thought to check media outlets based closer to Janesville when I was looking for information, other perspectives, etc. [i'm not counting technorati]
Palmer - I never heard you say coloured people until I did, because I call myself coloured. But yeah, POC is the accepted term these days.
I think el guante has it right about the culmulative effects of many unrelated issues. I won't pretend to understand how commercial radio works, but it's not difficult for me to imagine that a business or company might think that fans of hip hop don't "need" their stuff, which could be really good marketing, ignorance, or flat out racism.
Remind me to tell you the story of when I went to buy shampoo and the lady at the salon thought I just *had* to be looking for a pick (because that was the only "black" thing in the place).
Malicious intent does not always preclude an act of racism.
The D.
D - When I was growing up in the 1970s & 80s, people whose ancestors came from West Africa and had a lot of melanin in their skin called themselves black and that's how everyone else referred to them. (At least those who were being nice.) I, being of European stock and having pale skin, was always referred to as being white and that's how I've always referred to myself. I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut that I also heard folks like Ozzie Davis and Jesse Jackson use the term "colored people". In fact, the phrase is part of NAACP so it is something I've been familiar with much longer than PoC.
Part of me feels like, if the phrase "colored people" was good enough for W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, it's certainly good enough for me. But point taken.
Speaking of Douglass, if you go to the Art Institute, see if the daguerreotype of him is still on display. There's a link to it at FS.
As for the rest of your comment, I agree with el guante as well and made a post at FS yesterday relating to it.
Now as far as your hair goes, you'll just have to go to a different salon. See this:
http://www.madison.com/wsj/mad/business/index.php?ntid=116187
Some of my best friends are black. Well, some people I used to work with are black. I really like Dave Chapelle, that's gotta count for something.
Do girls look good with hip hop Grillz ?
They look fly.
A war against hip-hop? Hardly. Racism in Madison? Yes, but totally irrelevant - it's everywhere. No outcry from the unwashed masses? Nothing new.
The reality here, folks, is that ratings determine the per-minute price of advertising, and ratings are a figure based on listener demographics. Even a large listener-audience can be meaningless if it's not a demographic group with money - specifically what's known as "disposable revenue" -to spend.
The easy-listening, country (and I don't mean Shania Twain), album-formatted, jazz, and other specific music listeners have gone through this same thing in markets across the nation.
Does the black community have money to spare? No slur or badmouth intended here; I don't live in Wisconsin and have no local knowledge. I do know that the white suburban middle-class wannabe 16-to-25 crowd has money, but are they hip-hop and/or rap fans? Again, I don't know.
As the expression goes, "money goes where money is." And in my eyes, losing a rap or hip-hop station is more of a gain than a loss. No racism there, I just don't like it.
ob dan - you lost me right away. If racism is everywhere, then how could it have no effect? That's like saying oxygen is everywhere so no one breathes it. Its ubiquitousness doesn't render it impotent. It is not like an equation where a variable on both sides of the equals sign can just be removed.
To be sure, money talks but, to the best of my knowledge, the Majestic's problems did not include a lack of patrons. And as far as radio stations go, hip-hop listeners are not exclusively black. Perhaps you don't know that white kids love the music too. In fact, I believe they are the biggest consumers of hip hop CDs.
I don't listen to much hip hop but I'd prefer that the public airwaves be diverse and cater to as much of the public as possible. However, you are free to be as selfish as you care to be.
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