“I’m a hip hop child,” says Barry Mayo, sincerely, and laughs. “A 42-year-old hip hop child!” Mayo–born in the south Bronx, raised in Harlem–made his mark in radio broadcasting in the late 70s and early 80s, helping turn Chicago’s black-pop station WGCI into a nationally known powerhouse. From there he went to New York and did the same with WRKS, the renowned “Kiss.” There, he says, he was one of the first broadcasters in the country to play rap, boosting the careers of and hanging out with people like Run-D.M.C., L.L. Cool J, and Kurtis Blow. Now he’s a one-third owner of Broadcast Partners Inc. Until recently the company was best known in Chicago for WVAZ, which proffers a softish mix of black ballads under the name V103. But BPI has been booming on the acquisition front: it now owns 11 stations, in New York, Dallas, Charlotte, and Detroit as well as Chicago. Most recently, and closest to home, the company took the two WJPCs (AM and FM) off the hands of the Johnson Publishing Company. The hip hop connection? Mayo’s recipe for the moribund stations is a potent mixture of hard black pop and rap, making him the first to bring an avowed hip hop sensibility to a commercial Chicago FM outlet.
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The two ‘JPCs (950 AM and 106.5 FM) have not been forces in Chicago radio. Part of the problem is the FM’s weak signal–a deficiency Mayo will have to cope with as well. Another was that the company’s daring experiment with 24-hour hip hop on the AM side, started almost two years ago, never got the promotion it deserved. Not that selling the station to advertisers was an easy job. “You’re fighting the youth bias and the ethnic bias as well,” notes Phyllis Stark, Billboard’s chief radio watcher; she points out that ‘JPC AM lasted longer than any other all-rap station in America. Mayo sympathizes with the company’s problems, but has his own ideas as well. “Point one, it’s very hard to make an AM-only radio station a success,” he concedes. “Point two–that’s point one and two. I don’t want to slam nobody.” It remains a mystery why MTV can make a lot of money playing a color-blind mix (rap, black pop, rock ‘n’ roll, and alternative) and radio can’t. Stark says a new “Channel X” radio format presenting a mix similar to MTV’s is emerging, but it hasn’t made a commercial mark yet. One problem is that the sheer number of radio outlets in a given market lends itself to specialization. “With MTV, how many options do you have?” asks Green.
