Man, do those days seem prehistoric now. It used to be that people were just as loyal to their favorite radio station as they were to their sports teams. Every day, you'd see dozens of cars with KLOL, KIKK, or 97 Rock stickers on the windows or bumpers. Those stations defined who you were. They were your lifestyle. If you were a KIKKer, you wore boots, a huge belt buckle and a Stetson, drove a "KIKK-Up truck," drank Lone Star and two-stepped on Saturday night. A 97 Rock sticker meant Saturday found you at 17 Mile Road in Galveston, where you smoked lots of weed, beer-bonged a 12-pack of Bud and puked all over your Trans Am. (And then drove to the Ratt show at Cardi's.) Rock 101 was slightly more uptown. A KLOL person wouldn't puke on his car, and it would probably be a Camaro. And before that, a KLOL sticker could get you in trouble. "Back in the '70s, you could get pulled over for having a KLOL sticker," remembers Press contributor Greg Ellis. "It was a sign of rebellion, not conformity."
Today, the only radio stickers you see are for rap and Hispanic stations and oddities on the dial like KPFT and KTRU. Commercial rock and country radio have lost the Anglo and assimilated Hispanic youth. (I stress that last point because there are probably tens of thousands of local thirtysomething assimilated Hispanics who are extremely pissed by KLOL's format switch.)
One of the radio conglomerates could get these kids back, but only if it were bold enough to spin rock and hip-hop side-by-side. Okay, this is the third time I've said this in the last nine months, but recent events have made me nothing if not more certain that this format will work. Why is their no station here -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- that spins the likes of the Killers, the Faint, Franz Ferdinand, the Strokes, Radiohead, U2 and Bright Eyes alongside Eminem, 50 Cent, OutKast, the Roots and Kanye West? One that also played classics like Public Enemy, the Violent Femmes, Eric B. and Rakim, and the Cars? What's so difficult about that? Almost nobody born since the mid-'70s would mind a little straight-up hip-hop (other than the three tracks off Licensed to Ill the Buzz spins) mixed in with their rock, because that's the way they've been jamming their whole lives. It's a demographic now. It's reality. It's who the youth of America is today.
But no, when it comes to Anglos at least, Clear Channel can see only in black and white. When the company shut down a KLOL-like station in San Jose, California, and flipped it to a Latin format earlier this year, Clear Channel Communications regional vice president Ed Krampf had this to say in the San Jose Mercury News: "The fastest part of the market is Latin. And rock is having trouble. Young white kids are listening to hip-hop, and the other young segment is Hispanic…Sometimes you just have to move on.''
Yes, young whites are listening to hip-hop, but that's not all they listen to. Some of those same whites also listen to lots of indie rock, or country, or hard rock. At least in terms of what they listen to, they are neither white nor black but brown.
Which brings us back to the target audience of Mega 101. I've listened to the station for a few hours, and even though my Spanish is barely conversational and by no means up to the task of deciphering the slangy and rapid-fire lyrics of the music, I've enjoyed the station. You'll hear a Ricky Martin remix alongside one with Latin rappers rhyming in Spanish over a Lil Jon track alongside another edgier group rapping over the tracks to "This Is Radio Clash" and "Bust a Move." Molotov mingles with the Kumbia Kings; Paulina Rubio segues into Juanes.
Hell, it's as if you were hearing a Spanish version of the unborn Anglo station I've been harping on about all year. It's a sad comment on either us or them that they don't think the Anglos can take a station like that. To them I say, try us.
