| HN Mirror

We had a whole list of stuff we wouldn't play. R Kelly's first album was around 93 (I can't remember now) and the video of him and the underage girl that initially got him charged was known about at the time. The music and also information about the musicians reached people in the loop somewhat earlier than it reached everyone else. It's also 30+ years ago and details are not easy to remember, but there was no social media or internet. We had pirated cassette tapes and vinyl freebies from the distributors and word of mouth. R Kelly specifically there were djs who played him. This was not a commercial station so we could ban Tupac with no problems and we did. We also thought he was a mediocre rapper. There's lots of revisionism in how people remember things now.

For context we were in a big northeastern city with a good range and at the time there was almost no other regular rap programming on the radio (one other show locally). Outside NYC it was very hard to get rap (or even R&B) on the radio except in certain places or in very commercial programming (and then biz market and Beastie boys were maybe the best stuff you could put on the radio). Something like hit 107 in ATL (a very receptive market) started in 1990 and even there rap programming was mostly on college and community stations. We had guest djs beeping swearwords live on turntables while they stole our records because everyone was too high to pay attention. It was very much a bunch of kids into music convincing someone that this music deserved a time slot and one mistake and it all got cancelled. A lot of them were socially conscious and there was a lot of pushback against the misogynistic and gangster stuff but commerce won. We had issues about playing shabba ranks and the like too because of all the homophobia in dancehall. Tupac's case was a tough one because he had fans and defenders.