"Breaks in the Air provides a social and cultural history of rap music on Black radio in New York City from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. Radio shows were crucial in the growth of hip hop in New York, and Klaess explores the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations converging in that post-Civil Rights period. John Klaess offers a careful analysis of the city's three crucial commercial radio stations-WBLS-FM 107.5, WRKS-FM 98.7, and WHBI-FM 105.9-drawing on an archive of tape recordings of the stations' broadcasts. Klaess moves from a history of deregulation in the broadcasting industry to the ways that American racial politics inflected the broadcast of rap and looks at how these radio stations engaged with this unique historical situation, how technologies both aided and limited their broadcasts, how their broadcasts were received, and what the public broadcast of this music and culture meant to young people of color in New York"--
In Breaks in the Air John Klaess tells the story of raps emergence on New York Citys airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hops performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New Yorks African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.
John Klaess tells the story of raps emergence on New York Citys airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hops performance culture to radio.