The Demise of Hyphy

"It was a new regime. Things change," Cunningham says when asked about the incident. But Herrera says other local promoters favored by Johnson were allowed access. Cunningham says the new policy allowed indie-label reps to make monthly appointments at the station, while reps from national companies were granted weekly access. "We have major-label Mondays," she explains.

When he was tight with Johnson, Kennedy was able to come into the station and give records to DJs personally, but after their disagreement, he says he was told to drop off the records at the front desk. With his access curtailed, Kennedy says the labels hired M1 instead, "because they can get radio."

Now that he has fallen from favor with Johnson, Kennedy is willing to talk about the nature of their business dealings. Kennedy says he executive-produced five volumes of Big Von's Chop Shop mixtape series, which didn't do as well as other mixes by the Demolition Men, DJ Juice, or DJ BackSide. Kennedy says he ended up giving most of them away, but he still paid Johnson several thousand dollars per mixtape, with the unspoken understanding that Johnson would give special consideration to the label accounts Kennedy was working.

"I was coming back and giving [Johnson] money for records he never sold," Kennedy says. However, he adds, "I never just outright gave him dough and said, 'Play this record.' I should have, though."

Kennedy's account appears to contradict what Johnson told Ruckus: "If you're in the house thinking I take money, I never took a dime."

Allegations of quid pro quo and backdoor arrangements might seem titillating, but the larger point is that KMEL's machinations effectively limited station access to hand-picked local promoters and major-label employees. The end result has been a narrowing of diversity on the airwaves due to what appears to be widespread favoritism on the part of KMEL executives. This extended not only to major-label acts, but to local indies: Artists like the Team (for whom Big Von was the DJ) received considerable airplay, as did rappers with financial ties to M1, including Keak da Sneak and Kafani.

In 2005, KMEL appeared more than happy to go along for the ghost-ride. Yet both Malkia Cyril and Davey D contend the station had ulterior motives. They believe its support of local music at that time was a way to defuse activist efforts to challenge the station's FCC license (which is renewed every eight years) during the public comment period that ended in November 2005. According to Davey D, "The KMEL that played local music did so begrudgingly, under pressure."

In spring 2006, E-40's hit "Tell Me When to Go" made hyphy a national catchphrase. Davey D says KMEL responded by doing what he calls "superserving" local stuff, to the point where he started to feel that the station might be "trying to burn the audience out on the material." Intentional or not, that's just what happened.

According to Johnson, local music was outperforming national hits in 2004. Cunningham says Bay Area artists tested well in KMEL's market research as late as 2006. But by March of 2007, she claims, "they slid down." To the station, this showed that the "local stuff was no longer as relevant," she says. "Everything has a shelf life ... there's only so much hyphy you can take."

Asked why listeners aren't hearing as much local music on KMEL anymore, morning drivetime DJ Chuy Gomez remarks, "There is not a lot of hot stuff out there. ... It all starts to sound the same. Everybody wanted to sound like F.A.B. or sound like Keak. It got kinda stagnant."

Archer says KYLD began to back away from hyphy because of concerns over violence. "The culture that was developing was, unfortunately, not a healthy one," he says. Additionally, he says, KYLD's programming became more focused on "core" artists like Justin Timberlake, which made hyphy less than a perfect fit.

It may be closer to the truth to say that once KMEL's license was renewed, hyphy ultimately didn't fit Clear Channel's agenda. It's well known that commercial radio has longstanding arrangements with major labels, such as artists who perform for free at Summer Jam for "promotional considerations." By killing hyphy, the station could return to business as usual: playing national hits.

According to Cunningham, localism isn't good for commercial radio's image: "You can be a local artist and play up to where you're from, but if every song is about where you're from, there's a problem."

Ironically, she notes, San Quinn, Big Rich, and Boo Banga's "Frisco Anthem" is currently being spun on mix shows (though it appears on KMEL's playlist as "Scotty Fox's 6 O'Clock Chop Shop Mix"). In all fairness, local artists do show up frequently in mixshow airplay — which, coincidentally, happens at peak listening hours — but the artists don't get name recognition for it on that all-important industry barometer of hotness: the playlist.

Even if hyphy has run its course, a larger question remains of why hyphy artists were the only local rappers KMEL was playing. The Bay Area, after all, doesn't produce just one type of rap; nationally respected hip-hop artists like Lyrics Born, Blackalicious, and Hieroglyphics make music with socially responsible lyrics, yet were ignored by the station as hyphy scraped across the intersection of pop culture, leaving behind it a trail of empty Patrón bottles, half-smoked blunts, discarded pillboxes, and reckless-driving citations.

In a 2006 appearance at the Commonwealth Club, F.A.B. — who is clean and sober — told a sold-out house that he purposely "dumbed down" the lyrical content of his music in order to fit the popular radio formula and gain airplay. To a certain extent, the same could be said of KMEL, which stupefied the creative expression of a vibrant local culture — narrowcasting it to the point of redundancy and, ultimately, irrelevance.

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