How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race

✍ Scribed by Amy Coddington

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 225
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop's introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre's diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial organization of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre's growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the “mainstream.”

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Formatting Race on Commercial Radio
1. Too Black, Too Noisy
2. Broadcasting Multiculturalism – and Rap – on Crossover Radio
3. Hip Hop Becomes Hit Pop
4. Containing Black Sound on Top 40 Radio
Conclusion: Formatting Race in the New Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index