92.7....Sounds Like WAR!!!!
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Paris Vs The Clear Channel Beast
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PARIS VS THE BEAST
by Davey D
Bay Area rapper Paris had an unpleasant encounter when he paid a visit to San Francisco-based Clear Channel radio station KMEL Wednesday, January 14, while on air doing an interview with morning show host Chuy Gomez about his new album, Sonic Jihad. During the interview Gomez took live phone calls when several callers spoke up and complained that it was a shame that there weren’t more opportunities to hear politically charged raps and more artists like Paris. The callers put the station on blast and reprimanded Chuy for playing it safe and flooding the community with negative material.
Paris told the caller that deejays like Chuy aren’t the people responsible for making the musical decisions, instead it’s the program directors and higher ups at Clear Channel that call all the shots. Those remarks elicited a swift response from KMEL Program director and Clear Channel Regional Vice President of Programming Michael Martin who stormed into the studio and told Paris to "Get the @#%$ out of his station".
Paris remained calm and quickly checked Martin about his disrespectful manner. Aside from his obvious attempt to provoke a physical confrontation, Martin was out of line because Paris had recently purchased many thousands of dollars worth of commercials. In this instance, it wasn't just an artist Martin was disrespecting, but a paying customer of his employer. Heated words were exchanged , and Martin, obviously feeling threatened, called security and ran back to his office and locked the door - which was an over the top move since it was he who was the aggressor in the first place.
Listeners to KMEL did not hear the exchange because the mics were abrubtly turned off. One second you heard Paris talking, and the next second all you heard were songs and commercials. It was obvious that something went down--especially when listeners never heard Paris say goodbye.
We caught up with Paris and asked him his take on what happened. Was this an isolated incident or something that reflects a larger and more troublesome picture?
"Obviously we touched a nerve. Normally I don’t speak on unfinished business, but the cold part about it is the fact that the COMMUNITY was speaking out, not just me, so it carried much more weight than if I were the only one talking about shitty-ass commercial radio and it’s redundant, derogatory playlists. It’s bigger than just a Paris record, it goes to the core of the problem. These racist cowards fill our airwaves up with negative material that influences our communities and feel they don’t have to be held accountable for what they do. We are saying that they do. The community is saying it loud and clear – PROVIDE BALANCE!
The stations say they respond to the tastes of the streets, but they dictate the tastes of the streets, and there is a direct cause and-effect-relationship between what they play and how the community responds. How many times have you memorized the words to a weak-ass song that you don’t even like because they play it 10 times an hour? And how many times have you heard them break new records by artists that the street has never even heard of? Stations aren’t responding to the streets in these instances, they are receiving payola (pay for play) from labels that they have sweetheart deals with. Michael Martin programs 22 stations. Why? Who is this devil and how is he qualified to interact with us at all? I’m over 108,000 units deep on my latest in 4 months, with no video and no airplay, and am a motherfuckin’ vet in this hip-hop game, with over 3.5 million records sold independently, because I SPEAK TO US. We are the streets, not this Wizard behind the curtain. They need to have community outreach soon before @#%$ really gets out of hand."
Here is some good ol' news to pick ya earz. We heard Halloween is comin' early and some past and fired Djs with str8 butuglyizzle vendettas is rising from the grave to bring the streetz back on the yay map through radio frequency below Wild.When they finish looking over applicant resumes and job interviews, expect some real quarterbackin with strt8 hot track to hot track.