THEY’RE LISTENING

Evening drive Friday. The weekend slides open, wide like a tinted electric window. “Friday-light,” most seasoned Angelenos know, is nothing but some arch, Caltrans inside joke: A trail of pearl-whites and pulsing brake lights glowing like coals tightly twine Highway 101’s north and southbound lanes. * Tonight the airwaves feel just as jammed. Clogged and desperate. Beats bloom out of moon-roofs, slurred rhymes seep out of slender gaps from passing car windows. The dial alive, not just with music, Dodger scores, theater notes--but also the rumor from the streets. * “Busy as a mutha. Poppin,’ ” bellows evening-drive jock Big Boy, who has just dropped the final word on rapper Tupac Shakur’s life-and-death dance: One for the other side. * Most weeknights around this hour, the immense and the immensely popular Big Boy and his screwball Power 106 crew--DJ Ray and Shaun Juan backed up by deejay Enrie--whip up a bit of sparkling, choreographed call-and-response radio theater to Big’s “Shakin’ My Ass” anthem. Hoots, hollers and food. Tonight, he’s slowed it way down long enough to take some calls from listeners--questions, threats, tearful condolences.

If you take a hard left on your radio dial, you would happen on Theo Mizuhara (known to his on-air intimates simply as Theo), 92.3 The Beat’s drive-time Lothario with the Barry White baritone, who has taken a break from his daily dose of afternoon-to-twilight pillow talk, subbing tonight as grief counselor for a mourning community.

Over the thud of deep bass and the raw plaint of Shakur’s own voice, Theo ladles out his remembrances, anecdotes, outrage. In response, a montage of sentiments--raw voices overlapping, an oral documentary.

The evening’s refrain: Why?

During the next hours into days these airwaves evolve into a floating town hall meeting--a virtual front porch or makeshift barber shop confab. The voices, deep bass threaded through, function as release valves for a city that oftentimes has no communal place to vent. These airwaves link a community that has a difficult time calling itself such.

*

For teens--post and pre--few things connect an amorphous city like music. For years here in Southern California, radio provided the soundtrack for an endless summer. It was KPOP and Art Laboe’s dedication remotes from Scrivner’s Hollywood Drive-in. It was Boss Radio for a Boss City. It was Lucky Pierre and the Magnificent Montague. It was the Mighty Met’s Whooya To-ya. It was swimming through static; it was the transistor murmuring under your pillow.

Now, in a city that struggles to locate not only a physical but also spiritual center, the rallying cry of hip-hop, which articulates not only urban angst but also urban adventure, provides some semblance of a unifying anthem.

And the Beat and Power 106 pump it. Loud.

In top-rated FM formats that mix R&B;, funk, hip-hop and smoothed-at-the-edges, hard-core gangsta rap--the Beat, KKBT--or deep house/techno sound smears studded with sinewy flexings of hip-hop--Power, KPWR--these two have attracted audiences that reflect the rapidly changing face of Los Angeles.

As FM radio prepares to celebrate its 30th anniversary with rock ‘n’ roll this year, raw numbers tell just a tip of the story. The Beat and Power repeatedly go head to head against each other for the coveted No. 1 slot among listeners under 35, and it has become apparent to programmers and listeners alike that radio has upped its ante. It isn’t enough to spin the Billboard Top 40, give away concert tickets or bumper stickers. “While our mission is to entertain,” explains Craig Wilbraham, the Beat’s general manager, “we want to educate as we expand.”

Radio has always occupied a pivotal place in youth culture--powerful because of its immediacy and portability. “It’s an intimate medium. It’s with you all the time,” says Art Laboe, veteran KRLA deejay. “Youths listen to radio when they get up in the morning, in the bathroom, on the way to school, after school, when you go out with your boyfriend, and you may listen to it while you’re making love.”

But as corporations swallow up Mom and Pop operations, local radio has found its idiosyncrasies shaved away. “Conservatism drives the decisions,” Wilbraham says. “The idea has been just give away a Porsche, don’t tell the audience anything that might bring them down--don’t talk about AIDS or teen mothers, drugs and gangs. That’s not what they want to hear. Well, that’s not true. People want more. You have to endear yourselves to your audience and try to be a conduit for change.”

What stations like Power (owned by Emmis Broadcasting) and the Beat (Evergreen Media) are attempting to do, within their own corporate limits, is bring back that sense of community to the airwaves. The hope: That when you turn on the radio in Los Angeles, you are listening to Los Angeles.

For the past 15 years, rap has been its own information highway--dispatches from urban East and West that speak to the issues that affect both artists and listeners. “We grew up watching friends die from drive-bys. We have friends who do the gang thing,” says Long Beach-based rapper DJ Glaze of the rap group Foesum. “We’ve seen and been through so much.”

“So you figure,” adds Foesum member T-Dubb, “whatever you can do, you do it. Just keep it real.”

Ferreting out and packaging “real” motivates most urban contemporary radio stations, which seek to boost their numbers by keeping their on-air personalities as fluid and provocative as their playlists.

“After the riots, we kept asking our listeners: What are the big issues that confront you and your life,” says Michelle Mercer, Power 106 program director. “The answers came back overwhelmingly that it was violence. A lot of kids were afraid that they were going to die violent deaths. It’s pretty alarming hearing young children say things like that. Yeah, we could talk and promote things on the air, but what can we really do?”

In response, Power and the Beat have spun their own turn on the notion of community affairs, something that had been relegated to the high-shelf hours of Sunday night/Monday morning.

“Back in the days when I was growing up in the disco era, people were worrying about partying,” says Key-Kool, 27, a Torrance native, rapper and dyed-in-the-wool dial-spinner. “Now it seems that radio is a lot more politically involved. They are using it more as a social tool.”

In the fray? The usual issue-of-the-moment suspects: race relations, street violence, AIDS, immigration, affirmative action and welfare reform cast against views on homosexuality among the homeboys or community life after three strikes. With the Beat’s on-air, call-in community forums--”Street Science” and “Street Soldiers”--and Power 106’s nonprofit Knowledge Is Power Foundation and call-in forum, “From the Streets,” both stations have made aggressive attempts to “be there.”

Some listeners and media experts consider the innovations a proactive way to reframe a medium battling obsolescence; others wonder if these seemingly sincere efforts to link an estranged community are just hip, but empty, marketing. Motives notwithstanding, radio, like so much else in youth culture (stripped-down fashion and hair-as-afterthought to hand-held video), has attempted to scrape off the gloss and shift into hard focus--to take action.

“The political climate is such that the youth feel alienated from the process,” says Gary Phillips of the L.A.-based MultiCultural Collaborative, a community-oriented collective working to address intra- and inter-ethnic conflict. “In this era where people don’t have the time to do the reading and the fact-checking, radio is very important.”

*

It’s Monday night and Dave Morales, Power 106’s midday jock, drags himself in for another shift. Most late-dozing Power listeners know him as the caffeinated voice that mops up after Nick and Eric V (the Baka Boyz) of the 6-to-10-a.m. frenzied three-ring. Morales is in for an 8-to-11-p.m. shift--a special edition of the station’s community affairs call-in show, “From the Streets”--focusing, he explains, not just on the violence in hip-hop, but also of that “in the streets. Period.”

Swimming in an oversized basketball jersey and wearing a baseball cap tipped backward and a silver hoop sunk through his left eyebrow, Morales slumps in front of a blinking mixing board. His telephone lines flicker, lit hot, then flatline. He gives a couple of stingy coughs, clears his throat, adjusts his headset and leans into the mike: “Goin’ straight to the lines, Renee in Fullerton. Renee, it’s ‘From the Streets,’ Power 106. What’s on your mind?”

“Um, I would like everybody that’s listening out there to stop the violence and, you know, in order to make peace with others you have to start by making peace within yourself. And that’s all, just everybody just wake up. Stop the nonsense.”

Then there’s Earvin from Santa Monica, voice tinged with steely annoyance over the hype surrounding Tupac’s death, because people die all the time--”People I know live a life like that. I guess it’s a big deal ‘cause he’s a celebrity.” Jose from Orange County sends his prayers to Tupac’s family; Billy from El Monte calls to say it’s a waste, the result of the pose, the gangsta life.

Keeping the commentary popping, Morales, in the course of the three hours, smooths the brittle edges of revenge-baiting rumor--never preachy, never condescending.

“Our goal is to give some context,” he says, taking a break between calls, records and ego-bruising giveaway stunts for listeners desperate to score Dia de los Muertos concert tickets. “We entertain but we are also a community. When that little girl got shot in Cypress Park [when her family allegedly took a wrong turn in gang territory], we did a show on that. We responded to Tupac to try to explain ‘why Tupac?’ when this happens every day. You bring more to the table that way.”

It’s a growing attitude in radio; commitment shouldn’t stop at shift’s end when the on-air light blinks off. “We wanted to find a way to address those problems and the best way to stop violence was to give them something to do,” says Charisse Browner, executive director of Power’s Knowledge Is Power. “We thought we would fund programs that would get at-risk kids into jobs--pull them off the streets. You can’t say, ‘Increase the peace’ and not do something about it.”

Radio, like most everything else in L.A., cuts along race lines: Power, whose listenership is heavily Latino, focuses on the needs of its demographic. Proceeds from a series of station-produced CDs, for instance, fund various community-based programs that help youths build basic skills--from reading and writing to learning a trade.

“It’s wonderful that radio has used this medium to educate and motivate,” says Sister Jennie Lechtenberg, executive director of the Boyle Heights-based PUENTE Learning Center, which received not only free advertising but also $300,000 in expansion funds last year from Power. “They’re not only offering their station, but their dollars as well.”

And at the other end of the band, the Beat, which operates under a vigorously waved “No Color Lines, Unity Through Music” banner, puts its listenership at one-third African American, one-third Latino, one-third other. Although its sound is decidedly “black” (read urban contemporary mix of hip-hop and R&B;), this mix still makes community affairs programming more than a shade complex. “It’s important to go to your market and find out what the need is,” Wilbraham says. “Maybe it’s education. Maybe it’s voter registration. Maybe it’s [eliminating] racial tension.”

As a point of entry, all both stations had to do was take a hard look in their own backyard. Beat staff had been particularly affected. A Beat jock lost to an OD, Eazy-E (the station’s spiritual godfather) to AIDS, and evening jock Julio G’s own brief flirtations with street life. “We try,” says Wilbraham, “to lead by example.”

“I did the drug thing. I did the gang thing. Not hard-core but I did them,” says Julio G, who began training his ear after pulling apart his mother’s console and scratching her beloved Vicente Fernandez records. That and break-dancing ultimately raised him up and out of the streets. “It made me see a larger world. All my friends have either passed on or are locked up,” he says. “So when I came on the radio, I said, ‘I’d rather be real.’ If something’s on my mind, I say it.”

So the question left to those most poised to capture the multiracial youth market of this moment: How do you square entertainment with responsibility? How do you give listeners what they want to hear and chase it with a spoonful of medicine?

“We’re not going to sit around singing ‘Kumbaya’ or something cheesy like that,” says Morales. But gaining street credibility is a touchy business that oftentimes means preaching peace while at the same time playing songs about brandishing guns. Not everyone’s impressed with the formula. “When you put songs on the air about violence and killers and raping women as the hip thing of the day, I don’t think you’re helping,” says KRLA’s Laboe. “I don’t care if you go out and raise money for youth projects. That’s a bunch of baloney. I don’t want to be an old fuddy-duddy, but it’s correct.”

Still, with ratings for both stations hovering around No. 1 and 2 in the English-speaking category, the formula is working, to some degree, despite the mixed messages. “The kids listen to [‘From the Streets’] because it deals with all these kinds of issues [that affect] kids in the community like mine,” says Father Greg Boyle, known locally for his work with at-risk Eastside youths.

Boyle, whose Homeboy Silkscreen and soon-to-be reopened Homeboy Bakery have benefited from Knowledge Is Power’s gifts, believes that the station’s community involvement was born of two opposing facts. “Violence against youth was increasing and Power was getting criticism for playing certain kinds of songs that encouraged that violence,” he says. “So, I think [starting Knowledge Is Power] was the height of responsibility. They’ve put their money where their mouth is. A lot of people talk about prevention and enforcement. This is called intervention. I think it takes somebody who really understands what this is about to do it.”

“I like it because it has a diversity, as far as addressing the different issues of the black community along with other cultures,” says Beat listener Kimishawne Davies, 23. “I guess it makes you a more rounded person.”

“Nowadays they are getting a lot of deejays that sound a lot like everyday people,” says rapper Key-Kool. “Listeners feel like they are friends with the deejay, like yeah, that’s my homeboy.”

For programmers and jocks alike, it’s part of a logical evolution. “People seem to connect themselves to a station here more than in other places,” says Morales. “When I go out cruising and people see the vans, it’s incredible. We prepare people for a job--not just [with programs on] how to sit in on an interview, but tattoo removal, ‘cause you’ve got guys with tattoos on their faces who’ve been in gangs. I’ve done peace marches with mothers who have lost their children to gang violence. This was a very big step in my radio career to be able to work more than as just a disc jockey. Because we’re not just on the air, we’re in the streets.”

*

Unions don’t always bloom organically. Like relationships, communities sometimes need to be arranged, or manufactured. So some Sunday mornings, Dominique DiPrima, host of the Beat’s roving community affairs show, “Street Science,” tries to fashion one.

Long before the stroke of 8 on a drizzly September morning in the Wilshire district, folding chairs arranged in a multipurpose room at the Korean Youth Community Center are quickly filled: Students with sleep-creased faces, community leaders juggling Dayrunners and steaming cups of coffee, area residents in sweats and house slippers curious about the banners and commotion going up and on outside their doors.

DiPrima’s weekly show unravels topics as diverse as same-sex marriage, the three strikes law and the pros and cons of plastic surgery in a racial/ethnic context. In addition to town hall meetings like this one, DiPrima and Beat promotion staff also coordinate fund-raisers for community-based organizations--from the Minority AIDS Project to My Friend’s Place, a homeless resource center in Hollywood.

“It’s our commitment to take it beyond the slogan,” a wide-awake DiPrima announces to her seated and on-air audiences. “This ‘No Color Lines’ town hall meeting is a chance to talk about how we can build unity between blacks and Asians. You can come down and join us,” she says as her eyes sweep the multiracial assembly of about 40 people (which later swells to more than 70), and she adds with a laugh. “And I’ll tell you, there ain’t no color lines up in here.”

The participants--a range of community folk including Warren T. Furutani, executive director of the Asian Pacific Community Fund; Do Hyung Kim, director of Korean American Youth Leadership Program; Charles Kyte, president of USC’s 100 Black Men Organization; Renford Reese, founder of Colorful Flags, a bridge-building-through-language program; and the multiracial/cultural rap crew Foesum--seem a little uncertain at first, but with DiPrima’s nudging, slowly unfold. “Let’s start on the positive side,” she suggests. “What’s being done to create community?”

Each leans into the microphone with an answer or anecdote--training students in community organizing, educating them on ballot issues; teaching the importance of grass-roots activism and stressing the commonalities found in common cause. Tools to break the barriers. The power of the vote.

But DiPrima doesn’t want to keep it neat and tidy, because life isn’t at all like that. She prods the crowd, snaking her way through in black pumps and a crisp sapphire-hued business suit, mike in hand, asking all those assembled to dredge up their personal stereotypes. There is some tentativeness among those staring over this precipice. The room feels small, the object of the belief too close by, maybe right next to you, maybe you’re holding her hand.

The misconceptions are revealed slowly: that African Americans are dangerous, violent, angry; that Asians are computer geniuses, model minorities, can’t speak English. In the next three hours the stereotypes are broken down and examined, with Beat listeners calling in to augment the discussion.

Like slamming a lid on a rumbling pot before it boils over, DiPrima rigidly choreographs in-studio guests and callers, abruptly silencing them when talk turns too inflammatory or vicious. “These beliefs,” says DiPrima, “this is our mental slavery.”

“If you’re a kid in trouble, you are down with the blacks,” Furutani jumps in, purposely tweaking a stereotype one more notch. “That’s no role model. What will help is how we frame ourselves. It’s important for black folks, Latinos, Asians to know our collective history. It’s the young people whom I’m most concerned about. Brothers and sisters, get through school. Need to bring each other together,” he says, the cadence and texture of his voice revealing the trails of his own travels. “We need to build a citywide youth council. The success is in the youth. We need to organize this mutha.”

*

But this generation, maybe more so than those preceding it, some argue, is hardened by a perceived lack of tools. “Just look at the lack of opportunity,” says organizer Levi Kingston of the Community Consortium, another community-based organization. “Unemployment, welfare reform--there is a cynicism born of that. I do think that there is a vacuum in activism right now.”

“Urban radio stations,” says Dan O’Day, an L.A.-based radio programming consultant, “those who target a specific minority demographic, use public service genuinely as a way to serve and strengthen the bond with their listeners.”

Unity as marketing tool, as programmers and consultants know, translates into burgeoning listenership across racial divides. And, bottom line, bolstered ratings mean more dollars. “If they get involved in an anti-gang program and get their teenage listeners involved and their parents--it’s quite an amalgamation of genuinely wanting to improve the community and deliberately seizing on ratings,” O’Day says.

The agenda isn’t a hidden one. “Certainly we’re in a business to do things because it’s good business and certainly community service is good business,” says KPWR’s Mercer. “It does make sense. Everybody is a part of this thing, and they know that they are doing something that is ultimately part of this community. We try to relay really positive messages because we do know that we can be one of the few, if not the only, credible voices in a kid’s life, whereas somebody else is going to sound preachy. If parents can’t get away with it, the teachers can’t get away with it, government officials can’t get away with it, Power 106 can because it is relating to them with their music and their lifestyle.”

Some listeners argue that this isn’t as much a play for cultural or racial identification as it is a push for Arbitron points. Case in point: Power 106 muted its “All the Flavas of Hip-Hop” tag more than a year ago to aggressively pursue Latino listeners. Meanwhile, the Beat went for a more diverse market, though its playlist is decidely black--causing some to wonder if these slogans were merely crass displays of “faking the funk.” Lecia Brooks, a race relations specialist with the National Conference, a human-relations organization dedicated to fighting bias, simply “can’t get with it” and sees the slogans as lip service. Others, like Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at USC, are simply uncomfortable with who’s pulling the levers behind the curtain.

“You have a station devoted to playing hip-hop and R&B--African; American music--but very little [black] representation on staff,” he says. “ ‘No Color Lines’ is a message that can be, for very naive individuals, politically correct in this day and age. When I’m listening to the Beat, I feel like they are pimping black music.”

Aware of the suspicions, the Beat has tried to answer them, says Wilbraham, from program packaging to on-air personalities, taking into account the city’s shifting demographics and, with them, the new needs of its rapidly changing listenership.

“It was a different time and a different era when you could take care of people with just the music and the news,” says Bob Moore, vice president and general manager of “Real Radio” KLSX and KRLA.

*

To many ears, that wasn’t so long ago.

Through most of the ‘60s, Boss Radio was the rage, says Southern California cultural icon The Real Don Steele. “Even though the deejays at the time stayed in their pink bubble--keep it tight, keep it bright and have fun with it--it didn’t mean that they didn’t know what was going on.”

At that time, it was the job of the jock to entertain through the crisis: the civil rights movement, a string of hope-deflating assassinations, the Vietnam War.

“We cared and we did it through the music. It covered every issue,” Steele says. “A deejay had to walk the line between the competing pictures of the way it was in America at the time. Well, I think we did a pretty decent job.”

As FM radio rolled in in the late ‘60s and began to find true face and form in the ‘70s, youthful listening habits shifted. “It happened when it happened,” says Don Barrett, author of “Los Angeles Radio People.” “If you had the choice to listen to [Queen’s] ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in FM stereo or AM, which would you choose?”

Among one of the most canonized radio stations in L.A., KMET, the Mighty Met, was known for its carefully crafted sets of album-oriented rock, the format that ultimately dominated the FM band in the ‘70s. But, deejay Jim Ladd recalls, it wasn’t simply the music that kept the core together. “KMET once filled the Rose Bowl. People came out not because they were given something, but for a cause to stop the building of nuclear power plants. First time I ever heard the words ‘Greenpeace,’ Ace Young read them on the news. We went to work believing that we were there as an extension of the community; that was our job.”

A eulogy of a similar sort plays on for another station that set up shop on the other end, on the AM band KDAY (1580), which broke ground for contemporary L.A. urban radio. The apogee of post-’60s soul programming, the station wove a seamless mix of R&B;, sweaty funk, blue-eyed soul, slow-jam pop-edged ballads. “It was smooth, it was slick. For a contemporary station, it was very sophisticated,” says J.J. Johnson, the station’s morning-drive man through the mid-’70s, who now spins soul oldies on KACE. “We didn’t call it soul radio. It’s a black thing but everybody’s welcome to the party.”

Connecting a community meant connecting with a community. A noisy rumpus room of sound, KDAY’s mix of urbane jocks, community involvement and a supple playlist shifted with the music and the interest of its listenership. Post-soul, post-disco playlists were juiced up with the first wave of rap--novelty songs that quickly gave way to more rough-hewn confessional dispatches, the beginnings of gangsta rap. The 50,000-watt station sent out more than a strong signal that was feverishly captured by aspiring club deejays. “At 3 o’clock in the morning, I would be on top of the roof [in Bakersfield] with a humongous antenna, taping it,” says Eric V of Power, “to hear the deejay’s mix. And that’s how we got inspired.”

It was the proving ground for old school MCs, the first generation of mix-masters and new jacks. Johnson, Russ Parr and Greg Mack are enduring models for today’s deejays.

“To me, when KDAY died, a lot of things died as well,” says Key-Kool, who grew up with his ear trained on the far reaches of the AM dial. “Not only was [the music] important, but the local communities were able to advertise for cheaper on KDAY and reach a lot of people. They were looking out directly for the people. That’s why it was so sad.”

*

Trying to meld entertainment with message, or at the very least balance both, is a slippery business. Both Power and the Beat have had their skirmishes, high-profile run-ins with public taste--from the lyric content of those artists in the heaviest rotation to the flippant brand of topical humor that is the benchmark of their respective morning shows. Gay and lesbian listeners filed a formal complaint with a morning spot the Baka Boys snickered through called Gay Watch, while the Chicano/a and Mexican American communities blasted their dissatisfaction with an all-media campaign in which the Bakersfield natives billed themselves proudly as Two Fat Mexicans.

Of late, the Beat has been embroiled in a series of sensitivity issues, including the implied black-identified B-Boy pose of evening drive-time jock Theo, who is Asian American. It also includes a range of PC-smashing and scatological skits that unfurl daily on the Beat’s well-received morning show, “The House Party.” All of which leads some community leaders to speculate: Sometimes the message gets muddled in madness. Or as Khalid Shah, executive director of the L.A. youth organization Stop the Violence--Increase the Peace Foundation, suggests, it sometimes seems that the stations grew community service arms not to protect and serve, but to clean up their own messes.

Eyeing the bank of frantically blinking phone lights, Diana Steele, the Beat’s molasses-voiced midmorning jock, gingerly steps over the studio’s threshold as if through clearing smoke. She exchanges a look with Shirley Strawberry, part of the “House Party’s” wake-up crew. “We’re in so much trouble now,” Strawberry says, shaking her head.

“Oh, that’s why Craig’s door is closed.” Steele assumes the hot seat vacated moments ago by John London, head of “The House Party,” and lets out an ocean of a sigh.

London has ignited it again.

He and Compton Mayor Omar Bradley went a few endorphin-stoking rounds over the air that ended with London flinging a steely verbal “F.U.” into the airwaves.

This is only round one, Wilbraham knows, his face a worry mask.

“The House Party” is the station’s proud enfant terrible. “This show wouldn’t play well in too many markets,” London says later, jets cooled some, “because they wouldn’t understand why we are doing this. But the racial diversity, the economic diversity, Hollywood, the fact that it’s a commute-oriented area. You know we’re not really a city.”

The show doesn’t set out to make any friends. That’s part of its allure. And perhaps because of that position it’s a show that Guy Aoki, co-founder of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, calls the “earsore of KKBT.” In 1995, Aoki and his group organized a protest and eventually alerted key advertisers after the station ran a series of skits lampooning prominent Asian Americans, all acted out with thick accents. In response, the Beat scrapped the characterizations.

This morning’s skirmish--between London and the mayor of Compton--began over a skit called “Little Crack Head,” a short that shadows the misadventures of a child addicted to the drug.

Pushing it? You bet. And London would be the first to agree. But the show’s intent, he says, is often misunderstood. With raw on-air call-ins and satirical pre-recorded bits, the show deliberately positions itself to push buttons. “It isn’t a typical radio program. It does things that every research paper would tell you not to do. And [we] do it. A lot of people don’t get it, but a lot of people do. When you decide to push the envelope, you get noticed.”

Other segments of the community aren’t similarly moved. “I don’t care if the teenagers like them,” says Mayor Bradley, framing the larger issue. “We’ve seen the devastating effects of crack in our community. It’s up to those of us who have experience in life to stand up and say that’s not a good thing.”

In response to protests led by Bradley and the Brotherhood Crusade’s Danny Bakewell, the Beat pulled the skits in mid-October. “It has never been our intention to minimize, glorify or make light of the devastating pain and suffering caused by this dreadful drug,” Wilbraham said in a written statement to the press. “Moreover, while one of our goals is to provide satirical humor and entertainment . . . we realize that the skit . . . is inappropriate to some, given the sensitivity of the issue in the community.”

“[They] do some good things for the community. That’s all good and well,” says Shah, “but this is a matter of decency and self-respect. If you’re not sure, please stay away from the gray areas. It’s tempting to want to cross, if not get close.”

“All we were asking for,” says an only marginally appeased Bradley, “was a little respect.”

*

Once a station positions itself as a voice of and for the people, there are more voices to answer to, more positions and vantages to consider. And “taking it to the streets,” which has been these stations’ rallying cry, at times puts on-air personalities up-close-and-personal with a touch more drama than a benign photo op, as illustrated by a recent media-highlighted scuffle between fans and Power 106’s Big Boy and Shaun Juan.

It’s a messy work-in-progress. Jocks like London and Power’s Baka Boyz, whose job it is to construct lively, topical, in-your-face radio, often feel hamstrung. It’s then left to those like Power’s Morales and the Beat’s DiPrima to create the forums to address the growing pains--the stations’ and the city’s--immediately and candidly.

“I live the lifestyle, I’m out there,” Morales says. “It’s our responsibility to be a part of the community--because it’s our world. We can survive in it or we can die in it.”

“L.A. pushes you further. If you are going to say: ‘No Color Lines,’ you better show somebody or else fade off into the din of slogans and irrelevance,” says DiPrima. “This is a show-me generation. We grew up with Iran-contra. We grew up with lying politicians and perpetrators. So don’t just talk the talk.”

In a city like Los Angeles, crossing lines--of taste, of color--is inevitable because sometimes the only way to find the line is to cross it. Consequently these stations are discovering that what lies on the other side of the line, the content that raises hackles and inspires rage or tears, is a kind of unwieldy “real” that means a whole lot more than just broadcasting your station ID in Spanish.

“There are times,” London admits, “when it’s inappropriate for us to do things and we will check ourselves. I’m the first to say that we are not 100% correct on everything we do, but I would say that 100% of the time, we never meant to be mean-spirited.”

“I don’t agree with everything [The House Party] does,” DiPrima admits, “but their job is to make people laugh. What we have consistently done is talk with any and every organization who has criticism with the Beat.

“We’re not going to make everyone happy. We just mess up. But I feel we’re pretty responsive and a lot of times we’ve been able to work things out. It may take some time,” she says, “ ‘No Color Lines, Unity Through Music,’ is not something that you can just add water and stir.”