Word: jam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like many Harvard seniors, I have no idea where I am going to be next year, or what I will do when I get there. What I do know is that I don't want to be here, for one very simple reason: Jam...
Instead I found Jam'n. Jam'n is the only powerful local station that is even tangentially devoted to R&B and hip hop. But Jam'n is listed as "Top 40", and it takes this classification literally. Each day, without fail, the station plays about 42 songs--Billboard's top 40 and two Bob Marley songs to add a little variety...
This makes the station almost unlistenable to anyone who is any more than a casual music fan. If you don't believe me, take it from Baltazar, the station's bad boy morning deejay. "I can't listen to Jam'n," he told The Boston Globe in a 1995 profile. "We play the same songs over and over...
...repetition might be tolerable, if the 40 songs were really the 40 you wanted to hear. But what Jam'n touts as its "new" music is almost always at least four months out of date. In a recent Globe article, industry expert Lionel Ridenour, senior vice president of black music for Arista Records, explained this lag as a consequence of the fact that Boston does not have a "major urban FM" to go along with Jam'n's "crossover format...
...Boston, WILD tries to fill the role of community station, but it is too small and too poor to do it. Jam'n has the resources, but, if anything, is anti-community. Its main selling point is its "Jam-Scams," essentially a grown-up version of a middle school prank, in which Baltazar torments his victims by telling them (falsely) that their cars will be impounded or that their houses will be foreclosed upon. The scammed person invariably gets angrier and angrier, leading to bleeped-out expletives, giggles from the 'Zar, and finally a promise from the scammed...