DanjLovesThe90s!

Sometimes, it tends to be forgotten or not even acknowledged how many roadblocks and barriers hip-hop music had to break through. There’s younger people who’ve grown up all their lives with rap on the radio and TV, with no recollection of a time when it didn’t play a big part in popular music. There’s even some older people who lament how mainstream it’s gotten, but forget how there was a time when people were fighting for hip-hop to gain the recognition it gets today.

John Rivas, b.k.a. Mr. Magic, was one of those who put it on the line in the early days. Back when radio was staying as far away from rap as they could, he not only hosted the very first hip-hop radio show, but stood his ground in its defense when they wanted to shut it down. His Rap Attack show with Marley Marl was the first of its kind, years before labels or radio stations even thought of hip-hop as anything more than a fad. Magic’s show was such a big deal, he was later shouted out by some artists who grew up as fans during that time and went on to make history themselves- 2Pac, Biggie, and Nas among others.

I didn’t grow up in New York, so I can’t say how big a deal it was to hear Magic on WBLS in the ’80s. I can’t even speak on how it was when he came to Baltimore and hosted his own show on WEBB, although I do recall taping it a couple times. Still, Mr. Magic did a lot for the music and is a hip-hop legend for what he brought to the game. Since he told his own story better than I could, here’s the man himself in his own words, as written in Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists:

“After high school, I was working at this electronics store Uptown and I heard about this new station WHBI, where you could buy your own air time…  At WHBI, air time was $75 an hour. I bought two hours’ worth before anybody else in rap. My show was on Saturday night/Sunday morning from 2-4 a.m. I got a couple stores to sponsor me and I was on the air from about ’79 to ’81.”

“We were making noise at WHBI and Frankie Crocker, the top jock at WBLS, called me. His music director had a young daughter who always used to sneak and listen to me late at night. So Crocker plugged me in with the right people and eventually I went to work at ‘BLS.”

“WBLS was really anti-rap, but I got the ratings numbers for them. They gave me the nickname ‘Sir Juice’ and that’s how the whole Juice Crew thing originally got started.”

“In 1984, our show, Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack, had the highest numbers ever in New York City so we wanted to renegotiate our contract. Charles Warfield, who was the station’s general manager, hated hip-hop. We had a meeting and he said ‘the major labels are giving me a lot of hassles. They don’t have any rap artists, they’re not making any money off rap. Magic, the kids are listening to you. We got a new format called the Quiet Storm, and we want you to do that’. He said ‘we want to kill rap and if you tell the kids it ain’t happenin’ no more, they’ll think it ain’t happenin’ and it’ll be dead’. I said, ‘I can’t do that shit’… Then he said ‘Quiet Storm or nothing’. We chose nothing. We broke out went back to ‘HBI- back to paying to be on the radio. About a year later though, ‘BLS brought us back cause Red Alert [from rival station KISS-FM] was killin’ them in the ratings.”

“At around the time we went back to WHBI, UTFO had made ‘Roxanne, Roxanne’, which we liked… Their manager, Steve Salem, promised us a show at Broadway International so we could raise some money. But two weeks before the show, Ty called Steve and Steve said to him, ‘We don’t have to do the show now cause KISS just added our record’. This was Christmas time and we were broke. Our girls are looking at at us like complete idiots cause we quit ‘BLS, the #1 station in the world,  to go save rap. We were mad and hanging out at Marley’s house one night… Shante was there and she said, ‘Why don’t you let me make a tape dissin’ them?’ We was like ‘Go away, little girl, you’re buggin”. But the next night, Marley came to us and said ‘Yo, remember Shante? She made a tape dissin’ UTFO and them’. We put the shit on air and it took off right away.”

“I was in Power Play Studios in Queens and Boogie Down Productions had a meeting with Ty that I didn’t know about. I thought they were just somebody trying to get their record played, so I threw them out… A lot of people don’t know this, but BDP and the Juice Crew was gonna be down. We went on tour together and was milking it for all it was worth. KRS and Shan was always cool. They’d already figured the shit out. We was like, ‘People already think we hate each other, so let’s go on tour-Juice Crew vs. BDP- and make this money’.”

“I felt like I saved hip-hop and I didn’t do it for anyone else to fuck it up… Think about how many muthafuckas would’ve quit if they were given the same scenario as me: take the Quiet Storm job and forget hip-hop, or leave the #1 station in the world and get nothing.”

Salute!

-D!