Hip-Hop's Unlikely Voice
At 52, Shaping the Playlist for a Young Audience

By Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A01

LOS ANGELES -- Mary J. Blige, in thigh-high green stiletto boots, grinds her hips on stage at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. "Got a jones in my bones," she sings over the band's jumpy hip-hop beat. "And it's all for you, babe. Can't leave you alone."

Six thousand young people are on their feet bouncing and pumping their fists. Twenty rows back, between two young black women, sits a redhead named Mary Catherine Sneed, an Alabama native raised on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She sways and nods demurely as the two teenage girls in front of her shake it. Later, after the lights come up, while she waits for the crowd to file out, Sneed turns to her assistant: "She was great. Every song is like a chapter in the life of Mary J. Blige."

Few in this crowd know how much this 52-year-old white woman's opinion matters: She controls what many of them hear when they turn on their radios.As chief operating officer of Radio One Inc., a black-owned company based in suburban Prince George's County, Md., Sneed is one of the most powerful people in black radio. The company owns a fifth of the black stations in the country. Sneed, who likes to be called "M.C.," helps oversee the business side, supervising station managers, and the music side, supervising the program directors who decide what goes on the air. In most radio companies, those are separate jobs.

Most weeks she leaves home in Atlanta for one of the two dozen cities where Radio One owns 67 stations. This week in December is her L.A. week, and Sue Freund, general manager of KKBT-FM ("The Beat"), Radio One's local hip-hop station, is driving a steel-gray Land Rover through the office canyons of Wilshire Boulevard on the way to lunch. From the backseat, Sneed chats with the Beat's program director, Robert Scorpio, who decides, with advice from Sneed, what music to play.

She was not a fan of the first two singles -- "Flying Without Wings" and "Superstar" -- from Ruben Studdard, the black man who won the amateur-hour TV show "American Idol." The whiter network audience may have loved Studdard, but Sneed said his slow, crooning rhythm and blues singles are too mainstream for the station.

"I think they were trying to be mass appeal, but by being mass appeal they appealed to no one," she said. grvgrvThose songs weren't urban enough." grvgrvUrban" in the radio business means grvgrvblack." The rest of the album, she said, is a better fit.

Scorpio agrees. A 39-year-old white hip-hop fan, he is a veteran of black radio who was a morning DJ in Houston before leaving the air to program seven years ago.

After talking to Sneed, he adds Studdard's latest single, "Sorry 2004," with its more driving hip-hop beat, to the playlist. It becomes a hit. Sneed "definitely gets the whole urban vibe," he said later. "Not a lot of corporate people do."
Radio One's L.A. Story

The Los Angeles station, Radio One's first in the nation's entertainment capital, is especially important to the company. Radio One bought it three years ago from Clear Channel Communications Inc., the country's largest radio company. Federal competition regulations forced Clear Channel to shed the Beat after buying Dallas-based AMFM Inc. for $23 billion. Radio One's strategy is to buy struggling stations cheap and turn them around.

Sneed forced out the old general manager but kept on Ed Lover and Dr. Dre of the TV show "Yo! MTV Raps" for the morning show. They flopped. She replaced them with Steve Harvey, a black comedian and TV personality popular with black audiences. The ratings jumped.

Although Radio One is doing better than the industry as a whole during a nationwide advertising slump, last winter a drop in the ratings at the Beat and a few other Radio One stations began to worry investors. The company has run up debt, spending $1.6 billion recently buying radio stations, and needs a steady revenue stream to repay it. The stock price began to drop from $16 a share to $13 last summer. It closed Friday at $19.48 a share.

Sneed then fired the production director and afternoon DJ. She spent three weeks running the station when the new general manager took maternity leave during the summer. Arbitron Inc., which measures radio and TV audiences, is to release the latest ratings while she is in Los Angeles.
From Country to Hip-Hop

Sneed grew up in Huntsville, Ala., where she went to an integrated high school in the 1960s and then across the state to Auburn University. She joined the Pi Beta Phi sorority to fit in at school, but rarely showed up for meetings. When the sisters had to nominate someone to volunteer at the campus radio station, they picked Sneed. They thought it was punishment. She thought it was destiny.

"I went to the [radio station] meeting, and I was really over the sorority," she said.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, she programmed country music stations in Nashville and R&B, adult contemporary, pop and rock stations in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Then Summit Communications Corp., a small Atlanta-based radio chain, hired her as executive vice president, the second-highest executive in the company, which operated adult contemporary stations playing soft-rockers such as Phil Collins and Celine Dion.

"It was a big job to be a woman and vice president," Sneed said. "There just weren't girls in radio programming. It is still a position that is dominated by men."

At the same time, another woman was making her mark on radio. Cathy Hughes developed the "quiet storm" format -- heavy on slow, sensual rhythm and blues sung by soulful crooners like Luther Vandross -- at predominantly black Howard University's station in Washington. In 1980 she bought her own station, WOL-AM, for just under $1 million.

Now chairman of Radio One, Hughes made her son, Alfred C. Liggins III, chief executive. Liggins found Sneed in Atlanta in 1994 when he went to buy an Atlanta radio station from Summit.

Later that year Summit sold all its stations and Sneed, a separated single mother of one son, was looking for a job that would let her remain in Atlanta. Liggins wanted to expand Radio One beyond Washington and Baltimore. They started what was only the second all-rap radio station in a major market in the nation; the first was in New York. Sneed had never programmed a rap station before.

Radio One began to grow just as white teenagers began mimicking West Coast rappers by throwing gang signs, wearing ultra-baggy jeans and cranking the music up to parent-deafening levels. Today hip-hop and R&B -- "urban music" -- are among the most popular formats with listeners ages 12 to 34, according to Arbitron. Nationwide, 348 stations play urban formats and in many large cities they compete directly with about 600 pop stations that play Top 40 hits, since Top 40 is no longer overwhelmingly white: Many Top 40 hits these days are rap songs. Recently eight of the top 10 singles in Billboard magazine were by rappers, including Outkast, Ludacris, Chingy and Jay-Z.

The gansta rap genre of hip-hop and rough images perpetrated by some rappers is part of what has become a billion-dollar industry that markets music, clothes and movies to young people of all races. From its roots as an urban black music form, rap has become an integral part of mainstream culture and is used to promote such products as Coca-Cola and Old Navy sweatshirts.

The fact that Sneed is white and has a 23-year-old son may have helped her get a feel for young people. The company said it gives local programmers lots of leeway, but every two weeks she has a conference call with program directors telling them which rappers flopped at the Source Awards in Miami and which songs record labels are plugging. To stay plugged in, she goes to concerts and clubs.

"Realistically speaking, you don't see that many white women in the 'hood," said Chris Bridges, a best-selling rapper who uses the name Ludacris and who was once a DJ at Radio One's Atlanta hip-hop station. "She would come to clubs and events right in the ghetto. That says a lot for the chief operating officer of the company."

Last year, the company earned $7 million on revenue of $336 million after losing $55 million on $277 million in revenue because of the billion-dollar station-buying spree in 2000 that vaulted the company into the big leagues. Liggins took the company public in 1999.

But everywhere it looks, Radio One is surrounded by giants more than twice its size. Its toughest competition in Washington is WPGC-FM (95.5), owned by New York-based Infinity Broadcasting Corp., a unit of Viacom Inc. that owns 185 stations. Radio One's R&B station, WMMJ-FM (102.3) and WPGC battle for the top market share. The Infinity station is slightly ahead.
Rebuking Critics

Soon the Land Rover is parked and Sneed is eating a chicken Ceasar salad at a Marie Callender's, a middle-market chain restaurant heavy on comfort food. She tells Freund and Scorpio a story about conservative TV pundit Bill O'Reilly berating white rapper Eminem for advocating the assassination of the president. "In hip-hop, 'dead presidents' means money," she said, throwing up her hands. "He just didn't get it. Come on, people!"

It is not just middle-age white conservatives who dislike the music. Lots of parents worry about songs celebrating guns and violence or demeaning women. And some rappers are not exactly role models. Unlike easy-listening stars, rappers tend to walk it like they talk it, and some have been shot and killed. Then there is the rabid consumerism, obsessed with "bling-bling" -- jewelry -- and expensive cars and clothes. Some rappers talk about the rough neighborhoods where they grew up while others offer views on subjects as diverse as politics to partying.

Sneed blows off the critics. "Until they listen and can have a conversation that lets me know that they actually spent some time monitoring what we are playing, we have nothing to talk about."

Late that night, Sneed's driver drops her and her 29-year old assistant for a meeting at Mr. Chow, an intimate celebrity hangout in Beverly Hills. Sneed steps out of the black Cadillac Escalade and is soon joking with a Geffen Records executive and his three assistants over champagne and lobster, chicken satay and shrimp dumplings. The conversation turns serious for a moment when the background music changes. The Geffen executive has secretly asked the restaurant manager to play young R&B singer Avant's new record so he could pitch it to Sneed.

"Sounds good," she said, but makes no promises.

As dinner progresses, there are lots of stories about hip-hop artists -- who is the hardest-to-work-with diva; who is known to carry a gun. "If you ever see that guy," the Geffen executive said, "you know he's packing an arsenal." Sneed laughs.

Then it is morning again in Los Angeles, in a conference room at the Beat offices on Wilshire, and the station manager and sales team gather around printouts of the latest Arbitron figures. The station manager passes a sheet to Sneed: The previous month the Beat ranked third in the market for the 18- to 34-year-old age group. It grabbed a respectable 3.3 rating, meaning that during any continuous 15-minute period 3.3 percent of Los Angeles listeners, or 343,000 people, were tuned in. The station gained ground on its competitor, an Infinity station, which leads the Beat but lost market share.

"Oh, God! OH MY GOD!" Sneed yelps. "That's freaking awesome!"