JAM'N again

Of Sweat, Priest, and the big promise

by Franklin Soults

It's the end of the music biz as we know it, and the employees at JAM'N 94.5 feel fine. The current sales slump has taken its toll on everyone from big record labels to tiny music stores, yet WJMN-FM is coming through the industry-wide crisis in a better position than ever, nudging past longtime hit-music champ KISS-108 with a distinctive soul and dance format that has taken it to the top of the FM ratings.

JAM'N proudly displayed its success last Friday night at the FleetCenter in the station's second annual "Super Jam" concert. Of course, the main exhibit was the triumphant event itself. (And a benevolent triumph too: all profits went to Project Bread.) The first "Super Jam" extravaganza sold out in three days; tickets for "Super Jam '96" were gone in seven hours. Although there were plenty of certified adults in attendance, most of the lucky ticketholders were guys and girls in their mid teens. Noting that about two-thirds of the Super Jam attendees were also white (just like the young crowd at the Smokin' Grooves rap tour last summer), I wondered whether the newest generation of white radio listeners haven't grown up with a "natural" love of black music absent among many of their slightly older brothers and sisters.

But according to JAM'N director of marketing Dennis O'Herron (whom I talked to backstage), the JAM'N mix isn't about "black music." O'Herron prefers the more technically precise yet racially disingenuous label "rhythmic contemporary hit radio." As he sees it, his station's job is to appeal to a cross-section of black, white, and Latino urban listeners without ever getting "too ethnic." That means targeting the narrow band where all these groups' tastes intersect, and nothing more. Now that radio is divided into discrete stylistic blocks governed by giant media groups, such highly controlled narrow-casting is commonplace. Since popular music flourishes best in times of healthy competition, this may also explain the music industry's current dilemma. JAM'N's exceptional success proves the rule: ever since the first rock-and-roll era collapsed, around 1960, young music fans have fallen back on diluted black styles in times of scarcity. As always, most of that music functions as little more than teenybopper fluff and glorified novelty hits.

And indeed, the performances at the FleetCenter recalled the last two times this happened: the late-'70s disco craze and the early-'60s dance craze. Thanks to some Friday the 13th mishaps, I missed the performance by LaBouche (the evening's most perfect incarnation of happy-go-kitschy disco) and half the set by Keith Sweat (the evening's true headliner no matter when he appeared). From what I did see, Sweat lived up to his surname with a commanding, thoroughly professional performance. It was the closest the evening came to a traditional soul set, yet instead of soul's dramatic tension and variegated passion, Sweat offered a contradictory display of virtuoso muscle and airbrushed sultriness. Not that the little girls minded: ear-piercing shrieks of orgiastic ecstasy greeted his every cornball move.

For good measure, the girls gave up orgiastic shrieks to every performer that followed, but it soon became obvious that they were faking it. If Sweat half-broke out of the teenybopper/novelty mode, one-hit blunders Ghost Town DJ and Montell Jordan quickly re-established the music's parameters, and Jodeci members K-CI & JoJo reminded me that, as in the early '60s, the least interesting acts are the male vocal groups (think Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons). Now as then, it's only the girl groups who know how to carom between youthful sensual abandon and passionate stabs at maturity. Almost any young act from the Waiting To Exhale soundtrack could have provided some much needed grit.

As it was, the task got left to veteran reggae smoothie Maxi Priest and old-school rappers Sugarhill Gang and Run DMC. (Scheduled closers Digital Underground never performed.) The latter two were hardly up to the task. Even though they showed some of their original hip-hop spark, they functioned mainly as oldies acts mouthing the hits (sometimes literally); in this context it felt a little like watching Chubby Checker run through "The Twist."

Maxi Priest, though, was the pleasant surprise of the evening. Like several mediocre reggae artists, Priest has found his career resuscitated by his discovery of a broader scope of black American music. His easy R&B punctured by gruff reggae toasting was supple, unbounded, multitextured. It carried hints of the promise of a broad-based pop music held forth by the Fugees, the most exciting act of this unfulfilling year. In this plush new arena, that promise lasted for exactly three pretty good songs. Then it was over and gone.