Bad Boy Radio found ways to bridge gaps between genres and generations, and the Birthday Line became one of many common denominators in black Chicago.įor this oral history of Bad Boy Radio, I interviewed Mike Love and the Dizz separately, hoping to learn what brought them to WGCI and how their show came to be.
The Bad Boy Smack on Bad Boy RadioĬhicago is notoriously segregated by race, but even within its black community sharp lines can exist between fans of dusties, house, ghetto house, and juke music. When Mike Love and the Dizz left the station in 2007, their classic call-in segments went with them, including the Birthday Line, All Eyes on Me (where listeners shout out their neighborhoods and area codes), and the Bad Boy Smack (where the hosts deliver sound-effect “smacks” to the no-good people, lousy traffic, and other annoyances that listeners call to complain about). Chance the Rapper crystallized this nostalgia on Sunday, April 16, when he called WGCI and persuaded on-air personality Trey White to do the Birthday Line for his 24th.Ĭhano’s rendition was missing two important things, though: the original hosts. (The Dizz, aka Victor Blackful, no longer works in radio and lives in Chicago only part-time.) But back in the day, the Birthday Line ran every Monday through Friday night, often enough to become the kind of fixture that people get nostalgic about. Love has kept the Birthday Line alive, if only barely, with the occasional segment on the stations where he’s worked since-first V100.7 in Milwaukee, then Soul 106.3 in Chicago, where he has a different show called Bad Boy Radio With Mike Love. It’s been ten years since the original Bad Boy Radio went off the air, but Mike Love and the Dizz’s famous question to their callers-“Who’s this on the birthday line?”-remains a defining artifact in the history of Chicago radio.
It was the sort of thing DJs often did before corporate consolidation made community-oriented commercial radio an endangered species-the two men had no idea they were on the cusp of creating a pop-cultural phenomenon. In 1997 Mike Love and the Dizz, who’d begun hosting Bad Boy Radio on WGCI earlier that year, launched a segment where they asked any listeners who were celebrating a birthday to call in.
0 kommentar(er)
