Brown Vs. Hot 99.5

Oh, B-Bro.

OK, let’s take a break from satellite radio merger news for just a post and talk about some gossip. I mean, no blog is fun without the inclusion of gossip, so let’s put on our chat hats and get down to business. The man of the hour is Bobby Brown. If you have not been up on your US Weekly and/or National Enquirer the past ten years, you probably have not heard of the man. But just to give you a quick overview and the play-by-play highlights, Bobby Brown used to be in a group called New Edition, a semi-huge R&B group from the 80’s. He was married to Whitney Houston (he got her hooked on the white stuff, and I ain’t talkin’ the center of an Oreo) who he raised his daughter with, only to get separated last year after 14 happy (?) years of marriage with a pending divorce in order. He went through a plethora of legal woes, involving rape accusations, drunk-driving fiascos, alleged spousal battery, ventures into rehab, etc. The list really does go on, but for the sake of this entry, let’s get to why it says something about radio.

Bobby Brown is a sad man, and he’s about to get sadder (in your eyes… in his eyes, he thinks Bobby Brown is the one). While attending his daughter’s cheerleading competition at her high school, Brown was arrested – that’s right, at a high school cheerleading competition – for failing to pay the child support owed to his baby’s momma, Kim Ward, with whom he had two sons. Adopting the “deadbeat dad” title, Brown was ironically arrested for failing to provide financial support for his kids while giving emotional support to his other daughter. But it’s no laughing matter. Brown was sent to jail for three nights, and was unable to post the $19,150 bond owed to Ward. A little sad for a semi-successful musician. Brown sat and simmered in jail, which was no new locale for the singer, until he was finally bailed out on the third night’s evening.

How does this relate to radio, you might be asking? Well, the aids who posted the bail for Brown take the form of the radio station Hot 99.5 FM, based in Washington, DC. In agreement with Brown, they posted the bail to get him out of the slammer, and in exchange, Brown would act as host for a week on the station’s show, “The Kane Show.” Sounds a little ridiculous, right? In a veiled form of bribery (mainly, scooping someone up when they are down and are fresh out of choices), the station saw an opportunity to boost ratings by exploiting the real-life situation of a downtrodden and troubled man. Brown was left with no choices, since he could not procure the money, and agreed to do the show. Exploitation, exploitation, exploitation.

The story gets thicker. Brown called into the Kane show on one of the subsequent days, and began to chat with Kane, the show’s host. In the first ten minutes of the interview, Kane began to grill Brown on his lack of payments and financial woes, to which Brown took offense and hung up. Brown stated that he did not agree to bail on the condition that he discuss his personal life on the radio, which is quite understandable, and the station was left looking like a bunch of fools as Brown got a way scot-free. But luckily for the station, Brown agreed to pay back the sum in exchange for not having to appear on the show. Whether or not he will pay the station back, Brown made the station look like an inexperienced and naïve institution, giving the Kane show a bad public image and Brown an even worse one.

So what does this say about the radio industry? There is a fine line between the radio stations and the artists that they play. When a station makes a conscious decision to get involved with the lives of their artists, they are exposing their underworkings and undercutting their integrity. Sure, radio stations sponsor concerts all of the time, and obviously get paid to play some (most) artists, but those are all done for harmless profit. The moment that a radio station gets involved with an artist’s life, and tries to get something from that artist in exchange for a favor, they become less of a faceless entity; they grow a soul.

In the case of Hot 99.5, they showed that they had an evil one. Brown was left with no choices, and would have consequently rotted in jail until Whitney Houston let her consciousness eat away at her, eventually gave in and bailed him out. But that might have taken a long time. The station saw this as an opportunity to improve their listenership by getting involved with the controversy in the singer’s life and exploiting it, simply to get exclusive information straight from the horse’s mouth. In the scope of legalities, the radio station did nothing wrong, but this is a matter of morality. How can listeners trust a station that manipulates others for their own benefit? How fair is it for a radio station to step outside of the confines of their roles as a simple radio station?

Maybe it’s just me being a bit naïve and inexperienced in the world of radio, but this is a completely immoral act outside of broadcasting. I would hope that Brown never pays back the station to spite their ignorant behavior, thereby giving the station a financial (can I get a substantial?) loss. Radio stations need to keep the wall up between them and their played artists. But situations have and always will occur between artists and radio stations, since they are quite dependent on one another: artists need radio stations to play them, radio stations need artists for content. Therefore, there is always a relationship at work. But when that relationship becomes more than just about the music, it loses its integrity and starts to become capricious and ingenuine. Stations will look like fools in their blatant attempts to ring in listeners, and make it worse for the rest of the industry by tainting it. So I guess the moral of the story is clear: next time you go to jail, Bobby Brown, try to stick it out until a better alternative comes along. That way, you won’t get into a pickle and the industry won’t be exposed as immoral. And, best of all, I won’t have to blog about you!