Alums, fans question WKCR DJ’s dismissal

CORRECTION APPENDED:

Adam Waytz, CC ’03, is angry, and he’s not the only one.

In October, WKCR let go DJ Sucio Smash, of the prominent underground hip hop show Squeeze Radio, without warning that his position might be on the line.

Since then, WKCR has been receiving emails and mail from radio alumni like Waytz, and from New York hip hop community members, expressing disappointment and rage at the decision. An online petition begging the radio station to bring Squeeze Radio back had 1,707 signatures at the date of publication.

Aside from some “behavioral issues” that Ellen Walkington, publicity director of WKCR, declined to comment on, the primary reason for Smash’s termination, according to the station, was Smash’s alleged failure to teach student interns about music and allow them to participate in the show in a substantive way.

WKCR, as a station, prides itself both in offering high-quality programming to New York and in teaching Columbia undergraduates about music. And the decision to remove Smash may point to a renewed emphasis on making WKCR a learning experience for undergraduates in the station’s intern program above all else.

Waytz was an intern at WKCR in 2002, when Bobbito of the original “Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show” transitioned his brief solo show “CM Famalam Radio” to DJ Sucio Smash, another iconic figure of New York hip hop. The original show—which was started on KCR in 1990 by Stretch and Bobbito—has played a major role in shaping hip hop history and bringing hip hop to the forefront.

“In 1990, there were no hip hop stations,” Smash said. “The show is a part of New York City hip hop history, period, point blank, bar none, that’s the best show ever.” The show was the first to play then-unsigned legends Nas, Jay Z, Wu Tang Clan, and Notorious B.I.G., and publications from the Village Voice, Time Out New York, and Source Magazine have rated Squeeze “the best hip hop show” at various points.

“Many of the other alums, including former board members, are very disappointed with the decision and are confused as to why WKCR would cancel Squeeze Radio,” Waytz said. “The consensus among other alums that I’ve talked to has been disappointment.”

“Now what are people going to listen to? It was kind of like a staple on Thursday night, you look forward to staying up late to listen to all the good stuff he was going to play,” said Jorge Barrios, a fan since the ’90s and part of the New York hip hop scene. He added that there’s a sense of, “What else is going to be taken away from us?”

Waytz spoke on behalf of himself and other alums—“We all had an idea of what the spirit of WKCR and what it [Squeeze Radio] meant … WKCR is not about fulfilling the desires of the students first, it’s always been about the community. The relationship people in New York have with that show is just so strong,” he said. “It [Smash’s removal] gives Columbia this undeserved image of acrimonious relationship with the community—at any second they can do something like cancel this show that’s a New York institution and a hip hop institution.”

Katie Salmon, BC ’11 and WKCR’s program director, said, “His [Smash’s] vision of the show does not fit in at all with WKCR’s commitment to students. It was two very contrasting ideas of what the show should be.”

Marin Fanjoy-Labrenz, BC ’13 and a former intern on the show, said, “There are certain things that make WKCR what it is … I don’t think he [Smash] really fit into what WKCR is, meaning that we have an intern process, and the interns didn’t learn anything on the show.”

Fanjoy-Labrenz said of her own experience with Smash, “He cared about the music, but he spent his mic breaks talking about something that wasn’t hip hop. He talked about his experiences, his life, Twitter—but he didn’t really talk about what he was playing. … I didn’t feel like I was involved as an intern, and that’s what WKCR is about.”

“I had a great experience there, but it was a very different internship experience than the ones I know WKCR wants to offer,” Gwen Dipert, BC ’10 and another former intern, said. She added that she does think there is value in the type of internship experience that Smash offered.

Waytz accredits the decision to ignorance about the show’s importance—“I’m sure the students have good intentions, but they’re just not aware of WKCR’s history.”

Salmon said, “We had tried so many times to compromise with Sucio, and come up with a solution in interns could get a better experience without compromising the structure of the show Sucio had created, but he refused to compromise. He would always agree with us and say ‘Interns are welcome on my show. I love having interns,’ but then he’d never actually do anything about it. He put us in a very difficult situation.”

Many critics of the decision point to the fact that Phil Schaap, CC ’74, has programmed the same jazz show “Bird Flight” for the last 40 years. Smash himself said, “What’s the difference between Phil Schaap and me? The fact that it’s hip hop?”

Salmon responded, “Phil contributes a lot more of his time and energy to the station in other ways,” and added that there are other opportunities for students to intern in the jazz department where they can make programming decisions.

This is not the case for hip hop, where the 1-5 time slot on Thursday night/Friday morning claims WKCR’s only hip hop programming. When asked, Salmon and Walkington seem reluctant to open up another slot for student-run hip hop programming because “there’s no room in the schedule.”

According to Smash, the board was never clear about what exactly he should be teaching the interns, and how his show could at least run similar to Schaap’s. “It was never told to me there was a requirement, the interns have to be a part of the show, they have to program music,” Smash said. “If those things were expressed to me, trust me, I would have made it happen, and I would have made it fun.” Smash was also angered because WKCR never warned him about his removal being a possibility.

It is unclear how long the interning system has even been a part of WKCR’s history and how important it has been historically. Smash—who worked with Stretch and Bobbito before taking over the show—said that the first interns he remembers joined the show when the station moved to its current location at 114th Street and Broadway in the early 2000s. Waytz said that the program existed when he started in 2002, but added that “it was a fairly unofficial agreement.”

Walkington maintained that, even before the internship program was formal, “the station has always been student run, so older students have always taught younger students.”

Waytz said that the show’s ties to Columbia—and even WKCR—have always been loose, and when Bobbito ran the show, he recruited his own non-Columbia interns from the New York hip hop community. Waytz said, “I don’t really have an opinion either way on whether it’s better to make a Columbia thing or a community thing, but it was always a community thing.”

“Handing it over to students opens up the possibility that it can be both rather than one or the other, they can be undergraduates and have a great experience and serve the community,” Walkington said.

Salmon added, “Just because we lost a programmer that has a very strong connection with the community doesn’t mean that connection with the community is lost.”

But fans disagree. “The people they have on it now have no personality, and they seem like they don’t know what they’re doing,” Berrios said.

Old School Randy, a hip hop archivist and another 20-year fan, expressed a more zen attitude, “Ain’t nothing you can do really.”

CORRECTION: Gwen Dipert was incorrectly identified as Gwen Bitert. The above article reflects the correction. Spectator regrets the error.