[KDAY 1580-AM]

Matthew McDaniel

Abrams, Jonathan. "Completely Different Nations: Los Angeles, 1983 -1986." In The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop. New York: Crown, 2022.

Known as Los Angeles' "Most Dangerous Radio Station" throughout Hip Hop's golden age, KDAY 1580-AM was fundamental to the genre's explosion on the West Coast throughout 1980s and 90s.

Helmed by Texas-transplant Greg Mack, KDAY 1580-AM was the first Los Angeles-based radio station to embrace Hip Hop in the era when mainstream music executives were too afraid of the new music taking over the youth culture in Southern California. Imported from the East Coast, then remixed and slowed down to the better match the unhurried pace of it's Western counter part, Mack was an early champion of California's first excursions into Hip Hop, from Uncle Jamm's Army to Egyptian Lover. Trying out a new strategy for radio programming, Mack explicitly shifted the mainstream focus from what was commercially successful to the music he heard bumping again and again through the Southern Californian neighborhoods he now lived in—regardless of how popular these tracks were or were not on industry charts. With his shows on KDAY, Mack "provide[d] the music a voice and outlet in Los Angeles" (Abrams, 107).

One of Mack's most innovative changes to the KDAY line-up was the introduction of the "Mack Attack Mixmasters"—an in-house DJ crew whose first members were the likes of Dr. Dre and DJ Yella of the World Class Wreckin' Cru—tasked with spinning records live at local hotspots to be broadcast live on the air. The Mixmasters live show's made KDAY the listening destination du jour for L.A.'s teens and by the late '80s, KDAY was broadcast out of six towers on a hill between Silver Lake and Echo Park. KDAY 1580-AM would go off the air almost at the heights of it's popularity on March 28, 1991 but it's impact on culture has never stopped.

Many of the most famous Hip Hop artists that came out of this early West Coast scene credit Mack and his show's on KDAY 1580-AM for being their first introductions to Hip Hop as young people, introducing them to the art form that would go on to make them stars.