Feeling Rebloggy
Amid renewed attention on the R&B singer and his sexual misconduct allegations, many radio workers are opting to #MuteRKelly. “You have to feel some type of culpability or feel complicit in some way,” said one DJ, “especially if you work in radio.”
After watching Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly documentary, Jerold Jackson, a radio program director in Lafayette, Louisiana, was angry.
“To see the faces of those people, to hear that every single person was saying the same exact thing ... it was describing an MO of how he operates,” Jackson told BuzzFeed News. “That’s pimp-like quality and that’s the last thing we need.”
Jackson suddenly felt compelled to pull down a plaque on his wall that he said he’d received from R. Kelly himself at a National Black Programmers Coalition years before, “thanking” him for playing the singer’s music. Jackson’s radio stations, KRRQ 95.5 and KNEK 104.3, no longer play the singer’s music.
Jackson’s stations are not alone.
After decades of giving the musician airtime, many urban, R&B, and even pop stations across the US now seem to be slowly abandoning Kelly, as they find it increasingly difficult to turn a blind eye to the severity of the claims against him in the #MeToo era. BuzzFeed News spoke with almost a dozen radio workers across the country about how they’re handling the renewed focus on the singer’s scandals, revealing that the coordinated campaign by activists to #MuteRKelly may indeed be breaking through where it counts: the gatekeepers of the music industry...
Read More: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/michaelblackmon/r-kelly-radio-mute?
