Pulse-Checking NYC Rap Radio

A pair of ripples in New York’s terrestrial radio landscape seemed to end a long cold war between the city’s dueling hip-hop stations, Hot 97 and Power 105.1. On Friday, December 12, we learned that Hot canceled Ebro in the Morning as hosts Ebro Darden, Peter Rosenberg, and Laura Stylez offered curt social-media posts memorializing their run with no forewarning. The following Monday, the trio launched The Ebro Laura Rosenberg Show on YouTube to talk about the speed of the rug pull and their loving, if occasionally frosty, relationship with Hot 97 stalwart Funkmaster Flex, who broadcasts in their time slot for now. On the opposite end of the dial, Power’s rival morning hip-hop talk show, The Breakfast Club, has been picked up by Netflix in a deal with iHeartMedia to host new episodes from a slate of its tentpole video podcasts.

Personalities from the stations have squabbled over the years, like rappers signed to labels with similar wares but diverging agendas. Hot ran somewhat unopposed as the biggest rap-friendly Big Apple station from a mid-’90s conversion till Power challenged aggressively in the mid to late aughts with edgier voices like Charlamagne tha God and former Hot hosts Star and Buc Wild. The elder station now scrambles to recast the morning drive, while its competitor is rolled up in Ted Sarandos’s 2025 IP avalanche. (Across the Hudson River, 94.7 the Block, North Jersey’s classic hip-hop station since 2021, let veteran broadcasters Ed Lover and Miss Jones go.) The valuation gods declared a winner in the quest to be America’s premier New York radio station, the callous observer might say. But what does hip-hop lose? Charlamagne’s ascension — and that of Rory and Mal, Joe Budden’s former cohorts who have also been picked up by Netflix — dislodges the journalistic values from a mainstreaming of rap discourse.

The title of New York City radio heavyweight is usually won by welterweighting elsewhere in the country — this is precious commercial real estate, given to a commodity that tests well. Howard Stern gigged in almost half a dozen cities before landing a show at home; much of the Breakfast Club and Ebro in the Morning roster got here by grinding in other markets. By turning the feisty Maryland-raised Peter Rosenberg loose after over 18 years on the air, Hot 97 stands to lose sight of underground hip-hop luminaries he held the door open for in his long-running, also-axed show, Real Late, and through his early advocacy for phenoms like A$AP Rocky and Action Bronson.

Ebro in the Morning debuted in 2012, built around Bay Area–born Darden’s hard-nosed program-director veneer, Rosenberg’s rap-nerd bona fides, and L.A. transplant Laura Stylez’s ease in nudging the other more established personalities out of their wheelhouses. Tension between Ebro’s performative bullishness and the evolving face of rap led to prickly radio theater. The era yielded one interview in which Ebro failed to grasp the brilliance of the Migos in their prime and another in which he boldly grilled Kodak Black about the scourge of sexual assault in rap. The show angled to be on the pulse but could approach its work grubbily, like when Rosenberg took such umbrage with Nicki Minaj’s 2010s EDM pivot that it wrecked a Young Money appearance at Hot 97’s 2012 Summer Jam festival.

Turning the dial, Charlamagne’s elevation to multi-platform talk overlord reinforces the South Carolina chatter’s grip on the title of hip-hop personality called upon to represent the culture outside its confines. His is a true rap rags-to-riches saga: Turning from petty crime to interning in radio, he earned a role as a sidekick on WBLS’s The Wendy Williams Experience, a salacious precursor to Williams’s television reign. Charlamagne’s hardheaded vox-pop posturing served as a blueprint for Budden’s crotchety podcaster pivot. More recently, it has been pushed in political broadcast circles as a left-leaning antidote to the unpredictable thinker Joe Rogan turned into.

Similarly, Charlamagne’s instincts can cut through industry niceties or lead down glaringly wrong pathways. You want him making subject and audience a bit uncomfortable, as that’s where the magic happens, but this can also lead to prying, sexist questions, and ill-advised platforming of right-wing grifters. The Breakfast Club got Joe Biden to make one of the more embarrassing pitches to Black voters in recent memory; they’ve also had Candace Owens on. As with Rogan and other assertive hunch-havers ruling pod charts, this resonates with many (mostly men) who’d rather watch a guy painfully come to a realization in an exhausting debate than weather the confidence (scanning as arrogance) of anyone who has their insinuations filtered through a fact check. The Breakfast Club is interested in the greater good, but often creates a perfect mess in execution. No one with an interest in plugging into that audience cares whether it attracts eyes out of respect or spite.

Where does this leave a listener, or anyone on the ladder of success as a rapper in the city that birthed the concept? There is a fair chance that whatever ultimately settles in as the replacement for Ebro in the Morning will not share all of its sage or all of its annoying ideas about stewardship of a local and national scene. Pushing longtime personalities out with no good-bye suggests that Emmis, the corporation that owns Hot 97, would like a jewel in its repertoire to turn a bigger profit than Ebro. The rush for a piece of Breakfast Club feels, if not clueless to, then hungry for its controversies. Concurrently, Charlamagne’s appearances on journalism panels and cable-news shows indicate a push toward inner-city outreach that often stops at fishing for the biggest name friendly to the given agenda.

The public may still care, but the people chasing and reporting the news argued about on podcasts fight for fewer jobs underfoot. It doesn’t matter whether Rory and Mal, who feverishly defended Drake throughout his UMG trial, grasp the finer points of the legal proceeding so long as enough people tune in to see them stumble through it. They thrive in the chaos of coverage before, during, and after high-profile trials for men like Diddy and Tory Lanez. That wrongheadedness of hip-hop media’s mindset bears fruit in the endless loop of misinformation. Flex, who taunted Cassie on Instagram immediately after the Diddy verdict, is not turning back that tide.