“I came up at a time before streaming, where the only sort of popular exposure you could get was radio, and that translated back and forth to the clubs,” Warren “Oak” Felder, a songwriter and producer who has worked with Usher and Kehlani, said last year. To get played on mainstream radio, a singer would likely have to subsume her sound to rap - sing over a tough hip-hop beat, make room for a guest rapper - or push the tempo on a club-friendly record. Rap pushed R&B into the background, and black radio split into formats now know as “Urban Mainstream,” which plays a mix of rap and R&B and targets 18- to 34-year-old listeners, and “Urban Adult Contemporary,” which plays almost entirely R&B and targets listeners aged 25 to 54.Īs these formats cohered and calcified, they put young R&B singers in a bind. For veterans like the Isley Brothers, the format helped them continue to score hits decades after they’d begun releasing music.īut things changed at radio when hip-hop crashed into the mainstream in the early 1990s. It was also a boon for a particular group of singers who already specialized in plush and lush. “Quiet Storm changed the game for a lot of black radio stations across the country, who adopted not only the format but the name,” says Myrick, who also spent time programming WHUR. The format immediately proved popular well outside of D.C.
“People want something they can study to, something they can play while they’re having a dinner party.” “You might be in a bad mood, and you want to hear something that will either justify your mood or change your mood,” Dickinson adds. “That evening format, laid back, cool out, is important - it’s a rejuvenating way to listen to your music.” “The lifestyle of people listening to that format, they have jobs and things to do,” says Kevin Fleming, a former record company and radio executive who now edits the Urban Buzz, a newsletter for urban radio professionals. The Quiet Storm sound is as versatile as it is non-invasive. In a Billboard article around the same time, he described the format “an alternative crossover route to broad commercial acceptance.” ”It opened up the whole thing where ballads could break in without having to compete with up-tempo songs,” the noted critic Nelson George told The New York Times in 1987. This freed DJs of the need to play obvious singles, or even new songs - oldies and B-sides were welcome, as long as they fit in tone and tempo. (The title track became Lindsey’s theme music.) The meat of the genre was “slow ballads, some instrumentals and deep album cuts,” according to Maxx Myrick, a 40-year radio veteran. It was long suites of music.”Ĭallers loved Lindsey’s style, and his template became the basis for Quiet Storm, which was named in honor of the last great Smokey Robinson album.
He didn’t like to talk a lot, so he only took two breaks an hour. “So he played Phyllis Hyman, Jean Carne, Norman Connors, things of that nature. “He wasn’t a full-time announcer, and he was kind of shy, but he had a feel for music that told stories,” says Dickinson. In the summer of 1976, Melvin Lindsey was an intern at WHUR when he was pressed into service as a substitute DJ. “The playlists are a way to present this music to a new audience, wrapping an old package in new paper.” station WHUR - “home of the original Quiet Storm” - and now helms several R&B stations for SiriusXM. “It’s a new machinery, but the same idea that Melvin Lindsey had when he created Quiet Storm,” says Dave Dickinson, a radio veteran who used to program the Washington D.C.