THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019 N C5Pop Music
It was still light out, early on a weekday
evening this summer, when dozens of con-
test winners, radio station employees and
advertisers packed a small Manhattan mu-
sic hall for what was not exactly a display of
rock ’n’ roll bacchanalia.
Free pizza was scattered about and peo-
ple waited patiently as the station hosting
the event — ALT 92.3 (WNYL-FM), New
York City’s only major contemporary rock
station — was piped in at a respectable vol-
ume. Songs by Red Hot Chili Peppers, the
All-American Rejects and 311, each more
than a decade old, played to little notice. But
a cheer of recognition bubbled up for “Quar-
ter Past Midnight” by the British group
Bastille, which was scheduled to take the
stage to celebrate its recent album release
with an intimate performance.
After three minutes of glossy, post-Cold-
play pop-rock, the crowd once again quieted
for “Somebody That I Used to Know,” the
2011 No. 1 hit by Gotye, as it awaited the four
men of Bastille in the flesh.
This, in a nutshell, is what local alterna-
tive radio looks and sounds like at the mo-
ment, in a time of streaming, hip-hop domi-
nance and not so much rocking: a selection
of throwback favorites from mid-90s and
early 2000s hitmakers — Green Day,
Weezer, Sublime and others that could pass
as classic rock for old millennials and young
Gen-X-ers — plus newer, often synth- or
electronic-based and pop-crossover folk
from acts like Of Monsters and Men, Smith
& Thell and Matt Maeson, whose song
“Cringe” recently spent four weeks atop
Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart.
“We don’t even say the word ‘rock’ on the
radio station — we’re New York’s new alter-
native,” said Mike Kaplan, the ALT 92.3 pro-
gram director and format captain for alter-
native across Entercom, the station’s par-
ent company, in an earlier interview. “I
don’t think there’s a big win in using the
word ‘rock’ today,” he added.
“The raw, guitar-rock sound is really — I
don’t want to say it’s done, but... ” He
trailed off. “It’s present, but it’s morphed
and mixed with other instrumentation.
Does anyone really go to Guitar Center any-
more and pick up the guitar?”
The overlapping quagmires facing alter-
native rock radio — how much new music
should it play, what should it sound like and
who is it for? — are particularly tricky in
New York, which has long been led and de-
fined by its rap, Latin and pop stations.
The alternative format, also referred to in
the industry as modern rock, grew out of the
underground radio of the 1970s, and rode
breakout bands like R.E.M., Pixies and the
Cure to the Nirvana explosion of the early
1990s, when previously niche acts frompunk traditions stormed the mainstream. In
the aftermath, through the rap-rock of the
new millennium and the dance-pop and Top
40 dominance of the mid-2000s, rock sta-
tions that didn’t rely on oldies have been the
subject of much hand-wringing regarding
their sonic allegiances and commercial
prospects.
At 92.3, once the home of Howard Stern
(and formerly known as K-ROCK), alterna-
tive has been an on-and-off proposition
since 1996; most recently, under different
ownership, the station spent three years
playing dance music amid the EDM boom.
That changed in late 2017 — a format flip
marked by the playing of “My Hero” by Foo
Fighters — with the merger of CBS Radio,
which ran the station, and Entercom, a na-
tional conglomerate and iHeartRadio com-
petitor that saw a hole in the market.
“Bringing alternative back to New York
was a huge deal,” said Susan Larkin, Enter-
com’s regional president and market man-
ager for New York. She described the sta-
tion’s ideal listener as “early 30s — they’re
in an acquisition stage of their lives, just re-
ally starting to get brand loyalty and they
have decent jobs,” adding: “Who better to
talk to, as an advertiser?”
ALT 92.3, one of 13 alternative stations
under the Entercom umbrella, has built a
steady listenership in its second full year,
averaging an audience of about 1.7 million a
week, according to Nielsen — below the 2.5
million listeners averaged by the Latin sta-
tion La Mega 97.9 FM or the 2.2 million for
the urban station Power 105.1 FM, but onpar with the company’s storied alternative
channel KROQ-FM 106.7 in Los Angeles.
ALT has also focused on building local com-
munity with live events, like exclusive per-
formances by Vampire Weekend and
Twenty One Pilots in its heavily mural-cov-
ered offices, and its inaugural “Not So Silent
Night” holiday arena concert, which will
continue this year.
Kaplan, a Chris Hayes type with black-
framed glasses, acknowledged that finding
a market for rock in New York “has been dif-
ficult,” pointing to “the ethnicity of New
York, the makeup — the majority of our lis-
teners are Caucasian,” he said.
He described his philosophy for reaching
a target demographic of 25- to 34-year-olds
as “playing hits — the familiar music. Peo-
ple say they want new — and they do, and
we do give it to them in the right dose.” But,
Kaplan added, the station can’t “push too
much to try to make something that’s not
there there.”
“If there’s anything polarizing that I see
in the music, it’s a no-go,” he said, scrolling
through the station’s music database.
Commercial radio has always been a fun-
damentally conservative medium, dedi-
cated to avoiding any kind of jolt that would
lead a listener to change the channel, but
that can sometimes put alternative stations
at odds with the ethos of alternative music,
especially given the rapidly evolving
choices available on streaming services
and satellite radio.
Steve Blatter, the head of music program-
ming at Sirius XM, said, “Over the last five-plus years now, depending on how you
measure popularity, alternative rock has
seen a decline.” But he noted that his com-
pany’s three flagship channels dedicated to
contemporary rock — Alt Nation for alter-
native, Octane for heavier alternative and
XMU for indie rock akin to college radio —
have maintained a large, consistent audi-
ence by dedicating themselves to discovery,
playing new music up to 75 percent of the
time.
“Compare that to an alternative rock
channel in FM, and you probably in most
cases will see the reverse,” he said.
Kaplan of ALT 92.3 pointed to an artist
like Billie Eilish, an edgy pop singer who
has found success in both the alternative
and Top 40 worlds, as an example of a thriv-
ing artist who might not make sense on the
station’s playlist, between songs by Mum-
ford & Sons, Walk the Moon and Kings of
Leon. “The correlation between streams
and radio hits, they don’t always match up,”
he said.
“We know that she’s on the leading edge,”
Kaplan added. “She definitely reaches
young women, where our audience... ,” he
continued, stopping himself. “I like to look
at it as a gender-agnostic format,” he said,
but the station trends about 60-40 male.
And while an artist like Lana Del Rey has
found alternative radio success recently
with a cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time,” ALT
92.3 can often go long stretches without
playing songs by women, despite an abun-
dance of current independent rock led by fe-
male musicians.
“I wish there were more females in this
audience,” Kaplan said. “There happens to
be men.”
For ALT 92.3, being on the cutting edge
might not mean breaking an artist before
Spotify or YouTube, which remains all but
impossible for a more traditional medium,
but catching alternative-enough acts, like
Maeson or the next Bastille, before they
transition to the mainstream.
“Songs cross over all the time from here
to pop, and I like that,” Kaplan said, noting
that heavier, darker sounds had moved
away in favor of “the poppier elements.”
“We’re redefining what the word alterna-
tive means, especially for New York City,”
he said. “But we need to find what’s next,
and have men and women both agree.”Alternative Radio
(Don’t Call It Rock)
Inside New York’s
ALT 92.3 FM and
how it’s adjusting to
a format that has
become a quagmire.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The fixtures at ALT 92.3 FM, left, the New
York rock radio station, include Christine
Malovetz, above, a midday host and the
assistant program director.Mike Kaplan, the station’s
program director. “I don’t think
there’s a big win in using the
word ‘rock’ today,” he said.
By JOE COSCARELLIscribed “soccer mom,” an American and —
more than ever — a world traveler.
Yes, she is 61, but her music remains de-
terminedly contemporary, with the drum-
machine sounds of trap, collaborations with
hip-hop vocalists (Quavo and Swae Lee,
shown on video) and the bilingual, reggae-
ton-flavored Latin pop sometimes called ur-
bano (with the Colombian singer Maluma,
also shown on video). The concert, with
most of its music drawn from the “Madame
X” album, was packed with pronounce-
ments, symbols and enigmatic vignettes to
frame the songs. Madonna often wore an
eye patch with an X on it, no doubt a chal-
lenge to her depth perception as a dancer.
By the time Madonna had completed just
the first two songs, she had already
presented an epigraph from James Baldwin
— “Artists are here to disturb the peace” —
that was knocked out onstage by one of the
concert’s recurring figures, a woman
(sometimes Madonna) at a typewriter.
Gunshots introduced “God Control,”
which moves from bitter mourning about
gun deaths to happy memories of string-
laden 1970s disco, while Madonna and danc-
ers appeared in glittery versions of Revolu-
tionary War finery, complete with feathered
tricorn hats, only to be confronted by police
with riot shields. “Dark Ballet” had Joan of
Arc references, a montage of Gothic cathe-
drals and scary priests, a synthesizer ex-
cerpt from Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” and
Madonna grappling with masked dancers,
until cops pulled her off the piano she had
been perched on. The signifiers were al-
ready piling up.
And there were more. Film-noir detec-
tives pursued and interrogated Madonna in
another disco-tinged song, “I Don’t Search I
Find”; “Crave,” which warns, “My cravings
get dangerous,” flaunted a full-sized disco
ball. A pair of robotic but sinuous dancers,
with red lights for eyes, flanked Madonna as
she sat at a piano for the ominous “Future,”
while the video screen filled with images of
urban and environmental destruction. She
surrounded herself with a choir of brightly
robed women and geometric Arabic de-
signs in “Come Alive,” which used the metal
castanets and triplet rhythm of Moroccan
gnawa music to back her as, once again,
Madonna’s lyrics rejected unwanted opin-
ions and restrictions.
The songs Madonna chose from her past
were mostly exhortations and pushbacks,
sometimes coupled with direct political
statements. She sang part of “Papa Don’t
Preach,” reversing its decision to “keep my
baby,” then spoke directly about supporting
abortion rights. Dancing while surrounded
by video imagery of pointing fingers, she re-
vived “Human Nature,” which already testi-
fied — a full 25 years ago — to Madonna’s
tenacity and determination to express her-
self uncensored. When it ended, her daugh-
ters Mercy James, Estere and Stella were
onstage, and the singers and a full-throated
audience shared an a cappella “Express
Yourself.”
The concert’s unquestioned showstopper
was “Frozen,” a somber ballad from the
1998 album “Ray of Light” that offers heal-
ing: “If I could melt your heart, we’d never
be apart.” Madonna appeared as a tiny fig-
ure onstage, surrounded by giant video pro-jections of a dancer moving from a self-pro-
tective clutch to a tentative, then joyful un-
furling and back. It was her oldest daughter,
Lourdes, affirming the family connection in
movement.
Since 2017 Madonna has lived in Lisbon,
where her son David plays soccer, and she
spoke about savoring the city’s music: the
Portuguese tradition of fado and music
from Portugal’s former empire, particularly
from the Cape Verde Islands near Senegal.
One of the show’s most elaborate backdrops
simulated a club in Lisbon.
But appreciation doesn’t equal mastery.
Madonna was backed by the Portuguese
guitarra player Gaspar Varela, the grand-
son of the fado singer Celeste Rodrigues, in
an earnest, awkward fado-rooted song,
“Killers Who Are Partying” from the “Mad-
ame X” album; she also performed a Cape
Verdean classic, “Sodade,” made famous by
Cesária Évora.
Reminding the audience that she had
sung in Cape Verdean Creole and other lan-
guages, Madonna boasted: “This is a girl
who gets around. This is a girl who does her
homework.” But in the songs themselves,
she only sounded like a well-meaning tour-
ist.
Madonna was more suited to the harder
beat of “Batuka,” a song based on the matri-
archal, call-and-response Cape Verdean
tradition of batuque. Backed by more than a
dozen batuque drummers and singers —
Orquestra Batukadeiras — and doing some
hip-shimmying batuque moves, Madonna
conveyed the delight of her discovery, even
as the hand-played beat gave way to elec-
tronic percussion.Forty-one musicians, dancers and sing-
ers appeared throughout the two-hour-plus
show, which came with the same wardrobe
changes as any of Madonna’s large-scale
extravaganzas. (One, before “Vogue,” was
executed before the audience, shielded by a
dressing table.) The singer wasn’t onstage
for one of the most powerful dance mo-
ments, a break between acts when a row of
performers convulsed gracefully at the lip
of the stage to irregular breaths, set to a re-
cording of Madonna intoning lyrics from
“Rescue Me.”
Madonna spoke to and with the audience
repeatedly, taking advantage of the inti-
macy of the room to tell bawdy jokes, apolo-
gize for starting the show late and sip a fan’s
beer. But in songs and stage patter, she
sometimes conflated self-realization and
self-absorption with social progress. Con-
trasting freedom and slavery after “Come
Alive,” she announced that slavery “begins
with ourselves,” forgetting that the slave
trade was not the same as being “slaves to
our phones.”
Yet with Madonna, the spirit is more
about sounds and images than literalism. “I
Rise,” which ends both the album and the
concert, samples a speech by Emma Gonza-
lez, a survivor of the shooting at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School in Park-
land, Fla., then goes on to some clumsy
lyrics. But in a small theater, with a gospelly
beat, raised fists, images of protests world-
wide, a rainbow flag, and Madonna and her
troupe parading up the aisle — close
enough for fans to touch — there was no de-
nying the conviction.JON PARELES MUSIC REVIEWMadonna’s Tour Takes Chances (Cellphones, Too)
Madame X is a concert
focusing on new songs
and the present moment.CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Madonna: Madame X Tour
Through Oct. 12 at the Gilman
Opera House at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music; travels to
Chicago, San Francisco, Las
Vegas, Los Angeles, Boston,
Philadelphia and Miami;
madonna.com.