For The Love: Ebro Darden Interviewed

The Beats 1 broadcaster's fight to rediscover his inner music fan...

You rarely hear about this part, but starting a career in something you’re really passionate about is a double- edged sword. You can care too much. Those minor details that you’d leave behind without an afterthought during temp work through college become gargantuan issues that glue themselves to the back of your mind while you attempt to relax on evenings. Ironically, these can cloud the motive that had you following this path in the first place.

In music, this can be a particularly troublesome dilemma. They say don’t mix business with pleasure, but Ebro Darden would disagree. Since the beginning of his career in 1990, the outspoken radio personality has gone from a 15-year-old working at Sacramento’s KSFM to programme director of the world’s most influential hip-hop radio station, New York city’s HOT 97, and has had to constantly rediscover his love for music along the way.

Now at 41-years-old, his latest role – one of three main anchors for Apple Music’s worldwide radio station, Beats 1 – has him grinning from ear to ear with excitement, glowing when he talks about it. One year in already, and alongside Zane Lowe and London’s Julie Adenuga, he’s enjoying life as a music fan first, radio anchor second.

On paper, working for the station certainly hasn’t made life easier for Ebro. His exhausting daily schedule has him waking up at 4:30AM to prepare for his HOT 97 breakfast show. He works at the station until midday and then takes a nap before hitting the Beats 1 studio at 3PM. There, he prepares to broadcast to 100 countries at 6PM before heading home to spend some time with his family. He also tries to carve out some free time to listen to music for pleasure – something he says he could never pencil into the schedule, “that would be like planning sex with your wife!” This usually ends up happening while he’s hitting the gym, cycling around the neighbourhood or driving his daughter around at weekends.

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Until as late as 2012, Ebro had worked largely behind the scenes at HOT 97. But he began to make himself more publicly known when he started to involve himself in debates and conversations on social media. Under his handle ‘@OldManEbro’ he took on the role of the radio bad guy in order to spark debate around what he was referring to as “Minor Leagues Vs Major Leagues” – aiming to inspire independent artists that he believed didn’t need data driven mainstream radio, to go and create their own movements and get money through other, more fitting means. His presence in the culture has since exploded, and by 2014 he’d stepped down as the station’s programme director in order to focus on his role as an on-air personality. His reach continued to snowball, with kids worldwide sitting down to watch his in-depth interviews on YouTube far beyond the reach the station’s transmitter.

Now, he finds himself at a more comfortable spot between the minors and majors. During his afternoons at Beats 1 it feels like he’s been able to come full circle, regularly inviting many of the artists that had become caught up in that debate, such as Joey Bada$$ and Flatbush Zombies, to come through for interviews, and giving their tracks regular play during his prime time slot.

“I want to be that person that challenges young artists to be better, while also supporting them in a way that gives them a bigger audience,” he says, sat in the luxurious backstage lounge at the Roundhouse, where Chance The Rapper is about to close this year’s Apple Music Festival. “While I get into skirmishes with artists about their music, I think that the genesis of the friction is about making great music. I do believe that you have to have quality control so that people respect the work that’s been done before and we don’t completely lose ourselves in the bullshit!” He states, before breaking it down with an analogy about fast food: “At some point somebody’s got to be like ‘You know that’s not real food right?’ It tastes good, it’s cool when you’re a kid, but that shit’ll kill you bro. You have to tell people they can’t eat that every day. I think it’s similar with music.”

To Ebro, it’s important that he works to bridge generational gaps in music, by providing context and educating his listeners on what came before them. “I think that gives us a tighter knit as music fans,” he says. “When Ray Charles started using gospel melodies to create secular music, there was friction. Generationally it was like, ‘You're not allowed to do that.’ The more that someone can step in and show how this all works together, that’s what hip-hop is. It wasn't genre specific, it was wherever the drum break came from. Whoever had the illest drum break, give me that vinyl, and we're going to rock the party with that drum break. If it was a blues record, a rock record, a jazz record, a country record, a pop record, it didn't matter.”

Travelling to the UK for this year’s Apple Music festival has given him a rare opportunity to connect in person with his co-anchors, Zane and Julie, which again means more music sharing. Over drinks Julie puts him onto masked Tottenham rapper CasIsDead, while he recommends Teddy Sinclair’s new band Cruel Youth, and he later hits a club where to absorb the Road Rap sounds of C Biz and Abra Cadabra. He’s thinking more internationally now, and beyond the hip-hop realm that he’s inhabited since he was a teen. When asked to name some of his favourite recent discoveries he reels off Christine and the Queens, Anik Khan, Mura Masa and Cadenza.

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His reinvigoration of music fandom really comes across best when he’s on air. He’ll share how he discovered the track, like a kid who has just been blown away by hearing their new favourite band for the first time and wants to share it with everyone they come across. He’ll react off impulse, often taking his listeners down rabbit holes of classics, or delving into the catalogue of a favourite artist. At Beats he doesn’t have to cater exclusively to the records that are currently being marketed by labels, and it’s common to hear him breaking out the deeper cuts. “Everybody’s talking about this song, so we’re going to play this song. But there’s also a second tier of discovery, going a little bit further into an album,” he explains. “Being able to go ‘Wow, Travi$ Scott’s album is amazing, but here’s all the things that led up to this moment.’”

Ebro’s main goal is to have his listeners not just hear songs for the first time, but to “experience” them. “I think that's how people fall in love with music,” he philosophises. “It hits them in a certain season or time, or wherever they are in their life, or it hits them multiple times. All of that, they fall in love with a song.” While his week night shows don’t follow the research-based playlist system that sees mainstream radio repeating hits in almost hourly rotations, it’s not necessarily about trying to come up with an entirely new tracklist on a nightly basis either. Through putting certain favourites on regular rotation he builds a relationship with his listeners, a record pool that they all have in common. “You hear a song you might like, and you'll be like, ‘Oh, that's a cool song,’” he offers. “But then now you hear it again with you and your friends, and they like it. Then you go to a party and people are dancing to the song. Then it becomes a soundtrack to your life, you fall in love with it.”

While his new role has increased his global brand and widened his reach outside of hip-hop culture, it feels like the most important bi-product of the new role for Ebro himself is the new music that he’s discovered whilst spending his afternoons digging (or rather, swiping and tapping) for music that he wants his audience to fall in love with. “I started in this game about music,” he reflects. “But you start being a DJ or on air person. You're doing events, you're doing shows, you're doing parties. You really just want to help people have a good time. Then you get farther and deeper into the game and it becomes a business, and you're fighting all the time to just stay in love with music. Beats 1 has definitely helped me do that.”

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Listen to Ebro Darden’s Beats 1 show on Apple Music every day at 11PM & 11AM GMT.

Words: Grant Brydon

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