SPOTLIGHT: Darius P. Felton '08

After completing my interview with WHRB Program Director Darius P. Felton ’08, I was stopped on my way out of the station by one of his radio colleagues. This associate—presumably also a staffer of The Darker Side (TDS), WHRB’s hip-hop department—wanted to make sure I was aware that Felton is the man to know when it comes to independent hip-hop, citing the fact that Felton’s cell phone contains the contact numbers of several Boston-area hip-hop artists.

When I looked to Felton for confirmation, he grinned and shrugged off his familiarity with the underground hip-hop scene, even though he has been tirelessly improving TDS—and consequently hip-hop accessibility at Harvard—since he joined WHRB his freshman year.

I came in during my freshman year…Me and Sam Jacoby [Samuel D. G. Jacoby ’08], the other founder of this newest incarnation of TDS, came in saying this could be so much better if we found people that cared about this…We can change this. We can get it to how we want it. I mean it’s really just a matter of persistence.

That year Felton and Jacoby created the first TDS-specific comp, improved station relations with promotion companies, and later went on to extend TDS’ time slot to both Saturday and Sunday nights.

With increased manpower and an improved playlist, last weekend’s Boston Hip-Hop Festival at the Middle East Club found Felton and the rest of TDS ready to take their mission one step further: getting direct contact with local artists themselves and scheduling radio-broadcast interviews.

We’ve gotten contact with quite a few of the artists. I mean, they’re pretty eager to get on air. They’re all local artists. Some of them are bigger than others. The biggest one is Insight…he’s probably more professional-sounding than some of the others ones…[Some are] real local. We haven’t really heard of [them] up until this point, but…you’ve got to give everyone a chance. That’s the whole point of local college radio.

So far TDS has scheduled four interviews, the first of which (with Insight) will likely air this weekend during The Darker Side’s airtime, between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on Saturday night and midnight to 4 a.m. on Sunday night.

Felton hopes to build the station’s reputation against stiff competition with other college radio broadcasts in the area, most notably Emerson. He also envisions the musical influence of WHRB extending beyond on-air interactions with artists.

As more artists get used to coming to the station, eventually, hopefully, it’ll get to a point where artists get used to coming to Harvard. Once you get people coming to the station, it’s not that much more difficult to get them to go to Loker or something like that, and have small concerts. That’s what we’re really trying to do, trying to get more stuff happening on campus that’s radio-sponsored…Really, the aspiration is like I said before: to definitely create something that outlasts me. When I come to Harvard and I’m an alumni years later…it’ll be like ‘Oh yeah, the hip-hop department is going strong. And they regularly have guests, or they regularly bring concerts to Harvard.’ Something that improves quality of life at Harvard for students. That’s what it’s all about in the end.

And Felton, who goes by the alias DJ Radius on-air and at gigs with partner DJ Quiet (Kousha A. Bautista-Saeyan ’08), has specific ideas about what constitutes this improved quality of campus life.

A lot of times at Harvard there will be a party and there will be a room of people drinking or something. I personally find that kind of boring. I don’t want to sit around and watch people drunk. So if they have a good concert that’s an artist that I want to go see, you know, then I would go see it. And I would be out of my room. And I would be doing something social, which I’m sure Harvard wants. Because I know they’ve seen the ‘Our Students Are Unhappy’ reports, and it comes out every year: ‘Harvard students are the most unhappy of all the Ivy League’ or whatever. So I mean, yeah, if you give us more things to do that people actually like, other than sitting in a room and drinking, maybe it’ll make someone happy. Right?