The KROQ Sound: Future Rock?

Spinning the radio dial in Los Angeles is like hopping into a time machine.

On KRTH-FM (Your Stone Age Radio Station) it sounds like 1966. On KLOS-FM (Led Zeppelin Rules) it’s 1975. And on Power 106 (Big Brother Says Dance) it’s 1984.

But on KROQ-FM, it already sounds like 1990--could we be listening to . . . Future Rock?

At night, a typical KROQ set includes songs by newcomers such as Megablast and Voice of the Beehive (whose raucous “Barbarians in the Back Seat” is a favorite on the station 24-hours a day) as well as new material from the Pretenders, James Brown, Duran Duran and Social Distortion.

During the day, the station often reverberates with rap music. KROQ is playing several hip-hop tunes, including Ice-T’s “Pusher Man” and Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” (the latter is a nightly top request tune).

You can hear loads of new music on Top 40 stations like KIIS-FM, but only predictable pop fluff. You can hear more adventuresome rock on KMPC-FM, but the station (despite the presence of a black program director) keeps its distance from rap. At KROQ, the color barrier has begun to disintegrate as well as the more subtle dividing line of cool--you now hear both trendy Brit pop posers and noisy Yank rockers.

What’s going on?

“I think we’re trying to take the station in a lot of different directions,” explained Van Johnson, a veteran KROQ staffer who took over as program director earlier this year. “We’re not afraid of rap or reggae or anything. I don’t think you should rule out playing something just because it doesn’t fit squarely into your format. If it’s a great song, we can find a way to make it fit on KROQ.”

During the past year, KROQ’s ratings have been steady but unspectacular, with the station hovering in the lower reaches of the L.A. radio Top Ten. KROQ’s programming philosophy has also remained constant--the station carves out a distinctive niche by playing striking new songs weeks before its competition jumps on the bandwagon.

“We were on Aswad’s ‘Don’t Turn Around’ when no one else was playing it,” said Johnson, who also pointed to “Harley David” by the Bollock Brothers, “Wild Thing” by Tone Loc and “Crash” by the Primitives as KROQ exclusives.

Better still, unlike most stations ruled by call-out research, KROQ will stay with a song even if it arouses hostile feedback from its audience. A current example--Ice-T’s “Pusher Man.” “A lot of people have a built-in bias and prejudice against rap, so we’ve been getting a certain amount of negative response. Obviously, we don’t want to alienate too many listeners, but with Ice-T, we believe in the song, so we’re giving it a good shot.”

KROQ also jumped on the new Was (Not Was) album--and now that other stations have added the group’s single to their playlists, KROQ has gone deeper into the album, most recently playing a bizarre teen-age monologue called “Dad, I’m in Jail.”

“Yeah, it’s obviously strange and obnoxious,” said Johnson. “But it works in a KROQ sense, exactly because it’s so strange. That’s what we look for--the spice, the smack in the head that we can give our listeners. In fact, it’s that smack in the head they’ve come to expect from us.”