Skip to main content[FRESH TRACKS] Shoved away in a nondescript brown building off Southwest Macadam Avenue, the Jammin' 107.5 (recently renamed Wild 107.5) studio hardly feels like that of a commercial radio station. At least, not when Northwest Breakout is on the air.
It's not just that the weekly show represents a break from the station's 40-song rotation of current rap and R&B hits that cycles throughout the rest of the week, allowing host Terrance Scott—aka Cool Nutz—to play largely unknown, rising regional hip-hop acts. Nothing about the show, in fact, jibes with the stilted, homogenized atmosphere associated with Clear Channel, the corporate monolith that owns Jammin'/Wild. Scott doesn't speak in a contrived "DJ voice," using instead the same husky, laid-back drawl he employs when joking around with fans via webcam in the show's Ustream.com chat room. He and engineer Danny Davoodi often tease callers, especially if it's an artist requesting his or her own song (which, they say, happens a lot). And Scott is prone to off-the-wall statements like, "I fought a badger, and pound for pound, a badger is like Floyd Mayweather." Ryan Seacrest he is not.
Then, of course, there's the playlist. "We're not bound by the normal restrictions," Scott says.
That's for sure. Some of what Scott plays wouldn't sound out of place next to Lil Wayne and Soulja Boy, with Auto-Tuned vocals and pronounced pop hooks. But then there's stuff like 16-year-old Yung Mil's minimalist, perversely catchy "We Eat" and Exquisite Rap Duo's downright goofy "Step Mom." And those are just examples from Portland. Northwest Breakout features artists from areas even more seldom considered rap hotbeds, such as Alaska, Utah and Montana. Aside from offering independent artists exposure, Scott also uses the show to educate them, interviewing recognizable names—E-40, producer Hi-Tek, DJ Rob Swift—about surviving in the music industry and encouraging upstart MCs to sharpen their rhyme skills through his weekly rap-battle contest, Bar 4 Bar.
Only someone with Scott's deep roots in the local scene could pull all this off on mainstream radio. Scott was already considered an ambassador for Portland hip-hop long before he got his own show; his reputation preceded him when he approached former station owners CBS in 2008 with the idea of an all-Northwest radio show. "It's different when you have an artist come in to pitch a show and you know the artist is more about themselves versus being a face in the community," Scott says. "So not only are they supporting the community by having somebody like Cool Nutz on board, they're supporting the community by giving these artists an outlet."
It turned out to be a smart move: Scott says Northwest Breakout is rated second in its time slot. But he doesn't think of his show as a singular success. It is, like his record label Jus Family, part of a larger hip-hop ecosystem he believes is reaching a tipping point.
"It's about connecting a lot of things. So when you have the shows happening, you have things like MusicfestNW, you have POH-Hop [the Portland, Ore., Hip-Hop Festival], you have artists touring...now you have the Northwest Breakout show to support all those things that are happening," he says. "From a business standpoint, it connects all the dots."
now airs Sunday nights at 9 pm on Wild 107.5. For much more on local radio in Portland, go to wweek.com/localradio.
WWeek 2015