Bye To Beatsauce: 14-Year Old Hip Hop Radio Show Calls It Quits

The bad news: 14 year old hip hop radio show Beatsauce, a staple for music fans in the Bay Area, is hanging it up after their last show this Sunday. This was THE source for all the newest no-bullshit hip-hop and the prevailing antidote to bubble gum gangster wannabe mumbling some try to call hip-hop.

During its fourteen year tenure on KUSF 90.3FM, Beatsauce gained a devoted following, threw parties and events, and won both a SF Bay Guardian’s “Goldie Award” and a SF Weekly “Best Hip-Hop Radio Show” award. During that same time its countless hip-hop guests (many busting out freestyles or doing DJ sets) included the likes of Peanut Butter Wolf, Rob Swift, KRS-One, Jay-Z, DJ Quest, Common, Eminem, Black Eyed Peas, Gang Starr, EPMD, Outkast, Jurassic 5, Jungle Brothers, Zion I, Mobb Deep, Lyrics Born, Blackalicious, Company Flow, Slick Rick, Conceit, J-Live, Jeru the Damaja, Prince Paul, Hieroglyphics, Bas-1, Bored Stiff, Crown City Rockers, Breakestra, Brown Fellinis, and Dre Dog (before he became Andre Nickatina), to name but a handful.

The good news: They’re hanging it up because hosts/DJs J-Boogie, Raw-B, and DJ Wisdom (formerly known as Winnie B) are all getting too busy with other projects as their careers take off. Other good news is that the show will continue as a bi-monthly podcast and they’ll also be producing archives.

Apparently the show’s demise on KUSF is due to the ever-increasingly busy schedules of its three founding hosts, something that will be more manageable when the show becomes a bi-monthly podcast in 2009. Hosted by www.Brooklynradio.net, the new Beatsauce podcast will be available on the iTunes podcast page. Additionally, the Beatsauce crew promise that they will be uploading old shows and classic interviews from their deep vaults to the player featured on www.trueskoolnetwork.com and beatsauce’s MySpace.