If you flip on Hot 93.7 in the morning, the hip-hop radio station is as likely to be playing Phil Collins as Sexyy Red.

That’s because morning hosts DJ Buck and Big Regg have created a radio show as engaging and varied as a sunrise. There are jams, jokes, true or false quizzes that make you go, “Hmmm.”

Best of all, it’s free. Radio is a rare media everyone can share as a community. Let’s never let that go.

Here Buck and Regg share thoughts with HAPs editor Andrew Belonsky about hip-hop’s evolution, what makes Hartford hot for new artists, and name their musical guilty pleasures.

Hint: Buck’s involves rocking and rolling all night. 

Andrew Belonsky: A recent Question of the Day was, ‘What’s a dream you had that came true?’ Was this your dream, working in radio?

Bigg Regg: I liked the entertainment business. Couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance. I couldn’t do any of that. Radio fell in my lap, and when it happened, it was like, ‘You know what, this is what I’m supposed to be.’ I was on an AM radio station, a smaller station here, and I did a college radio station. And then I started nights here.

AB: Was radio what you wanted, Buck?

Buck: It was music. As a kid, I always wondered what music would sound like in the future. What kind of sounds would come around? What would we do? And that’s what got me interested in doing that – and how would I be able to change what people are listening to or how people listen to music. 

AB: Does the music today sound like you thought it would?

Buck: No. It almost sounds exactly like the sound back then. It’s going back. It went to the future and now it’s coming back!

AB: We’re all about the same age. Hip-hop was a baby when we were babies. It was once apart. The mainstream poo-pooed it: ‘Oh, that’s about drugs, that’s about guns, that’s violent, that’s black, that’s bad.’ Then, in the 90s and the early aughts, hip-hop and rap became more integrated into the mainstream. Now Snoop Dogg and his family model for The Children’s Store. From your perspectives, what has this evolution been like? 

Regg: We’ve seen the music change so much over the time that I’ve been on the radio. It is like a roller coaster. It went from being more underground and then became mainstream, then it was street, then it went away from the streets to where we at now, to where you got hip-hop artists doing country.

AB: Yes, I want to talk about that.

Regg: That’s fresh. I don’t know if I ever thought hip-hop would go to those lengths, but I always knew you could integrate hip-hop into anything. Any music you got, leave a space, somebody can drop a 16 in there. Hip-hop could be integrated with everything.

Buck: I didn’t think rap or hip-hop music would be in the same category as rock. Growing up listening to rock and roll, we have different types of rock and roll. Heavy metal, hard rock, soft rock, easy listening to rock. That’s rap. You got hip hop, you got heavy rap, hardcore rap, West Coast rap. It’s all types of rap right now. It has branches. When it started, it wasn’t supposed to have branches. It was supposed to be one thing. Now you’ve got different types of hip hop.

AB: What makes it so adaptable is that it’s from the musician, it’s so reactive to the environment in a way that I think that like pop music, more canned pop music isn’t necessarily born from people’s actual experiences. Whereas hip hop and rap are typically from someone’s own personal experience.

Buck: Yeah, it’s more real. Creative. Rap has gone from being so real to where we are today. You don’t have to be real to sell, you know? We come from a place with NWA, Public Enemy, when people were getting arrested and people were getting shot. And now people just, you know, just to make up a song saying, I was shot and it never happened. You can feel the difference.

AB: Or the people who brag about being super rich when they’re just starting.

Regg: Hip-hop went away from where it started. One of my favorite records is Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Message,” which brought you right into the inner city of what was going on in it, and you listen to it and you know what’s going on in the city. That was like a newspaper for hip hop, that song. It went from telling the stories to telling stories.

AB: Yes.

Buck: It’s like, you know something? There was broken glass everywhere. “People pissin’ on the stairs” – that was the lyrics to the record. It was like that growing up for everybody. 

Regg: I mean, he couldn’t take it, but he ain’t have no money to move out, so he had no choice.

AB: Was radio where you got your music growing up? 

Regg: I grew up here, so mainstream radio didn’t really exist to me; it wasn’t what I listened to because at the time they didn’t play hip-hop. It was a lot of college radio stations that I listened to get hip-hop, to get reggae. And you only could get it at a certain time. It was 12 at night to six in the morning, you know. But the mainstream stations, that’s where I heard my Michael Jacksons and Prince.

AB: Right.

Regg: That’s why when Hot 93.7 got here [in 2001], it was an explosion because we never had a mainstream, FM, commercial hip-hop station. 

AB: [2001] seems late, especially considering that this area has so many people of color, Central Connecticut.

Buck: When Hot 93.7 came around, they never thought it would do what it’s done, because demographically it doesn’t make sense. When you look at Connecticut as a whole, there’s such a small percentage of African Americans. And when you think about people who listen to hip-hop and R&B, with that small percentage of African Americans, [people thought] ‘There’s no way they can get the ratings; there’s no way they can do it.’  But the big picture is this: not just black people listen to hip-hop and R&B. 

That is what made this station what it was: Having the people on it that looked like everybody, looked like you and looked like me. It wasn’t just an all-black station. It was just a good music station of people who believed in what we played. That’s half the battle: when people believe the people who are talking to them. We built their trust over the years from just being real.

AB: [Back to country in hip-hop.] Country and hip-hop are so distinctly American. I love that they’re coming together at a time when our country is so divided. These two distinctly American genres that theoretically, based on everything we know about race in America, should be opposed, they’re coming together.  

Buck: It surprised me, but it works. It opened up people who love hip-hop to say, ‘Hey, there’s almost the same story, just different rhythms.”

Regg: They’re both about storytelling.

Buck: When you go back to old Johnny Cash, he was talking about walking with a gun in his pocket. The hip-hop guys are talking about the same thing. 

Regg: Like I said: you can fuse hip-hop into anything. There’s no genre of music hip-hop can’t go into. You can put a verse on anything. Whether it’s a slow song, a fast song, country song, jazz song – you can put a verse into it.

AB: The guilty pleasures segment is hilarious. Someone calls, ‘I want to hear Amy Grant’ – on Hot 93.7. It shows how universal music is and the pressure so many feel: “I only listen to hip-hop because everyone only listens to hip-hop.”

Buck: That’s why we do it. The toughest guy can want to hear “Careless Whisper,” and I’m like ‘I know what you want.’ People try to hide behind, ‘I’m this, I’m that, and I only listen to, DMX.’ 

Regg: He’s sitting there in his car, windows tinted, got the hoodie on, but he’s listening to Culture Club.

Buck: It was an eye-opener for me. Fifteen, sixteen years we’ve been doing that. We have our top five songs that pop up all the time. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is going to pop all the time. Phil Collins is going to pop up all the time. 

Buck and Regg: “Sara Smile.”

Regg: “Sara Smile” is in the Guilty Pleasure Hall of Fame.

Buck: Nirvana is going to pop up at least once a week, but you’d be surprised at the other stuff we get. It really blows my mind.

Regg: Def Leppard. When I got a call for Def Leppard, I was like, ‘Wow’.

AB: What are your guilty pleasures? 

Regg: Honestly, I leave here and go listen to a lot of the music they request on guilty pleasures, but [Paul Young’s] “Every Time You Go Away.” 

Buck: I’m Kiss. I’m a Parliament and Funkadelic kid, and Kiss was the rock version of that.

AB: What’s special about Hartford and the surrounding areas?

Regg: As far as music goes with Hartford – because we didn’t have a mainstream hip-hop station [until 2001], we listened to college radio, we listened to songs out of the mainstream. That is now the makeup of the city. We find those artists not in the mainstream, that are not the norm, and that’s what we like. The city hung on to that. We’re always looking for that next, that underground artist. You’ll hear a lot of artists from New York say they like coming to Connecticut because Connecticut got a thing for underground music. They got a thing for different music, and I think that’s what the makeup is here. Connecticut likes to find that new, hot artist. 

AB: To someone who doesn’t listen to the station, what do you say?

Buck: Don’t look at Hot 93.7 as hip-hop all the time. And ask yourself, “What is hip-hop these days?” Hip-hop became so popular that it became pop. You’ll realize that there’s stuff you listen to that comes from hip-hop. It’s not as hard or abrasive as you may think.

Regg: We’re good at taking care of everybody. We got reggae music. We got an international show that gives you Latin songs and overseas songs. We got hip-hop. We got a 9 o’clock old school block that we do every day. We got 90s at 9. Whatever your fix is, we got it on the radio.

Along with that, the music’s not the star anymore. It’s what’s between the music. We have personalities who keep you entertained here. Whether it’s me and Buck, whether it’s Jenny, you know, Kid Fresh, you’re going to be entertained. So, if you like the podcast, if you’re listening to us talk, you’re going to get that feel of a podcast.

Buck: Hip-hop is not what it used to be, but we remind you what hip-hop was.

Check out Buck ‘N Regg in the Morning on, where else, Hot 93.7FM.