ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) — Clive Davis, the famously sharp-eared label executive who steered eras at Columbia Records, founded Arista Records and later launched J Records, has died after decades of delivering some of America’s biggest hits.
Davis didn’t just shape pop radio from New York and Los Angeles. His influence reached straight into Atlanta, where a generation of R&B and hip-hop artists broke nationally through pipelines that ran, in one way or another, through Davis’ boardrooms.
Atlanta’s 1990s and early-2000s boom was powered by local visionaries like L.A. Reid and Babyface at LaFace Records — but LaFace’s national engine ran through Arista, where Davis was the key decision-maker…