Los Angeles ? A young boy asks for the latest from Ludacris. Junior from Stanton wants to hear some classic Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Randy from Anaheim is hankering for political rapper Paris’ decade-old “Guerrilla Funk.”

Veteran DJ Julio G steps away from a glowing mixing board in the darkened studios of KDAY-FM, surprised and pleased by the last request.

“Wow. I haven’t heard that in a while. That’s hip-hop,” he tells the caller, promising to add the song to his mix.

Nostalgia for the not-so-long-ago sounds of early rap is kicking in hard for longtime fans who find themselves left cold by the genre’s latest hits. The booming, marketer-friendly audience in their 20s and 30s is starting to find more mature alternatives to the ever-young party and gangster rap that populates the pop charts.

KDAY, named after the groundbreaking 1980s AM rap station, is the nation’s first hip-hop oldies radio station. In Atlanta, WFOX plays “the best jamz of the ’80s, ’90s and now” – with Whodini classics sandwiched between R. Kelly and Usher.

WFOX doesn’t attract a lot of listeners, but New York urban station WWPR (Power 105.1) is among the top-rated in the market and plays about three hip-hop or R&B oldies an hour.

Veteran DJ Julio G. includes radio listeners' requests for hip-hop oldies in the studios of KDAY-FM in Los Angeles. KDAY, named after the groundbreaking 1980s AM rap station, is the nation's first hip-hop oldies radio station.

Nearly every urban radio station around the country features at least one so-called old school show. L.A.’s dominant KPWR (Power 106) fills its popular weekday lunch hour with one.

And the new wave of satellite radio embraced the old wave of hip-hop several years ago; both major subscription services offer dedicated channels. Hip-hop pioneers Dana Dane and Kurtis Blow host a show on Sirius’ “Backspin” channel. Younger rap icon Snoop Dogg has a weekly program featuring old school rap and funk on XM channel “The Rhyme.”

XM – the dominant network with 4 million subscribers – does not release listenership figures for individual channels, but urban programming director Leo Pryor said the hip-hop oldies channel is among its most popular urban offerings.

“The popularity of ‘The Rhyme’ surprises me. There’s a huge audience for this music,” he said. “There’s a song in each era of the music that takes you back to, ‘Man, I remember when I was in high school and I was dating this girl…”‘

Record labels, meanwhile, have in recent years reissued a slew of “classic” rap albums from those golden years of, say, the mid-1990s.

Nas’ landmark “Illmatic” has sold a respectable 121,000 new copies since being re-released on its 10th anniversary last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 2Pac’s double-CD opus “All Eyez On Me,” first released in 1996, sold 773,000 new copies since being reissued four years ago. The original album sold 4.5 million copies.

2Pac was one of many rappers who referenced the influential original KDAY in their lyrics. Created in 1983, it quickly became a sensation and drew national attention for playing a bold mix of cutting-edge rap around the clock: DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Boogie Down Productions, Kid Frost.

Now, nostalgic rap fans can hear some of that same music on the reborn KDAY.

The rather weak signal at 93.5 FM “flipped” to the new format last September. NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” was the first song played.