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Continuing on with the MTV theme from the last post, yesterday was the music channel's 25th Anniversary. Its hard to believe now, but for the first few years of the channel's existence there were no hip hop videos in the rotation. It wasn't until 1984 that MTV played its first rap video, Run DMC's Rock Box -- a video that would still hold up ok today, if it wasn't for the extremely outdated "television" graphics. The budget for it certainly pales in comparison to, say, Biggie's Hypnotize, but take the big booty video ho and the candy coated rides out of Mike Jones' Still Tippin and you have more or less the same video.
MTV has certainly played a major role in bringing hip hop to mainstream audiences, primarily through Yo! MTV Raps hosted by Fab 5 Freddy, Ed Lover and the other Doctor Dre. The videos that originally appeared on that show were a lot rawer than what you'll see today, including an Ice-T video that featured members of his crew walking around with loaded uzis and AK-47s, but that all changed when the station decided not to air Public Enemy's By the Time I Get To Arizona, a video that these days would probably get P.E. placed onto some sort of Homeland Security list. After that, a lot of the rap videos were edited to remove some of the content that was deemed offensive by MTV executives and Yo! episodes were pushed back to a midnight time slot. I was pretty young for most of the life of Yo!, but there were a few moments that stick out in my mind: Naughty By Nature, House of Pain, D-Nice and A Tribe Called Quest killing it in live performances. The Leaders of the New School getting into an argument on camera that escalated into the group breaking up. Tupac bragging about beating up the Hughes brothers, with Ed Lover trying to shut him up before he incriminated himself, an episode that eventually led to Pac doing a couple of weeks time in jail.
A little bit of trivia: the late Ted Demme, director of the movie Blow, started his career on Yo! MTV Raps.
Hip Hop even played a part in MTV's The Real World. On the first season, before the show started exclusively casting anorexics and wannabe models, the cast included Boogie Down Productions member Heather B. If you've never heard her rap before this may surprise you, but she is probably the grittiest female MC I've ever heard. Her first album, Takin' Mine, was produced by Kenny Parker and the Beatnuts. Released in 1996, two weeks before Jay-Z dropped Reasonable Doubt, it was one of the last great boom bap albums to come out before the blinged out rap era took over. Here's one of her independent releases:
Heather B Do You
While the album was well-reviewed, she was never able to overcome the stigma of appearing on The Real World. The album did not sell well and her next album was a White Label release. More recently, Eternal Affairs came out a couple of years ago, but its her debut that you want to get. It looks like Takin' Mine is out of print but if you can find a copy of it, its a great album. Well worth picking up.
These days you can flip on MTV at any time of the day and find rap videos mixed in with every other genre of music. On the one hand, the channel helped expand hip hop's audience dramatically, exposing the music to people who would never have heard it otherwise. At the same time, MTV deserves a large part of the blame for the commercialization of rap. Would you ever have seen Puffy and Ma$e running around in shiny suits if it wasn't for MTV? Probably not. Does the good outweigh the bad, though? Probably. At least until YouTube is able to deliver tv-quality video, I'm willing to put up with MTV.
8/2/2006 9:38:11 AM posted by Fresh