The Tanning of America (15 page)

However, there was one other TV entity that predated all the rest in its airing of rap videos and is too often overlooked in the history books for everything that it and its creator, host Ralph McDaniels, did to give hip-hop a footing—not just in music television but for its ultimate survival and growth.

Originally from Brooklyn before he moved to Queens—where he cut his teeth in the early days of hip-hop as a DJ for local MCs—Ralph went on to pursue a formal education in communications and broadcasting. After earning a college degree from the New York Institute of Technology, he came up with a radical concept he called “edutainment” that would allow him to combine his passion for hip-hop with his communications acumen. His idea for creating a hybrid of education and entertainment was to layer rap music on top of news-style camera footage of the city's diverse street scene, complete with local interviews of artists and fans alike. Ralph is African-American, but his pitch wasn't about color, minority status, or the need to feature black music. What he was seeing, rather, was an emerging, important kind of American folk music. It was complete with a culture and an attitude that happened to be bubbling up ahead of the curve right there in the New York area.

Part of what really motivated him, Ralph explained to me, was the culture of B-boys, which was all about code: “The way you wore your sneakers, your hat, or cap to the side, and the colors. B-boys led the way. But they were outcasts. They were trendsetters, but club owners wouldn't let them in the club. And I saw this look nowhere on television.” There were also videos being produced by the music companies for artists like the Fat Boys, Grandmaster Flash, and Whodini, as well as for Run-DMC, Rick James, and Michael Jackson. But as then twenty-two-year-old Ralph McDaniels realized, “There were no real outlets for them. They weren't on
Soul Train
or on
The Dick Clark Show
.”

To do a local TV show on something that was beginning, something as transformational as ragtime was in its day—as one example—ought to have rung all sorts of bells with network affiliates in and around Manhattan. Nope. Not in the for-profit media apparatus. Fortunately, however, Ralph's energy and conviction were so appealing that the public station WNYC-TV, Channel 31, brought him on as an engineering intern. Ralph's fortunes changed one day when a promotional reel arrived from SOLAR Records, owned by Dick Griffey, with footage of the roster's mostly West Coast R&B artists. Ralph said, “The reel wasn't a video, just footage shot in the studio, not live performances at a venue.” The label had simply sent out the reels to radio and TV stations. Ralph proposed to his bosses that they use it during the annual station fund-raiser. “I rounded up more videos,” he recalled, “and what we found was that when the music videos were played, we got more fund-raiser calls.”

When he proposed to turn that into his big idea for a music video show, the station still balked. They did, however, opt to hire him as a host of a show that played an eclectic mix of danceable music called
Studio 31 Dance Party
. That went so well, by the end of 1983 when he pitched a public interest angle for his edutainment idea, it held sway with the station heads. Thus,
Video Music Box
was born.

Because there were so few hip-hop artists at the time with videos broadcast-ready, Ralph McDaniels often developed his own visual component to the music as part and parcel of his storytelling. Pioneer of music videos that he was, Ralph realized that the best place to do that was in the clubs. He remembered, “I'd go into the clubs and tape the acts.” There was a rich diversity in the different outposts for cultural sharing—the hip-hop and punk clubs downtown at the Roxy, the uptown clubs where you had to have money to get in, and all the different neighborhoods where fashion was being created. His next brainstorm was to host the first ever concert lineup of rappers—with the likes of Run-DMC, Kurtis Blow, and a very young LL Cool J—and then to shoot video of that. From the very first performance, Ralph noted somewhat to his surprise that the crowd was composed of both inner-city kids of color and suburban white kids. Something very real and relevant was clearly happening.

Video Music Box
soon became as much a part of the upbringing of area teens like me as
Sesame Street
had become for preschoolers. For one hour in the afternoon, six days a week, urban teens would rush home from school (or wherever we happened to be) and watch stories set to music that actually resembled and reflected our lives in ways nobody else was offering on mainstream TV. Out in the suburbs, as Ralph McDaniels realized, kids who weren't growing up in the culture also rushed home from school (or wherever they happened to be) to watch stories set to music that spoke to them too. Why?

And it wasn't just attracting kids in New York City and environs.
Video Music Box
was so popular it gained national attention. When I asked Ralph how a local public access show did that, he explained that there was a signal from the station that was picked up in the D.C./Virginia area, as well as in North Carolina and in Detroit. Then, those viewers started recording the show onto VHS tapes and selling them around the rest of the country. That was how, he said, early hip-hop videos became a national phenomenon. Another part of the drawing power was that cable was in its infancy, and not everyone had access to MTV. And because public television was free—accessible to anyone with a television set—curiosity alone must have been enough to motivate teens of all backgrounds to check out a format completely different from anything on the other channels. For many,
Video Music Box
was where they could hear rap for the first time, with the added bonus of having visuals to go with the audio experience. Besides the appeal of poetry set to beats, Ralph's video footage provided a minidocumentary—a real, honest portrait of another world that existed not so many subway stops away. And the reason that it resonated both with those who were living it and those who were outside of it was not a fluke or happenstance. It had everything to do with Ralph McDaniels's prescience that there might be a tan mind-set waiting to be tapped by the possibilities of the new cable medium.

In time, the creator of
Video Music Box
would be affectionately known as Uncle Ralph for everything that he had done to provide a platform to up-and-coming artists, fledgling crews, and even nominal figures in hip-hop culture. With Uncle Ralph's man-on-the-street interviews, where he would stop passersby to say a few words for the camera, legend has it that Ralph McDaniels coined the phrase and practice of giving “a shout-out.” Some of the shout-outs became local headline news—like who did somebody wrong, or the name of somebody's good-for-nothing ex about to be pursued with a paternity suit! Of course the language was part “localese” and part generational slang, both old-and new-school ghetto vernacular. All that code was now getting passed by
Video Music Box
to other neighboring locales, even to communities where the culture was very different.

Not every parent out in the sleepy safe suburbs was a fan of their kids watching the gritty, urban, irreverent, and unpredictable show six days a week. Even if it was public television. From what those teenage viewers would later tell me, their parents weren't any happier when they started tuning into the more mainstream black music videos that BET was starting to air in the late 1980s. But then, interestingly enough, as soon as
Yo! MTV Raps
debuted in August 1988, first as a music special starring Run-DMC along with Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (a.k.a. Will Smith), then as an hour-long show shown once a week, hosted by Fab Five Freddy, suddenly, somehow, some way, parents didn't seem to mind as much. Even when the show expanded a short time later to include a daily installment hosted by Ed Lover and Dr. Dre, the general consensus by those who didn't love hip-hop was
Well, let the kids watch it, seems like they're just having fun
. Again, why?

Part of it was timing, and the fact that the MTV brand and banner gave the genre a legitimacy. Plus, my guess is that the segmented programming made it safe for visiting—just as advertisers were beginning to see it as safe for visiting.

As envisioned, the show didn't reinvent the wheel. It built on everything that
Video Music Box
and BET had started doing—but, like a petri dish, helped grow the culture by pointing out that what was happening in the Northeast was in full swing down in Atlanta, over in Houston, and out in California. Now the images and words were more regionally and culturally diverse—palm trees and skateboarders, graffiti that mixed Spanish and English, dance grooves locally branded, language with Caribbean, Asian, Middle Eastern, or other accents, or vocalized with a southern lilt or a western twang. The global exposure was a two-way street—with
Yo!
broadcasting from places, like Jamaica, where it wouldn't be lost on the hosts that the poverty of the 'hood there was so extreme, as they would say, that it was definitely the “' hoo-ooo-ood.” One of the more memorable specials for me was shot in Japan. Here were 1990s Japanese kids in baggy pants with baseball caps on backward, listening to rap, break-dancing, popping and locking like they invented it. Proof positive of the global power of hip-hop and music television.

When I asked Van Toffler at what point he and the other MTV execs started to recognize that the audience was much bigger than the segmenting would have suggested—and when they knew that white suburban kids were starting to emulate the language and the dress of the hosts and guests and the stars of the genre—he answered, “It was probably ten minutes after
Yo! MTV Raps
aired.” The reaction from one and all, Van remembered, was literally, “This is the coolest thing I've ever seen.”

With MTV's overall mission to tell real stories and provide the authentic narrative of life from the streets,
Yo!
acted as a cultural ambassador, as hip-hop had been known to do, for the entire network. Van's comment was, “Nothing connects more to the audience, whether it's told through rock music or folk or hip-hop, than real stories.”

That popularity impacted a lot of careers, as I experienced firsthand. In the early years of the 1990s when I was going from artist management to working as an executive at RCA and then becoming a producer/manager—in tow with the Trackmasters—our success depended on whether or not we got played on radio and music television. Plus,
Yo!
gave exposure to artists as much as it did to their music.

Since most of the show was taped in-studio and there was lots of time to fill that wasn't about the music videos, the hosts were constantly coming up with entertaining bits, often inviting guests to freestyle right along with them or to engage in an unscripted megalogue with cameras rolling. The atmosphere was anything goes, wild and unhinged.

“Thank God it was taped,” Van Toffler said about that. “It was uncontrolled chaos.” One of the most famous instances of things getting truly out of control was Tupac Shakur's unsolicited rant about kicking the asses of the Hughes brothers—allegedly because of how they fired him from the movie
Menace II Society
. The hosts were practically tackling Tupac to get him to calm down. But to no avail. The Hughes brothers ended up showing that clip when they took Pac to court.

As boisterous as the shows got, Van Toffler knew that
Yo!
and MTV were benefiting from the excitement that those kinds of spontaneous outbursts aroused. Yeah, it was rough around the edges, but it was full of surprises, never the same, and a proving ground for emerging hip-hop artists like no other. Or, I should say, that was mostly the case except for the period of backlash against hardcore rap, right around the time in mid-1992 when Jimmy Iovine and Interscope were coming up with a bold, new strategy for how they were going to promote
The Chronic.

The irony was that for all the liftoff that
Yo!
could offer, it was still segmented programming that wouldn't guarantee getting a music video day-parted and put into heavy rotation. The way for most rap or metal videos to keep from being limited to late-night airings was to first have a radio story—heavy growing rotation (a.k.a. “spins”) and an expanding audience. And getting that to happen for hip-hop in those days—to climb to the top of the mostly still segregated R&B and pop charts—was next to impossible.

Just what was happening and why was revealed in the early nineties when new technology in bar coding for retail cash register sales showed what was actually selling in the record stores—as opposed to what stores had been reporting to
Billboard
and other trade publications. When the weekly syndicated radio show
American Top 40
(hosted by Casey Kasem and then by Shadoe Stevens) started basing the Top 40 list on a formula that included airplay but was weighted by these actual sales figures, it turned out—much to the shock of white-owned stations—that hits by black artists (rap, R&B, and pop) were dominating like nobody's business. The bar code scans also showed that besides black music, hard-core metal rock was booming. The other revelation in the scan reports was that there was completely unprecedented sales momentum for country music. Who knew? The data was contradictory to everything that programmers had been trained to understand about their advertisers and listeners. Country and metal were problematic but programmers could adjust. All that black music was another story. And so, when a significant number of stations threatened to drop
American Top 40,
a new formula for creating the list was established—weighted not by sales figures but by airplay as recorded among Top 40 stations. They jerry-rigged the formula.

Metal had a home on rock stations anyway and country music took lessons from R&B, first adding more mainstream pop music elements and then finding stations for brand-building for the genre on the AM dial. But what this did to hip-hop was throw it right back out into the cold, radio-wise, once again, after gaining legitimacy, back to being an orphaned street music—not fully suitable for black R&B stations, not welcomed on white pop stations (now being rebranded as contemporary hit radio), and not ready to be given its own station platform. Then we all turned around and a portal, as if out of nowhere, suddenly opened. It was crossover urban, called “churban” or rhythmic radio.