Ryan ChartrandMTV has launched a month-long campaign commemorating the 20th anniversary of the “Yo! MTV Raps” music show’s premiere. The program is praised by much of the hip-hop industry as the first to bring such music to the masses.
The celebration includes all mediums in the MTV network – television, radio, the Internet and mobile phone access – and features new and old “Yo! MTV Raps” programming as retrospective hubs in honor of the program.
The program’s original hosts, Fab Five Freddy and Doctor Dré (not to be confused with rapper and producer Dr. Dre), expressed their enthusiasm for the program’s 20th anniversary and took stock in the groundbreaking nature of the show in a recent conference call interview.
“It really was a great thing at a great point in time,” Fab Five Freddy said. “Prior to ‘Yo!,’ MTV was video apartheid for hip-hop videos. The show allowed the showcasing of an era with so much diversity and culture in the hip-hop movement; it played a big part in hip-hop’s golden age.”
“There was a really huge reaction to MTV deciding to play hip-hop videos,” Doctor Dré concurred in the same interview. “We all looked at it as sort of a summer job – one that we were always excited about and grateful to go back to when we found out we still had it. Before ‘Yo!,’ the biggest video by a black artist on MTV was ‘Billy Jean’ by Michael Jackson.”
MTV spokespeople said all the festivities, which began April 1, will cement the status of “Yo! MTV Raps” as the most influential music television series of all time.
MTV’s popular “Sucka Free” program series will officially become “Yo! MTV Raps” for the month of April, featuring the current hip-hop video countdown while intermixing memorable moments from both the show and MTV news.
Other channels will also celebrate “Yo!” for the month of April, with “MTV Jams” becoming “Yo! MTV Jams,” “MTV Hits” featuring playlists for each year of the show’s existence, and a weekly syndication of “Yo!” programming on MTV radio.
The introduction of the program, one of the highest-rated to air on MTV in the 1980s, spawned a number of similarly minded shows, most notably BET’s “Rap City,” which still airs today.
“Someone always goes out on a limb and does it first,” Fab Five Freddy remarked. “Afterward, everyone’s trying to catch up and get on the boat, especially with a cultural revolution such as this. It was literally an avalanche coming down the mountain. Young black males had a presence on TV that they’d never had before, and it was a ‘get with it or get out of the way’ situation.”
“Yo! MTV Raps” set a major precedent for other shows as well.
“The difference between ‘Yo!’ and what followed was the budget, among other things,” Doctor Dré added. “We were given a blank slate and asked, ‘What’re you gonna do with this?’ Those other shows which followed did well because ‘Yo!’ had already cast the mold.”
Both Fab Five Freddy and Doctor Dré agreed that “Yo! MTV Raps” was a major catalyst for the hip-hop industry’s proliferation, observing that it leveled the playing field for many artists as major record labels tried to catch up.
“It really was a renaissance in its own right, a stage of music much like when the jazz age allowed many black musicians to achieve prominence,” Fab Five Freddy said. “It helped bring in the hip-hop era, which is still going strong some 25-plus years later.”
Particularly noteworthy programs that will air in celebration of “Yo! MTV Raps” are countdowns of top artists, episodes, videos and moments from the program’s seven-year span.
Some of the more memorable moments from the show include Tupac Shakur boldly declaring that he physically assaulted the Hughes Brothers after being cut from their film “Menace II Society” (which was included in the Tupac documentary “Resurrection”), and the freestyle rapping of an apparently drunk Ol’ Dirty Bastard, despite host Ed Lover’s attempts to stop him.
Both Doctor Dré and Fab Five Freddy expressed their gratitude for being able to take part in a groundbreaking program at such a pivotal time in the history of hip-hop music and culture.
“‘Yo!’ did it first and better than anybody else has to date,” Fab Five Freddy said. “You can’t really know how big of an impact it had until enough time has passed and you can reflect back on it. ‘Yo!,’ as a forum, instigated the eventual study of rap music’s history as well as the finetuning of form in terms of music and culture.”