I Want My MTV (66 page)

Ted came into my office and pounded on my desk. And this part of the story is embarrassing for me, but when we okayed the show, I called him to my office and said, “I'm glad you're doing it, but this show will not get ratings, okay? I don't want you to be bummed out about it, and I don't want you to feel like you're a failure.” Of course, we got the ratings in, and it was stupid how successful it was. So I called Ted back in and said, “Can you do another one next weekend?” Then we got the ratings in again, and I said, “Can you do a daily half-hour show?” Ted was the front guy. He was so gregarious and persuasive; he basically charmed me into letting him do it.

DJ JAZZY JEFF:
Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were on the very first episode of
Yo! MTV Raps,
which Run-DMC hosted. We were on tour with Run-DMC, Public Enemy, a bunch of us, when “Parents” started getting big on MTV. Both Will and I remember the cheers getting louder for us night after night. One night before the show Will said, “I'm gonna try something.” He was going to rap a verse of “Parents” and ask the crowd to chant the next one. I'm sitting there with my fingers crossed, hoping this works. Will's up there and raps, “I remember one year my mom took me school shopping,” and twenty thousand people sang back, “It was me, my brother, my mom, oh, my pop, and . . .” When the tour started, we were going on second. After about two weeks, somebody says, “Okay, you guys go on third.” Then, “Okay, you guys go on fourth.” Before the tour ended, we were going on right before Run-DMC. And that was all because of the success of “Parents,” and mostly due to the video.

 

ALEX COLETTI:
We did a
Yo! MTV Raps
weekend to launch the show, with a whole week of VJ segments with Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff. Will and Jeff came up from Philly by train every day; we didn't put them in a hotel.

 

PETER DOUGHERTY:
Hiring Fab 5 Freddy as a host was a no-brainer. He was involved in the art world, in the hip-hop world, the graffiti scene, he had been in Blondie's video “Rapture.” And he was not a gangster. The way he dressed—he was not a typical b-boy. He could float through different worlds, highbrow and lowbrow, and not be out of place.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
My on-air persona was an extension of my character in the movie
Wild Style
, who was a hip, cool, knowledgeable guy. Essentially, I'm a cool nerd, if you will.

Being on MTV was nowhere on my radar. I'd become restless with painting in the late '80s, and started thinking about music video. I'd learned the rudiments of filmmaking when I was in
Wild Style
—it was my idea to combine break dancing, graffiti, rap, and DJing. Prior to that, these things weren't on the radar of pop culture. Ann Carli at Jive said, “I've got a video for you to direct.” It was “My Philosophy,” by KRS-One. I used images of Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Marcus Garvey, and Hailie Selassie. My father was active in social change; he marched on Washington, he was in the room when Malcolm X was assassinated. My grandfather worked with Garvey. I was from that ilk of conscious black folks.

When we were shooting “My Philosophy,” people were asking, “Yo, Fab, you think this will get aired on MTV?” I made an announcement: “Nobody else ask me that. I'm making this video so black, that's not even a question. I am not trying to get on MTV.” And then “My Philosophy” was the final video on the pilot for
Yo! MTV Raps
.

When they hired me, I was adamant about not being cooped up in a studio like the other VJs. Things were emerging from other parts of the country, so we talked about what's going on in Philly, we had Too Short and Ice-T from LA, Luke from Miami, Texas with the Geto Boys. We would jump at opportunities to travel and show this culture. Rap was spreading like Ebola.

 

DMC:
Until
Yo!
, Run-DMC was the only hip-hop kids saw on MTV. Once
Yo!
started, they got to see Eric B & Rakim, Public Enemy, the Geto Boys, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Leaders of the New School, X-Clan.
Yo!
showed the diversity of hip-hop. And everyone was dope as hell. When you went on
Yo!
, it wasn't about your video, or your clothes, or your money. You had to perform live, and you had to be
better
than your record and video.

 

MC HAMMER:
Fab 5 Freddy launched my “Turn This Mother Out” video in Times Square. That's the show where I had Jennifer Lopez as one of my backup dancers.
Yo!
said, “You have to get to New York.” My dancers were in Florida, for my next show. They go, “Don't worry, we can get some dancers from New York to do it.” When I get up to the dance studio to pick out dancers, J.Lo is there. She stood out, even then. There were tons of girls in that room, but her energy, her look, and her disposition got her in all the shots. I'm sure I flirted with her.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
MC Hammer debuted on my show, in a famous episode that was also J.Lo's television debut. I had something to do with that. A casting director rounded up a few dancers. I came into the room and saw her and said, “Yo, Ted, put her front and center.” MC Hammer offered Ted Demme a Corvette. In a joking way, but serious, and Ted was like, “Nah, man.”

 

MONICA LYNCH, record executive:
All these little white kids in middle America sat on the edge of their seats, waiting to see what Fab 5 Freddy, Ed Lover, and Dr. Dre would say or wear or play, or who they're gonna have on their show, so they could try to live that lifestyle themselves. The white homeboy nation arose, and
Yo!
had a lot to do with that.

SCOTT KALVERT:
Eric B. & Rakim's “Follow the Leader” was the first gangsta rap video. We modeled it on
The Godfather
. We wanted to do something street and gangster, but without being contemporary, so we went period. There were lots of machine guns. Everyone was like, “It's never gonna get played.” And it was the first video ever played on
Yo! MTV Raps
.

 

DON LETTS:
The irony is,
Yo! MTV Raps
ended up being the highest-viewed program on MTV. And that made me realize that in America, it ain't about black, it ain't about white, it's all about green. If you're making money, you are accepted instantly, no matter what color you are.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
Ted sat me down and said, “This shit is blowing up. MTV wants to do the show daily.” They asked me to host the daily version, and I refused, because I didn't want to be overexposed. People grew to hate a lot of VJs.

 

ED LOVER:
I met Ted when I was fifteen or sixteen. I used to go on religious retreats, just to get the hell out of Queens. My church fellowshipped with Ted's father's church in Rockville Center, Long Island. We'd be at the religious retreat smoking weed and drinking communion wine out in the woods. And Ted knew a lot about hip-hop. I stayed friends with him throughout high school and college.

Yo!
became extremely popular when it debuted, and when I saw Ted's name on the credits, I contacted him about how I could get on the show—I thought I knew everything there was to know about hip-hop. When Fab turned down the daily show, Ted contacted me. Dre and I didn't know one another—I met him for the first time when he came in for his audition. Ted was the one who had the foresight to give a different look to the daily show and put two guys together. Early on, people might say to me, “Who's the white dude?” And I'm like, “This is Ted, who knows more about hip-hop than you probably do.”

Freddy was all serious and cool. He was a downtown hipster wearing sunglasses. Dre and I made it funny. We were the dudes next door that were in love with hip-hop. You were in the basement with me and Dre. “Oh, we got a big foam cowboy hat on the set. I'm gonna wear it. Now I'm country-western hip-hop,” and Dre would follow me.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
Ed is a comic genius. He and Dre developed an Abbott and Costello–Laurel and Hardy kind of slapstick routine.

ED LOVER:
Whoever was in the MTV studios doing other things, we would ask them to come on. We had Carole King on as a guest. Mel Gibson was in the studio doing something else, so Dre and I knocked on his door. He knew exactly who were were, and he came and did the show. I remember he liked “Rapper's Delight” and “It Takes Two” by Rob Base.

Dre and I had to split the money. The salary was $1,000 a week. It was like, “I'll take $500, you take $500.” I was a school safety officer, working for the Board of Education, making $732.96 every two weeks. $500 a week for me was great. But I kept my job at the Board of Ed because we didn't have a contract.

No assistants, no writers, no dressing room. Did we have MTV's full support? Hell no. They had no idea what it was, no idea it was going to be that big. They didn't think the show would last. We knew MTV was gonna be changed forever. We knew the power hip-hop had. White kids already thought hip-hop was cool. MTV didn't understand that hip-hop had crossed over. There were white kids at Big Daddy Kane and LL Cool J concerts.

 

MC HAMMER:
I was a huge fan of
Yo! MTV Raps
. They played so many of my videos, I shouted them out in a song: “Ted, Dre, or Ed Lover / Fab 5, homeys, won't you help a young brother?”

 

SCARFACE, Geto Boys:
We watched
Yo! MTV Raps
every friggin' day at four-thirty, religiously. We were so excited to see videos from our favorite groups. “Wow, look at Public Enemy!”

 

B-REAL:
Hip-hop was the lowest member on the pole to get any love within all of the musical genres, and here came
Yo! MTV Raps,
which said “This shit is serious. This shit is real. And we ain't going anywhere.”

 

CEE LO GREEN:
Yo!
in the afternoon, that's what we were rushing to get home from school for. I had a friend who was staying around the corner from me, he was a little older, so he'd be out of school first, and he would record the show. You can hear how animated my voice becomes; I remember like it was yesterday. That was a big part of my day, to get home and see
Yo!

This way we could identify the new trends coming through, and who wore the new jogging suits. LL Cool J really took on Troop—they gave him his own Troop suit. There was this one dude in the eighth grade, and you could tell he was getting some street money, because he had the red-and-blue suede LL Cool J Troop suit. He set the school on fire with that suit.

 

HANK SHOCKLEE, music producer:
A rock video was about, What kind of guitar is he playing? What's the attitude of the singer? With a rap video, it was a different aesthetic: Were there any cars in the video? Any fly chicks in the background? Were any of my homies in it? Rap videos came out in that context—the stars and their posses, and then trying to squeeze in some storyline. A video could redefine what was hot. “What kind of sneakers has he got on? Is that a hoodie? Yo, he's rocking the crazy hoodie.” It's these different aesthetics that represented real life for us.

 

CHUCK D:
We didn't make our first true video until 1988, with “Night of the Living Baseheads,” from
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
. What changed my mind about making videos?
Yo! MTV Raps
is the only thing that changed, because now we knew the video would be seen.

 

B-REAL:
My favorite hip-hop video is “Night of the Living Baseheads.” When I saw it for the first time I went ape-shit. I liked dark, aggressive, in-your-face shit like that.

 

HANK SHOCKLEE:
If Public Enemy was going to do a video, we wanted something outside the norm. My thing is, I hate literal translations. The video should always tell you what the lyric doesn't.

 

LIONEL MARTIN, director:
I didn't even know who Public Enemy was.

 

HANK SHOCKLEE:
The song was about drug addiction, especially crack. The crack epidemic was destroying the black community. Everybody I know, including myself, had close family members who were on crack or trying to recover from it. The fact that the song was disjointed gave us the impetus to create skits within the video. I didn't want to make light of crack, but a video needs to have entertainment value.

 

LIONEL MARTIN:
They had some crazy ideas. Hank Shocklee said, “Could we stop the music and insert a commercial?” Flavor Flav was a mess. He was full of surprises, like when he said, “Kick the ballistics.” He was always late, and he would disappear for drugs or for girls. He was just a crazy dude.

CHUCK D:
“Baseheads” was brutal. It was my first video, it took a long time, and we had a lot of different locations. We knew we had to go over and beyond, make something that had never been seen before.

 

LIONEL MARTIN:
When you're in telecine doing color correction, there's a term you use: “crush the blacks.” I like my blacks to be dark and deep and rich. Flavor and Chuck were in the room and I kept telling the colorist, “Crush the blacks, crush the blacks.” Flav jumped up and said, “What the fuck are you talking about? Yo, Chuck, I got a problem with this dude.” So I explained it to them.

 

JAC BENSON, MTV producer:
I studied finance in college, at Hampton University, and sometimes we would, like, maybe not go to class, because we wanted to watch
Yo!
In addition to the videos, it provided an environment for artists to be themselves. The show was fun, it was smart, it was all these things. Every day there was a new video or a new artist. The only real reference point I had for MTV was Michael Jackson, and it was questionable how black he was.