I Want My MTV (67 page)

 

PETER DOUGHERTY:
It was like a runaway train. The show aired fourteen hours a week at one point; the daily show was on twice a day, then the Freddy show was on twice a day on weekends.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
I remember Ice-T telling me how in LA, in the hood, people were rushing to get cable to see my show.

 

ED LOVER:
We went from a half hour to an hour. Then we went to six days a week.

 

KOOL MOE DEE:
Rap videos were segregated into an hour-long segment of the day, but we were definitely glad to have it.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
The first show I did with N.W.A, a lot of people say that's their favorite show. Ted was like, “Eazy-E has a new group, they're called Niggaz With Attitude.” I'm like, “The group is called
what
?” We were standing by the “Welcome to Compton” sign, setting up a shot, and guys were riding by looking at me. So I threw up the peace sign. Ice Cube said, “Fab, I know that's the peace sign back east, but out here it's a gang sign.” I didn't get how serious the gangs were.

 

SIR MIX-A-LOT:
Freddy came to Seattle and thought it was a place where everybody rode horses and drank coffee. When he got here, nine gangsters showed up in my group, holding guns. Freddy stood there like, “What the fuck is this?” I think he was surprised at how much juice showed up.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
Our trip to Jamaica was weird. We got free accommodations at a place called Hedonism. I knew what the word meant, but I didn't realize I was staying in some fucking free-love swingers hotel. There were ugly people walking around in togas, naked in the hot tub. The concept is, you're safe from the native people. I was like, “Money, I want Jamaican food
now
, I want jerk chicken, motherfucker. We are leaving.” They were like, “We don't recommend that.” I was like, “Motherfucker, I'm from the hood, I'll see you later.”

I interviewed a whole litany of Jamaican artists, including Ziggy Marley, who recognized me right away. This was in the first year. He was like, “We are watching
pon
satellite dish.” When I'm out of the country, whether it's Nigeria, Brazil, Spain, Israel, people talk about what the show meant to them. If they didn't get it directly, tapes were passed around. It really sparked and inspired hip-hop around the world.

 

B-REAL:
If you were an up-and-coming rapper, one of your goals was to get on
Yo! MTV Raps
, to visit Ed Lover and Dr. Dre and see Ed Lover do that crazy dance he used to do on Wednesdays. That was every rapper's dream. I mean hey, even Notorious B.I.G. mentioned it in one of his raps.

 

EVERLAST:
It was a big deal to be on
Yo!
It was like doing the Johnny Carson show.

 

ED LOVER:
We did a Big Daddy Kane day, played five of his videos, and at the end of the show I started spitting some of his rhymes. And I was like, “Kane, you know you stole them rhymes from me, you old flat-top-wearing sucker ass.” It was a joke, but his guys took it seriously. So later I'm at Queen Latifah's birthday party and these guys come threaten me. “We're gonna fuck you up.” One of them had a straight razor. Ice-T protected me and got me to my car safely. I knew where they were from. That night we strapped up, me and Live Squad, the dudes Tupac used to run with. We went out to Brooklyn and chased them nig-gas down the block shooting at them. I believe somebody got hit, but it didn't come from my gun. That's all I'm gonna say.

The next day, Lyor Cohen came to the set to talk to me, and he squashed everything. Kane and I cleared the air, he let me know he had nothing to do with that. We're great friends to this day.

 

BIG DADDY KANE, artist:
Keep in mind, in the late '80s it was still difficult to get rap songs on the radio. A video gave you nationwide exposure. If you hear a song, it's like, “Yo, did you hear what he
said
?” But if you see a video, now dudes say, “Where can I get that jacket? Yo, I need those glasses.” You've got girls saying, “I'm going to fuck the shit out of him whenever he comes to this state.” It helps build your fan base, because they get to
see
you. If you're a man, women get a chance to fall in love with you, and men get a chance to try to dress like you and
be
you. Whether they're saying, “Kane had on the most incredible outfit,” or “Kane had on some ridiculous bullshit,” they're talking about you.

Yeah, I wore some ridiculous bullshit. One of Chubb Rock's boys was cracking on me about what I wore in Heavy D's “Don't Curse” video—a purple paisley shirt with matching purple paisley scarf. He told me I was dressed like a bullfighter. One time I wore a sheer purple outfit, straight-up see-through, and I intentionally had on leopard drawers. I was on some Gentleman GaGa shit.

 

DJ JAZZY JEFF:
My family was from Virginia, and to people in Virginia, Philly might as well have been Mars. I'd go back home when I was younger, and people would be like, “Wow, you guys dress like this?” After MTV started playing rap videos, I went down to Virginia for my family reunion. I walked into a 7-Eleven, and there was a kid with a box haircut and parts in his hair. He looked
exactly
like he was from Philly. That's what MTV did. It changed fashion, it changed culture.

 

PETER DOUGHERTY:
In '88, you couldn't find anybody at MTV who wasn't white, except in the mailroom. I was very insistent that we get black people to work on
Yo!
, and I was met with “Why? You think that's necessary?” And I was, like, “Yeah. I don't think it should be run indefinitely by a couple white people.”

 

JAC BENSON:
When I got hired at MTV, my job was in production management. I lasted a whole week.
Yo! MTV Raps
was celebrating its third anniversary with a special show, and production management was handling the logistics, prepping for a shoot. I was running to get more food for catering, that kind of busy stuff. I was introduced to Ted Demme, and as the shoot was wrapping up, he said, “I'm thinking about hiring a PA for
Yo!
Let me know if you're interested.” He told me the rate and I did the quick math. I was like, “Well, that's $75 less per day than I'm making now.” Ted Demme gave me the opportunity to work for him for less money.

One of my jobs was to take Fab 5 Freddy his check every week. No one else wanted to do it, because Fab liked to
talk
. But the shit he was talking about was fly.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
We were astute enough to smell a phony. “Rico Suave”? No, we're not doing this.

 

ED LOVER:
I'll tell you right now who tried to bribe us. Somebody from Vanilla Ice's label offered a couple hundred thousand dollars, cash, to play “Ice Ice Baby” regularly. I refused. I hated Vanilla Ice.

 

JAC BENSON:
Tupac and Ed were friends. We were in the studio, and the week before, Tupac had a fight with these directors, the Hughes Brothers. I think they pressed charges. He comes to
Yo! MTV Raps,
and when Ed asks about the incident, Tupac just
goes.
He's bragging about what he did, then he challenges the Hughes Brothers to a boxing match. Those tapes ended up being subpoenaed by the court.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
Tupac was a crazy dude. He could have an intelligent, substantive discussion with you, then flip on a dime and be the illest street guy that doesn't give a fuck. This one particular show, he was like, “Yo Fab, I just got this new tat, let me show you.” And he lifts up his shirt to show the Thug Life tattoo, but there's a pistol in his waist which we can clearly see. So we huddle with his manager and say “Should we retape it?” Tupac was like, “Nah, fuck that. Let it air.” So it aired.

 

ED LOVER:
My favorite episode? We went to Mike Tyson's house in Vegas. Ted decides we're going to shoot on a golf course in the backyard. When we're done, Mike can't find a key to the back fence. It's six feet high. The crew gets over the fence, then Ted, then Mike Tyson. Don King says, “No fucking way I'm jumping over this fence.” I jump over the fence. Now we're waiting on Dre. Tyson says, “Dre, jump over the fucking fence, you fat motherfucker.” Dre's holding on to an eagle that's built into the cement and it snaps off. Tyson goes ballistic: “Look what you did to my fence, you fat piece of shit.”

Finally we shoot the segment, and Mike says, “I'm a Brooklyn guy, I've always had this lisp, when I was young everybody laughed at me.” And I go, “We got more
Yo! MTV Raps
coming up. Mike Tyson is talking this Brooklyn crap. Let me tell you, I'm from Queens, and there ain't never no punk had nothing from no dude from Queens.” And Mike runs up behind me and hits me in the rib cage. All the air just left my body. And Mike stands over me and says, “Oh, Ed Lover is gonna sue me now.” That's the first time he punched me. It wouldn't be the last time.

 

JAC BENSON:
Ed was the star of the show. This is no disrespect to Dre, but Ed was going to be the comedian. He would make a fool of himself, in a good way, playing different characters. We would be doubled over in laughter and pain. You'd plan a forty-five-second segment and it would run two minutes, and then there wasn't time to show the videos.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
The town car bills for Ed and Dre were outrageous. They'd stop the car twenty-five places on their way home.

 

JAC BENSON:
Trust me, every day Ed and Dre would remind me that they were the highest-rated show on the channel.

 

ED LOVER:
I was in a rap group called No Face—we were doing fun, 2 Live Crew–type of parody stuff. MTV made me choose between doing my music or being on MTV—so we took my face off the No Face album and my name off the credits. They said it was because of a morals clause in my contract, and because we had the lyric, “I'm gonna wake your daughter up, we wanna fuck.” “Fake Hair Wearing Bitch” was one of our records. Yet after that, Jenny McCarthy posed naked in
Playboy
while she was at MTV, and morally, that's okay?

MTV had no late-night television show. Our ratings were great, but they didn't want to do a late-night show with me and Dre. Jon Stewart comes right after us and they give him a late-night show. What the fuck? It's race. That's all it is. We were treated different than white talent, absolutely. There was no problem paying Adam Curry. All them dudes was making way more money than us, and we were out-rating them every single fucking day. We were killing Adam Curry and had to fight for our money. We had Lyor Cohen negotiate our deal in'91, and he got us each $250,000 a year. We had to threaten to leave the show. And from $250,000, we went up to $500,000 apiece. Then we were doing radio and MTV at the same time, and I was clearing almost $2 million a year.

FAB 5 FREDDY:
For the first three years or so, we were kind of untethered and could do whatever we wanted. Then the network became overly sensitive, because it was black content. There was a constant pressure to edit videos: The gun has to come out; that FUBU T-shirt was okay before, but now we can't show it because we're getting pressure from advertisers. We weren't debuting all the hottest stuff like we were before. BET and The Box were playing this shit in every major city. That became problematic.

 

JAC BENSON:
Rap videos exploded on MTV. You'd see Ice Cube and Tupac played outside of
Yo! MTV Raps
. So that thing we held close to our hearts and kept authentic, it was starting to grow beyond its boundaries. Ed and Dre and Fab would say, “We used to program the show ourselves and do what we wanted.” And at that point, there was more of a channel involvement in it. Patti Galluzzi programmed all the shows, from
Headbangers Ball
to
Yo! MTV Raps
. Videos were getting caught up in bullshit, getting caught up in standards. They got pushed back to the record labels: “You've got to make these edits, change this language, bleep this, back-scratch that, before we can play the video.” We were early in the beginning, then we became late. Rap had grown bigger than the show. Michelle Vonfeld in standards and practices, I maybe saw her once or twice. It was like the Wizard of Oz that you hated.

 

ABBEY KONOWITCH:
All of a sudden, we went from a network that played a little R&B to a rap network. I didn't know anything about rap. Lee Masters had no idea. Judy McGrath was terrified. So Patti Galluzzi became our expert. She played me a song called “O.P.P.” and said, “It stands for ‘Other People's Pussy.'” I go, “What?! You're telling me we should be playing this?!” And of course it became one of our biggest hits.

 

TREACH:
“O.P.P.” was a phrase in the hood: Other People's Pussy. It was a funny concept, so we made a song about it. “You down with O.P.P.? Yeah, you know me!” Ed and Dre took “O.P.P.” and made their own video, “Down with MTV.” They rerecorded “O.P.P” with new verses from Ed and Dre, and we did the hook. “You down with MTV? Yeah you know me.” All the VJs were in the video, Queen Latifah was in the video, MC Lyte, Marky Mark. It was a family thing.

 

JAC BENSON:
There was a line in a Heavy D video, “I'm not your H-E-R-B, I'm your H-E-A-V-Y.”
Herb
meaning nerd. But Michelle Vonfeld was like, “
Herb
, that's a weed reference.” I'm like, “No, no,
no
.” Rap was a very smart and cunning language. That was a higher level of thinking, of wordplay. But it got boiled down to a weed reference and the video was held back. I don't think Michelle understood black culture, forget about just hip-hop.