I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  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. Ever
y 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.

  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.