YO! MTV RAPS
Yo! MTV Raps is a two-hour American television music video program, which ran from August 1988 to August 1995. The program (created by Ted Demme and Peter Dougherty) was the first hip hop music show on the network, based on the original MTV Europe show, aired one year earlier. Yo! MTV Raps produced a mix of rap videos, interviews with rap stars, live in studio performances (on Fridays) and comedy. The show also yielded a Brazilian version called Yo! MTV and broadcast by MTV Brasil from 1990 to 2005. (More from Wikipedia)
The Fat Boys were pretty hard to miss in the early days of rap music, not only because of their prodigious weight, but also due to their high-profile cover of "The Twist" that featured Chubby Checker, who had originally recorded the mega-hit “The Twist”. Years before the Yo! MTV Raps program debuted in 1988, the Fat Boys were featured in one of MTV’s earliest commercials.
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The rap section of "Rapture" by Blondie is not conventional rapping by a long shot; it has a stream-of-consciousness quality about it and is mostly a strange science-fiction tale about a “man from Mars” who eats cars, bars, and finally guitars. The first line name-checks a hip hop pioneer – “Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly” – and this man later became the first host of Yo! MTV Raps, using this line as his musical intro.
(September 2016)
