Posted on March 12, 2012
Harlem World
Ralph McDaniels punched the pause button on the big flat-screen television in his Long Island studio.
Mr. McDaniels was surveying live footage from “Video Music Box,” the show he created in 1983 that has, for three decades running, documented New York’s hip-hop scene.
On the screen was a clip from circa 1993. Mr. McDaniels needed to explain: Nas and the Notorious B.I.G. were not yet the era-defining artists they would later become; they were not even known outside New York City. The footage of these two together, performing at an unlikely sounding venue called the Country Club on the Upper East Side, is the only known time that they publicly shared a stage, Mr. McDaniels said.
A few minutes into the clip, a scuffle broke out and the stage cleared.
It is just one memorable moment among hundreds, if not thousands, that Mr. McDaniels has collected in service of a singular purpose: creating a street-level view of the scene he has spent his life in.
“This was hip-hop in its rawest form,” Mr. McDaniels, 52, said in his studio last week. “Sometimes it went well. Sometimes it didn’t.”
Works that examine “Video Music Box” and Mr. McDaniels as a documentarian and an architect of the local rap scene will be on display in “The Box That Rocks,” an exhibition that opened on Saturday at Mocada, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Uncle Ralph, as Mr. McDaniels is better known, has become as much of a legend as some of the rappers he has memorialized on screen. “Video Music Box” was among the first television shows to regularly feature hip-hop, and Mr. McDaniels has always been its accessible, even-keeled host, guiding generations of viewers through New York’s hip-hop world with interviews and scenes from live shows. He is even credited in some quarters with inventing one of the culture’s most enduring idiosyncrasies, the shout-out.
By the late 1980s, with a partner, Lionel Martin, Mr. McDaniels was crafting his own videos for some of the era’s seminal artists. Through their production company, Classic Concepts, the two helped define hip-hop’s aesthetic: They took rappers from soundstages into the streets, as Mr. McDaniels put it, and weaved story lines into a genre that, conceptually, had been less than ambitious.
“Without question, Ralph was one of those foundational guys,” said Harlem resident Fab 5 Freddy, the former host of “Yo! MTV Raps.”
Mr. McDaniels grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, the son of a draftsman and a civil servant, and followed New York City’s burgeoning music scene. In the early ’80s, he was an engineer at WNYC-TV Channel 31, a city-owned station that sometimes leased blocks of time to independent shows.
At the time, there were few outlets that played music videos. In 1982 — the year after the launch of MTV — Mr. McDaniels said he persuaded a WNYC program director to play a handful of segments by Rick James, the Pointer Sisters and others on the air during a fund-raiser.
“We got instant reaction,” Mr. McDaniels said. “The phones lit up like a Christmas tree.”
In 1983, “Video Music Box” was born, a six-day-a-week, hourlong show with an indelible opening: Over the sound of Whodini’s “Five Minutes of Funk,” a silver boombox, pierced by lightning bolts, rose above an orange-hued city skyline. A montage of video clips followed.
As important as the videos that Mr. McDaniels selected for the show, said Laurie A. Cumbo, Mocada’s executive director, were the interviews and live footage that came in between. Ms. Cumbo recalled growing up in East Flatbush and dashing home after school to get a glimpse of the club scene: What venues did they go to? What did they wear? How did they dance?
“This was a whole world, a whole scene, and you could keep in touch with it through ‘Video Music Box’ and Ralph McDaniels,” Ms. Cumbo, 37, said.
In the early video era, Mr. Martin said, rap videos looked largely all the same: Artists were positioned in front of a camera, or in the background, performing a song. Mr. Martin and Mr. McDaniels created videos that were as much about acting and conveying story lines as rapping; they also shot on location.
“I said, ‘We have to shoot this one in Harlem,’ or ‘We have to shoot this one in the Bronx,’ because that’s where they’re talking about in the song,” Mr. McDaniels said. “You have to see that in the landscape.”
Mr. Martin and Mr. McDaniels did such a convincing job with one video — M.C. Shan’s “Left Me Lonely” — that Tyrone Williams, who ran Cold Chillin’ Records, one of the era’s most important labels, recruited the two to produce the rest of his roster, which included Big Daddy Kane, Kool G. Rap and Biz Markie.
The videos, Mr. Williams said, “made us feel like real artists.”
Mr. McDaniels is still directing videos — and still hosting “Video Music Box,” which moved to the city-owned NYC Life Channel 25 in 1998 and is now down to one episode a week that is broadcast three times weekly.
As Mr. McDaniels dug through footage, he talked about a more expansive project, a true hip-hop documentary, that he said would portray a street-level perspective of the culture.
“Nobody tells that side of the story,” Mr. McDaniels said.
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Wednesday, March 14th 2012 at 11:15AM
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