Not sure how much of a news flash this is, but yeah, BET is ass. It’s even been confirmed as recently as yesterday by people who decided to go against their apprehensions and try to help change things from the inside. I can’t say that it was ever some kinda cornerstone of Black America or anything like that, but it’s progressively gotten more and more steeped in what-the-fuckery over the last few years.
That said, I’d be a got-damn lie if I said BET didn’t play a serious part in my teenage years as a big music freak. As I’ve said before, there was a time when I watched that ONE station all day long with a tape in the VCR and a hand on the remote. I still remember all the shows- Video Soul, Video Vibrations, Jam Zone, Planet Groove, etc. But the one show that was unconditionally my shit, without doubt, was Rap City.
Around early-’92, after years of wanting cable but never being able to get it (it was unavailable in our apartment complex), we moved to a place where cable was available. One Wednesday afternoon, I came home from school just as the United Artists Cable of Baltimore truck arrived in front of my house. Being that this was a couple years before the first time I crushed some pink cookies with my building, I didn’t think I could get more excited about something. Later that afternoon while jumping thru each and every channel, I got to BET, which was playing a video called “Hickeys On Your Chest” by Little Shawn.
From there, I was stuck on watching Rap City every afternoon. It didn’t have the production value of a Yo! MTV Raps, and the yellow-and-purple lettering on the video descriptions made it look even more cheesy. It was almost like public access TV, and it managed to look even more low-budget than BET itself was. Almost to a fault, they played damn near any rap video that was sent to them, no matter how low-quality it was. But for those same reasons, that show was right up my alley, especially since Yo! started getting its time cut by MTV around that same time.
Despite my moms thoroughly disliking Rap City, I couldn’t get enough. Every other day, I’d hear complaints of “the same damn videos everyday with the same ugly-ass people”, but you couldn’t tell me it wasn’t the shit. It was the show to watch because more often than not, they ran the entire spectrum of what was out there. Whether it was Snoop, Lost Boyz, Master P, Common, Bone Thugs N Harmony, The Boogiemonsters, Fat Joe, or MC Eiht- all that shit could be seen in the course of those two hours and it didn’t seem strange to have all those different types of artists thrown in together.
I can’t even count how many artists I saw for the first time ever on Rap City, or how many songs I remember STRICTLY because of how much the videos got played. The best thing about it was that they gave exposure to a lot of shit that was otherwise not being played, even on BET’s other shows. Even a video by the most underground rapper on the most random label could get regular play and possibly become a favorite. There were songs that were “hits” on the show that weren’t actually hits on any other level. In some cases, there were songs that later became huge pop hits getting play on Rap City months before everyone else caught up. It had little to do with who directed the video, or who the artist ran with- it was more about the music.
This year, Rap City would’ve officially been on the air for 20 years, but it ultimately got canceled last October. Of course it was bound to happen, because video shows don’t nearly mean as much to stations (or viewers) as they did pre-Youtube. In true BET fukk-up fashion, the “Grand Finale” of the show was aired randomly as all hell for an hour on a Saturday night. Lame as that was, it was cool to see all the old hosts (Chris Thomas, Dajaur, Joe Clair, Big Lez, Tigger) come back for the last time. The brief montages they showed throughout the hour reminded me of why I used to anxiously wait for it to come on every afternoon at 4:30.
Rap City is another one of those things that I can gladly say I was able to experience firsthand. It may seem like no big deal to someone who didn’t come up in that era, but it was practically required viewing for anyone who was a hip-hop fan in the ’90s.
-D!
Posted by Danj! 
