Ralph McDaniels of Video Music Box
NEW YORK - The public access Hip Hop classic TV Show, "VIDEO MUSIC BOX" hit the scene in 1983 - and went on to become the longest-running music video show in the world.
"From a visual standpoint I was the guy who brought the visuals to the masses," said Ralph McDaniels, the founder and host of Video Music Box.
"I think people tell me that I'm one of the 'founding fathers'," he said.
McDaniels has never had a legendary rap lyric or chart-topping beat, but when the music industry needed someone to show who was making the emerging genre of music, he was the man to do it.
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"One day, these tapes came in and we had these videos that artists were performing and I looked at it and I said, 'why don't we play this on tv?'," he told FOX 5 News.
Back in 1983, as hip hop burst onto the scene, Ralph was working at Public TV Station WNYC in New York City, he started his own show "Video Music Box"
The program focused on airing interviews and recordings of live shows that often felt raw and showed the music in its infancy.
"It was so new. It was like the trending thing. We say trending now. but it was the trending thing back then in the street because people saw something that they never got the opportunity to see. This is pre-internet. This is pre-YouTube."
He would eventually become known as "Uncle Ralph" and he was there from the beginning.
Over the decades he's met and interviewed just about everyone. The legacy of his show is now immortalized in a new documentary on Showtime where some of the biggest stars in the world now remember their roots.
The documentary completes a circle in a way. McDaniels directed the first video for rapper Nas. Now the legendary hip-hop artist is the director and executive producer of the new documentary.
"It makes people, if you grew up in that time, you're loving it. if you didn't grow up in that time, you're going to see some things that maybe you've never seen before," he said about the new documentary. "It's not your typical hip hop film... we wanted to tell a real story."
EXTENDED INTERVIEW WITH RALPH MCDANIELS BELOW: