Read an oral history of Yo! MTV Raps

Vulture

MTV was infamously slow to catch on to rap music, waiting three years after its 1981 launch to show its first rap video (Run-D.M.C.’s “Rock Box”). In August 1988, with the help of two white guys at MTV, Yo! MTV Raps launched, "flinging the doors to the genre wide open, expanding upon the mainstream success that hip-hop had already started to achieve elsewhere," Jen Chaney says in her oral history.