Ralph McDaniels was one of the first to film the New York rap scene in the 80s for his TV show "Video Music Box.” He kept all the archives – thousands of hours of footage that he is digitizing – in an effort to preserve them.
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00:00 Let's see.
00:02 This is LL Cool J's first interview.
00:04 - Okay, welcome to another edition of Video Music Box,
00:07 and we're here with superstar rapper, LL Cool J.
00:11 - LL stands for ladies, love, legend, and leather,
00:13 long and lean, love of ladies, last of the red hot lovers,
00:16 looking for a little, level-headed leader,
00:18 and a whole lot of L's.
00:20 People always see me when they hear my radio,
00:21 they know I'm coming.
00:23 So after a while, I said, "Dang, I can't live
00:24 "without this radio."
00:25 So I said, "That would be kind of deaf."
00:27 So I made a song.
00:28 So music video became super important for hip hop artists
00:32 because very often, we didn't get radio airplay,
00:36 especially in the '80s.
00:37 You know, it was late night mix shows.
00:40 You only heard it there.
00:41 When I came on in '83, people saw LL Cool J.
00:46 They never saw him other than a magazine
00:48 or something like that, you know, like Write On Magazine
00:51 or Rap Pages or something.
00:53 You never saw these people talk.
00:55 ♪ Bring him on the mic, I do so well ♪
00:57 ♪ Now he's my ace, my king, my pride and joy ♪
01:00 ♪ Come on, Nancy, see it's on you, homeboy ♪
01:02 ♪ I'm a specialist, I'm a big wheel ♪
01:04 ♪ I'm all for your little, big, big ditty ♪
01:07 Diddy, Jay-Z, all these guys would come to me
01:10 and be like, "Can you get it on today?"
01:14 And I'd be like, "Let me look at it."
01:15 And if it was hot, I'd get it on that day
01:16 'cause I knew that MTV or, well, in the beginning,
01:19 there was no MTV.
01:20 And that's why you have Jay-Z as a billionaire
01:22 and Rihanna and Kanye West and Dr. Dre,
01:25 that we have to start talking about.
01:27 I'll go through here.
01:28 And there's never a great way to organize
01:34 what you're looking at, trust me.
01:36 She's just catapulted into the number one
01:40 hip-hop R&B artist, yeah.
01:42 You know, we have to treat it like it's important.
01:47 It is important because this is what is telling the story
01:51 of our culture and you can't just throw it away.
01:54 And I think that that's important.
01:55 Hip-hop has that because soul music didn't have that.
02:00 A lot of soul music archives were lost.
02:01 And as a teenager and when I first got into the business,
02:05 I realized that a lot of these things were lost.
02:07 And I said, "That can't happen to our stuff,
02:09 at least the stuff that I shoot."
02:11 And I just wanted to get it right.
02:13 You know, I just wanted to say,
02:14 "This is what actually happened.
02:16 Let us be the first genre of music
02:18 that got the archives right."
02:20 (hip-hop music)
02:24 (hip-hop music)
02:27 (hip-hop music)
02:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]