Ralph McDaniels was one of the first to film the New York rap scene for his Video Music Box show, which featured genre legends from Nas to Jay-Z. He kept all the archives, thousands of hours of images and sounds that he protects to transmit the memory of an era.
Early 1980s… hip-hop is still living its prehistory, the Sugarhill Gang’s first rap hit (Rapper’s Delight, 1979) has just hit the airwaves. DJ, video producer, and now coordinator of hip-hop activities for the libraries of Queens in New York, Uncle Ralph (Tonton Ralph) – his nickname in the middle – remembers it like it was yesterday. “We were with Russell Simmons (the future founder of the famous hip-hop label Def Jam). You couldn’t get a contract for an artist. You couldn’t put a (hip-hop) record in a store. They told you that they would not sell it”, says this pioneer.
“And then there was Run-DMC,” the first major group in rap history. “Really, we were talking to them, around the corner, and the next day they were on stage at Madison Square Garden,” recalls this native of Brooklyn with origins in Trinidad and Tobago, in the Caribbean.
From this period, and the years following, Ralph McDaniels, 61, retains rare visual and sound vestiges, captured wherever he hung out – often with his only team -, his camera and his microphone. Video Music Box was launched in 1983 on a local New York channel (WNYC-TV) to give voice to a still burgeoning and energetic rap scene. Nas, The Notorious B.I.G., Busta Rhymes, Roxanne Shanté, Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z…, Uncle Ralph filmed them all in their debut, in concert in front of excited crowds, or on confidential stages.
In a studio set up in the basement of his house in Elmont, a suburb of New York, he scrolls through archive footage: a very young LL Cool J giving his very first filmed interview, or DJ Grandmaster Flash, glasses black, sparkling outfit more disco than rap backstage at a show in 1985. Thirty to forty years later, the big names in the genre are grateful to Video Music Box for having been there at the very beginning. “We had Ralph McDaniels, that’s all we had,” summarizes Jay-Z in a documentary that Nas devoted to the show (You’re watching Video Music Box, on Showtime, 2021).
Today, Ralph McDaniels wants to protect this heritage, by digitizing the 20,000 hours of images contained in the mountains of old video cassettes piled up everywhere on the iron shelves of his studio.
His dream ? “Forty or a hundred years from now, it’ll all be in an archive somewhere, and you can say tell me about Mary J. Blige, and you’ll find Mary J. Blige in her time,” he says. “It’s important because it’s what tells the story of our culture, and you can’t just throw it away,” he insists. Already, the small box-shaped microphone he used for Video Music Box has entered the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
His memory, Ralph McDaniels also nourished him with the video clips he produced with stars from the golden age of New York rap. Among them, It Ain’t Hard to Tell by Nas (1994), or the very famous C.R.E.A.M. (1994) by Wu-Tang Clan, a raw chronicle of New York youth, between drugs, violence and prison, where the acronym C.R.E.A.M. stands for “Cash rules everything around me”. “It was minus 15 when we shot,” he recalls, nostalgic for that era of hip-hop when “the words we said really corresponded to what was happening in the street”.
“A lot of the biggest artists in hip-hop have had a rough time,” he adds, quoting Jay-Z, The Notorious B.I.G. or Nas, all of whom grew up in poor New York neighborhoods. “They knew and they understood the people, the families, the smells and everything that goes on in elevators that smell of urine and everything you walk through there every day. And they took all that and put it on their records,” says Ralph McDaniels.
From now on, he tries to transmit the heritage within the libraries, “a safe space, especially for teenagers”. “There are kids who need help, or opportunities, or just to be there, to see us do an interview and see how it works,” insists Uncle Ralph. “Here they are safe, nothing will happen to them.”
