'Yo! MTV Raps' airs its final episode

Why it matters

August 17, 1995. Yo! MTV Raps aired its final episode after seven years on the air. The show had launched in August 1988 with Run-DMC as the first guest, hosted by Fab 5 Freddy on weekends and by Doctor Dré and Ed Lover on weekdays. The final episode featured live performances from Method Man, Redman, Erick Sermon, KRS-One, Salt-N-Pepa, Naughty by Nature, Run-DMC, Rakim, Craig Mack, MC Hammer, LL Cool J, and the Notorious B.I.G. The room was, basically, the late-80s and early-90s commercial center of rap. Yo! MTV Raps mattered because, before it, rap had no consistent national television outlet. Local video shows existed in New York and LA. National cable did not have a rap hour. Then MTV gave the genre an hour a day, and the hour became the single most important video-promotion vehicle in the industry for the next seven years. Every artist on the final episode had broken through Yo! at some point. By 1995, MTV had splintered its rap programming into smaller blocks (Rap City had moved to BET, MTV Jams was coming) and Yo!'s seven-year run was over. You can find the final episode online. It plays like a graduation ceremony for the era.