08 / 15 / 2013
On August 6, 1988 Yo! MTV Raps debuted on MTV and changed the world. It's hard to imagine, but back then Rap music was not seen as it is today. It was an underground genre of music that challenged what was going in popular music at the time. Yo! MTV Raps transmitted the culture of Rap to millions of homes at a time when there were only a handful of local outlets to see a rap video. The style, the trends, the language of Rap began to influence popular culture and by the time the show left the air in 1995, the genre was no longer the best kept secret. Rap music has grown to being the biggest and most popular genre of music today, and a lot of this is due to Yo! MTV Raps.
For the Stüssy X Yo! MTV Raps collection, we selected 10 seminal artists from Yo! MTV Raps' time on air for a series of t-shirts and fleece pieces released in 2013 on Stussy.com US.
In conjunction with the release of the Stüssy/Yo! MTV Raps collection, Stüssy produced a 2-part documentary entitled We Were All Watching. Part 1, The Importance of Yo! MTV Raps, takes a look at the history of MTV's groundbreaking music program, and Part 2, Fashion in the Golden Age of Hip Hop examines the trends, styles and influence Hip Hop has had over the years.