If you were living in the New York City/tri-state area from the Juice Crew ‘80s to the Bad Boy ‘90s, most of your afternoons were probably spent in front of the boob tube watching Video Music Box. Premiering in late 1983 as the brainchild of television producer Ralph McDaniels, the invocative program had urban music fans flocking to six-days a week at 3:30 pm (noon on Saturday) to check out the latest rap or R&B video clips. Opening with the catchy “Five Minutes of Funk” theme song performed by underrated rap group Whodini, the program was the perfect introduction to a different world of Black music.

For the “eighties babies” Video Music Box became the streetwise New York City equivalent of Soul Train or American Bandstand. Certainly, in that “golden age of rap,” when I still lived in Harlem and verbal rhyme slayers and groundbreaking DJs ruled the day. When Run-DMC, Big Daddy Kane, Roxanne Shante, KRS-1 and Kid ‘n’ Play, just to name a few, were beginning their musical careers, Video Music Box was one of the few outlets to show their work love without compromise.

In addition, the show also mixed in the R&B be it the new jack triumphs of Uptown Records, Lower East Side boy Luther Vandross, Brit chick Sade, and pop crooning sisters Whitney Houston and Anita Baker who were launching the age of the new R&B diva. “There was no blueprint for what I was doing,” McDaniels told me from his home in Long Island. A former dj that grew-up in Brooklyn and Queens, he attended New York Institute of Technology where he studied Communications–TV–Film and graduated in 1982. “Of course, there was MTV, but hardly anyone in the city had cable back then.” A truly grassroots effort, McDaniels, working alongside his friend and co-host Lionel C. Martin (The Vid Kid), they ventured into various clubs with cameras and interviewed artists as well as patrons. It was from those live moments that “shout outs” were born.

http://www.soulhead.com/2015/02/26/video-music-box-michael-gonzales-videomusicbox-gonzomike-tbt