Spanning the 19 years between 1989 and 2008, BET's Rap City was the longest running hip-hop TV show in history. It helped rap grow from urban shout to suburban obsession in the late Eighties, documented the initial reigns of Los Angeles and Atlanta in the Nineties and, most famously, helped make freestyling fashionable in the image-conscious Aughts.
The show outlasted rival
This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: Rap City: An Oral History of TV’s Longest-Running Hip-Hop Show