Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 11/18/2011 at 9:32 AM News

The Popdust Files: 80s, mtv, sucker free awards, Yo! MTV Raps

The nostalgia circuit continues to flourish on MTV, with Beavis and Butthead, 120 Minutes, Liquid Television and other retro favorites soon to be joined by Yo! MTV Raps, the ’80s and ’90s music video show often credited with bringing hip-hop into the homes of suburban America. Yo! will return to MTV2 at midnight on Dec. 4th, immediately following the first-ever Sucker Free Awards, in a special called Classic Cuts. The special will focus on three seminal early-’90s hip-hop videos: A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario,” Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” and Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” (“Went to Short Dog’s house / They was watching Yo! MTV Raps”).

Most exciting about the return of Yo! are the names attached to it. First and foremost, the show’s three original hosts, Ed Lover, Doctor Dré (the non-Compton one) and Fab 5 Freddy will all be making appearances, as well as a whole host of hip-hop fixtures past and present, including Q-Tip, Scarface, Ice Cube, Wiz Khalifa, DJ Khaled, Questlove, Busta Rhymes, Mac Miller, Machine Gun Kelly, Young Jeezy, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Phife, Fat Joe, Common, Mike Epps, Ice-T, Meek Mill, Tyga and Naughty By Nature. MTV also reports that the half-hour special will also “flash back to some of the Yo! MTV Raps moments, interviews, performances and characters that made the original show so special.”

Well, one half-hour special after a tokenish awards show isn’t going to make anyone forget that this is 2011 and not MTV’s Golden Age of videos, but at the very least, it should be some pretty cool retro viewing. Cue the Ed Lover dance music!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F4ZdLOCaU4&feature=related