MTV is known for lots of things: Downtown Julie Brown, The Real World, Yo! MTV Raps, and of course, Bill Bellamy. Yo! MTV Raps is commonly credited with ushering hip hop music into the mainstream, with the likes of Fab Five Freddy and his cohorts pumping Fresh Prince videos and L.L. Cool J muscles into living rooms coast to coast.

Good or bad, those early days paved the way for an explosion of hip hop programming at MTV. With multiple brands including MTV2, MTVU, MTV Hits, MTV Jams, & MTV News, Viacom-owned MTV is the undisputed leader in urban music entertainment.

Ever wonder who’s responsible for deciding what urban music videos and artists are supported at MTV?

His name is Buttahman, and he’s MTV’s director of Music & Talent.

It was his vision and creativity that launched MTV Jams, a 24-hour hip hop music video channel with national distribution. He’s also responsible for MTV Networks Monster Mix, the first nationally televised video mix show. Before coming to MTV he was On-air Talent and Music Director at WERQ/92Q Jams in Baltimore. Now he writes screenplays and finds artists for soundtrack placement for MTV Films. Oh, he’s also a stand-up comic.

In this installment of Industry 101, Buttahman breaks down how he got started in the industry, his role in the mega-machine that is MTV, and his new hit show hoodFAB, MTV’s first ever interactive hip hop Trivia game show.

HHDX: How has your radio background informed what you do now?
B: Basically, I started off, as an intern at the radio station, and I basically just drove the van around. That’s where I got the name Buttahman from because I used that word to describe everything (It was the late nineties). So basically they just liked my personality and they let me start doing other stuff, and I became the music director of the radio station in charge of deciding what got played and finding new music and making sure that the station was always on the cutting edge of what was happening musically. And that’s basically the capacity that I got hired for with MTV; except now I do music videos and label relations (which is working with the labels and MTV to break new music), and we both come up with creative ways to put their artist in front of the people. They’re really our partners, they provide the content; we provide the means.

HHDX: Ok, wait wait WAIT. You’re obviously a humble dude- you make it sound so casual like “yeah one day I started working at MTV…” It couldn’t have been that simple.
B: It was that random dude. It was like a phone call out of the blue. Because I really honestly was not expecting... it was one of those things that just happened… just the right place at the right time. Like, you couldn’t have told me how to get a job like that back then, like whatever, but yeah timing and pure preparation made it happen. Continued on page 2 »