Onyx made a rowdy video for "Slam" that was as smart as the record. "'Dude, this record is so off the hook, the phones will not stop ringing.' I had five or six big stations calling me telling me, 'You've got power rotation on this record.'" "I can remember getting a call from the music director at WPGC," he says. At that time Johnny Coppola did radio promotion for Sony Music. Ironically, in becoming more true to themselves, the members of Onyx were falling in line with pop radio's new openness to the sounds of the street. Onyx was making music somewhat closer to their hearts. When I saw Onyx onstage in early 1993, I couldn't believe this was the same group.
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The melody contained a little code language for hardcore hip-hop fans, inspired by a record that MCs had been rhyming over for decades, a song from 1967 by The Mohawks, called " The Champ." "And," Starr says, "that's where the grimy style got created." They're talking about a song called " Stik 'N' Muve." "We were being crazy and having fun playing these crazy, stick-up kid characters," says Sticky. "We created these characters called Mickey Billy and Sticky Fingaz," says Starr. If we added a rap record, it played around the clock."Īmid these developments, the rap group Onyx resurfaced - with a new mentor, the late Jam Master Jay, a new record deal with Def Jam/Sony and a new aesthetic. "Once we embraced it, we embraced it fully. I mean, it was kind of a no-brainer," he says. "You didn't have to go to very many events and see the response that A Tribe Called Quest or a Wu-Tang Clan or an Ice Cube in his early days, or a Snoop - any of those artists - got. The following year Cummings did something that no pop radio programmer in America had ever done. And I still remember kind of this singular moment when a consultant with our group turned to us and said, 'What's hip-hop?' And I thought, 'Oh, boy, we are in trouble.'" And we realized very quickly that these young kids, especially the Latinos, were talking about hip-hop.
What went wrong here?' And we started doing a little research and getting back on the streets. "After being Number 1 and taking the world by storm, suddenly found itself in 10th place and we said, 'Huh. "It started with the ratings faltering," says Cummings. In Los Angeles, Rick Cummings saw it in his stations' ratings, which dropped from first to tenth. Then, in 1991, something strange happened. While Starr and his band-mates nursed their wounds, hardcore rap continued to sell by word-of-mouth, and pop radio continued to focus on hip-hop lite. "I wanted to just jump off a building after that." "I walked away and I was like, hurt, depressed, and everything," says Starr. Pop radio didn't bite, and the record bombed. 'Yo, you sound like you was from the country.'" "I used to go down south when I was 13, 14, and I would come back home to Queens, from summer down south - I was down south for like two months. "We called it the 'country style' back in the days," says Starr.
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