How Is The Internet So Box Deficient?

dangibs | November 16, 2007 4:00 am
oaktown357.jpg

The Internet is useful for so many things, but while looking at the blog The Stencil today, it occurred to me, where is the extensive Internet tribute to the pay-per-video channel “The Box” that we all so richly deserve?

Sure, there’s a brief Wikipedia entry:

The channel also existed in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, but was eventually purchased by Viacom and merged into MTV2. The channel was initially a product of the Miami Music scene, hosted by local Miami Bass rappers known as Miami Boyz. THE BOX is a shortened term as the channel was originally named ‘The Jukebox Network’. Founder and former owner Steve Peters began a short-lived record label from the earnings of Video Jukebox entitled Peter’s Records, but despite having his foot in the local Miami Bass scene, and employing Hip-Hop producers from abroad, he never managed to find a hit record and ended the label before The Box was sold. Some cities in the U.S. had terrestrial (over-the-air) transmitters for The Box and later MTV2, but many have now been sold off as of 2005.

That’s it? No extensive Box chart history? Just the painful memories of Viacom sweeping in and destroying my Miami Bass video source? I cry injustice. If a Bone Thug trivia page can state that “The Thuggish Ruggish Bone video was the most requested video on The Box in 1993,” the information is out there somewhere. It just needs to be collected in a helpful web-based resource for me to obsess over. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for. In tribute to the deeply missed Box, here’s the number one request of 1993:

And then, my favorite non-Miami Bass Box track, Oaktown 357’s “Juicy Gotcha Crazy”:

Perfect Rap Video? [The Stencil]

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