When Ginuwine set his mind to arriving on a stretcher for a performance of his hit song “Pony,” BET’s “106 & Park” was the only place to do it.
In 2003, one of the show’s two hosts at the time, Free Marie Wright, then known to viewers simply as Free, was winding her way through a standard introduction for the artist when her co-host, AJ Calloway, held a hand up to an earpiece and pulled a face of concern.
“Hey, hold on a second,” he broke in, brow furrowed. “I just heard something happened to Ginuwine while he was doing his sound check. He was supposed to perform right now. We have to apologize. Guys, what … what happened, dog?”
Moments later, Ginuwine was wheeled out to the stage on a gurney, wearing a red visor turned to the side with matching baggy pants. As the confused audience looked on, a backup dancer gave the singer one theatrical chest compression, sending him into a full body roll. A moment later, he popped up, and sprang into a snazzy performance. It was James Brown-caliber stage theater for the early aughts.
“We didn’t know what was happening,” Ms. Wright, who hosted the show from 2000 to 2005, recalled last week. “After him, everybody wanted to do all kind of crazy stuff.”
The moment is one small part of the legacy of “106 & Park,” BET’s signature video countdown show, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Over 14 years, the show, which was often compared to MTV’s “TRL,” became a platform for Black artists and allowed for loose-buckle performances that are hard to unstick from memory. It also provided a space for fandoms to bloom and be expressed before social media provided seemingly unfettered access to stars, on their terms. To celebrate the impact of “106 & Park,” BET is planning to include a tribute to the show during the BET Awards on Monday.
“We were the barometer of the culture at the time,” Mr. Calloway said in an interview. “We were all the trends, the fashion. We were it. You couldn’t go on the internet and see all this you see now.”
The New York Times spoke to half a dozen past hosts of the show, which went off the air in 2014, in an effort to distill its 3,700-episode history down to the moments that defined the show — and, in some ways, the culture.
2001
The Death of Aaliyah
The promising career of the 22-year-old R&B singer Aaliyah came to an end on Aug. 25, 2001, when she died in a plane crash in the Bahamas, where she had been filming a music video.
Fans of the star, whose rise had been fueled in part by appearances on BET, turned to “106 & Park” to process — or discover — the sad news in a world where most cellphones still flipped open and were mainly used for making calls. Knowing that many viewers would be hearing of the singer’s death for the first time from “106 & Park,” Mr. Calloway described the episode as one of the hardest he had to tape.
“You had to deliver horrible news, but then try to bring people up at the same time,” he said.
Unexpectedly, the show became a sort of virtual gathering place when difficult news struck — a function of the trust the show’s primarily Black audience placed in the network.
Less than a month later, “106 & Park” viewers had occasion once more for a session of on-air group therapy. The show, which turned one year old on Sept. 11, 2001, produced a special episode featuring the Rev. Al Sharpton just two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center.
“We became sort of the center of our culture, so that they knew when something was real,” said Ms. Wright, who called the day a blur.
But some moments couldn’t be organized in advance. “Michael Jackson passed while we were on air,” Terrence J, who was a co-host from 2006 to 2012, recalled in an interview.
“I remember they were telling me in my ear to announce the death of Michael Jackson,” he said. “All of these moments were happening in real time.”
2007
50 Cent and Kanye West’s Made-for-TV Beef
It was 2007, and album sales were in sharp decline with the advent of music streaming and downloads. Kanye West and 50 Cent were releasing albums on the same day — fertile ground for some very public competition. After teasing a rap beef that was more like a friendly feud on the cover of Rolling Stone, the two titans of hip-hop made their way to the set of “106 & Park,” which by that time had relocated from East Harlem to Hell’s Kitchen. It was one of the first opportunities that fans had to see the two interact.
“To get two big A-listers like that in the same room, it’s a really hard maneuver,” said Terrence J, who hosted the episode with Rocsi Diaz. “And it would happen all the time on ‘106.’”
The show also made it possible for rap beef that predated an episode to be resolved, live on air. In one of Ms. Diaz’s most memorable episodes, she took the show to Brooklyn to broker a special hip-hop treaty.
“Jay-Z and Nas, they performed together, squashing the beef after so many years and really showing unity in hip-hop,” Ms. Diaz said. “That was, like, a huge moment.”
2013
A First Lady on the ‘106 & Park’ Couch
Music videos, special performances and exuberant fans might have made “106 & Park” a rowdy ratings hit, but the show was also a platform to discuss matters of significance to young Black Americans.
“We touched on very important topics,” Ms. Diaz said, adding that the show broached gang and gun violence, eating disorders, AIDS and the killing of Trayvon Martin.
In 2013, once it was clear that the show had become a way to reach a broad slice of young Americans, the first lady Michelle Obama visited to discuss her education initiatives.
“The Secret Service came in to sweep the whole studio that day — it was crazy,” Scott Mills, the chief executive of BET, recalled. To Mr. Mills, the first lady’s appearance spoke to the show’s emergence as “an important destination for anyone who desired to engage and access the culture.”
This connection is “what really made ‘106 & Park’ so different from other shows there,” he said.
2005
Tom Cruise Did the Motorcycle Dance
Grantland called Tom Cruise uncool for going on “106 & Park” during his “Mission: Impossible III” press tour, but the live audience and BET viewers saw the moment for what it was: the imprimatur of Hollywood. When the megastar showed up on set and did the motorcycle dance to Yung Joc’s “It’s Goin Down,” it was a de facto acknowledgment that “106” had become a vital access point for reaching Black communities.
“For Tom and everybody from the cast to come and stop at one of the sets and give us that iconic moment like that, I will never forget it,” said Julissa Bermudez, who hosted the episode with Big Tigger. “Everybody went crazy. We went crazy. The audience went crazy. Everyone was losing their mind.”
2001
Minting New Boy Band Royalty
Before “106 & Park,” the Black boy band took the shape of Boyz II Men, New Edition and Jodeci. After, there was B2K. When the members of the R&B group — Lil Fizz, J-Boog, Raz-B and Omarion — started generating levels of fandemonium seen only with the Backstreet Boys and ’NSync, “106 & Park” was part of the reason.
“When you had those key ‘106’ demographic artists that came on the show — the B2Ks, Bow Wow, Omarion, Chris Brown — it would be all of these young people, especially the young girls, and they would be screaming at the top of their lungs,” Terrence J said, adding that the stars could hear the screaming from their dressing rooms hours before the show started taping.
“I’ve never seen so many young girls crying and screaming,” Ms. Wright said. “That energy and that excitement in the room, it comes off the floors, the cameras, the wires in the room. People go crazy with them.”
Shad Moss, better known as Bow Wow, was no stranger to rapturous receptions. The artist’s videos were in frequent rotation on the countdown, and in 2012, he became the host of the show until it went off air.
“The show was important for us because there was no streaming, there was no outlet like the younger generation has nowadays to reach their fans and to keep them in tune with what they’re doing,” Mr. Moss said. “‘106 and Park’ was that platform for us.”
Sandra E. Garcia is a Times reporter covering style and culture.
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