with pop radio's new openness to the sounds of the street. At that time Johnny Coppola did radio promotion for Sony Music. "I can remember getting a call from the music director at WPGC," he says. "'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.'"

Onyx made a rowdy video for "Slam" that was as smart as the record. David Belgrave commissioned it for Def Jam. "Big crowd scene, moshing, slamming, crowd surfing," he remembers. "OK it's white, it's black, this is hip-hop, there's this rock thing, it's east and then they're out in the west coast with these guys tatted up and the wife beaterson in front of the low riders."

The video hit MTV right when the channel had also begun to play harder rap. Patti Galuzzi was MTV's director of music programming.

"I feel like 1993 was the year that the rap artists in particular started moving in heavy rotation.," she says. "Onyx felt like it was smack in the middle of the sort of thing that we could play. It's a really memorable hook. The video looked a little bit like a grunge concert. They looked authentic. They looked really cool."

Galuzzi and MTV did have one problem: The album title, which they had to find some way to display onscreen. Solved with this spelling, says Galuzzi, "B-A-C-D-A-F-star-star-star-Up."

"But," she says, "there was nothing about the lyrics that were misogynistic, violent. And we