MTV turns 30 on Monday. To celebrate, we're running a bunch of pieces on the channel, its legacy, and its future.

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Debuting during the golden year of '88, Yo! MTV Raps revolutionized TV coverage of hip-hop music. Of course, hip-hop videos existed long before Yo! launched—Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five's gritty street-level visuals for "The Message," peeping Kurtis Blow clad in black leather pants performing in front of a silhouetted Manhattan-skyline backdrop in "If I Ruled The World"—but the show provided hip-hop junkies with rap reportage like never before. Hosted by Ed Lover and Doctor Dre (the lesser-heralded one), who were assisted by Fab 5 Freddy, Yo! MTV Raps didn't just showcase new videos and air interviews; it took viewers inside the worlds of the artists they profiled, which might mean delving down into producer Pete Rock's dingy Mount Vernon basement, trading barbs with N.W.A. in LA, or letting shout-rap oiks Onyx slam dance with Freddy on the Brooklyn Bridge. Here are five of the best moments from its archives.

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​Recently our hackles were raised after a concerned Park Slope resident (or, as reports increasingly indicate, a gifted troll) sent out a petition hoping to keep a new club from playing the hip-hop music (gasp!) in yuppietacular Brooklyn. We could not imagine the anarchy if rap music ever hit Park Slope: Think upended strollers and innumerable adorable pug dogs scattering toward Grand Army Plaza, causing winter-squash raviolis to rattle off forks at Al Di La. Uh, you're all conveniently forgetting that the Rub throws a great weekly party on Fifth Avenue, and KRS-One was born in Park Slope, right?

Anyway, our favorite line in this ridiculous petition is the decidedly anachronistic description "another Yo MTV Raps 'bling-bling' vip club," which moronically links a hit 1988 TV show with a hit 1999 song. Which got us thinking: Do today's rock critics know more about the seminal Yo! MTV Raps than your average panic-stricken Brooklynite? And so we asked 15 music writers:

Who were the hosts of Yo! MTV Raps?

Should be super easy, right? It's essentially the show that brought hip-hop to the suburbs in 1988, changing pop culture, fashion, and music forever. It brought radical politics to our living rooms and taught a generation of white kids to shave lines into their hair (sorry, mom). Was our panel of critics actually watching this landmark moment unfold? Or were they too busy waiting for Dave Kendall to play the new Mighty Lemon Drops? Our posse in effect consists of 15 professional and semi-professional rock writers, all given the usual rules:

1. I will not identify you AT ALL, so it is OK to be wrong. [We will say that our esteemed panel edits magazines, websites, and alt-weeklies. They have written for pretty much every outlet you've ever heard of, from Rolling Stone to Spin to Billboard.]

2. You can't use Google.

The correct answer and some dropped science below:

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