To satisfy the appetite for visual representations of black music, a number of ventures were announced after MTV’s launch. In 1982 Inner City Broadcasting, a black-owned company that controlled a number of major-market radio stations including New York’s WBLS-FM and Los Angeles’s KUTE-FM, announced its Apollo Entertainment Network, which had a goal of providing forty-two hours of programming to 250 cable systems. In March of that year, a weekly syndicated video show called R&B Express started airing in 420 markets. A ninety-minute music-video-based special called Sultans of Soul, hosted by sitcom star Tim Reid (WKRP in Cincinnati) aired with an eye toward becoming a half-hour show. Don Kirshner Productions, the folks behind NBC’s popular The Midnight Special concert series, produced a two-hour special called Rhythm ’n’ Rolls. A group called Bronze Star Productions was producing a weekly video show named Jammin’ on the Tube.
Most of these endeavors either never aired or survived only a year or more. The one enterprise from this era that took hold was Black Entertainment Television (BET). Owned by black businessman Robert Johnson along with his deep-pocketed backer, media mogul John Malone, BET started slowly in August 1981 and was available to only two million households by 1984. The programming during its early years primarily comprised old 1970s sitcoms, movies featuring black actors, faith-based broadcasts, and infomercials. There was little original programming, and music wasn’t yet a huge part of their mix.
In a long Billboard magazine piece titled “As Programming Demands Rise, Black Music Increasingly Visible” that ran on June 5, 1982, BET merited only a single sentence: “The Black Entertainment Television network is extending its programming service this summer with a major portion of time devoted to music.” As more black videos became available, Johnson soon recognized that they could be a huge source of free programming on which he could build his network. Record labels and artists, fed up with getting the cold shoulder from MTV, began to support BET and traveled down to its Washington, DC, studios to do interviews and to tape (mostly lip-synched) performances. It was clear that once BET began airing music videos pretty much exclusively, it would eventually have an impact on Soul Train’s weekly broadcast, but no one knew to what degree.
This challenge to Soul Train’s supremacy in broadcasting black music would, however, occur only incrementally, due to BET’s many challenges in becoming available on key urban markets’ cable systems. In fact, it would be ten years after its launch before BET could truly claim that it was available nationwide.
Black neighborhoods, even in major markets like New York and in crucial southern cities, were often the last to gain cable access. If you lived in midtown Manhattan, you could watch MTV but not be able to see BET in Harlem, much less in black outer-borough hoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. When cable was finally available, many working-class and poor households often had to decide whether it was worth the additional monthly bill (which inspired a lively illegal business in bootleg cable boxes). Local cable operators had to be convinced that BET belonged on their schedules. The 1980s amounted to an arduous climb for the cable start-up.
Unfortunately, Cornelius and Johnson, both pioneers in the business of visual black entertainment, would never have much of a personal relationship. Their business models were so different that neither felt the need to cultivate the other. Plus both men had such healthy egos it’s hard to imagine either feeling vulnerable enough to open up to the other. But this doesn’t mean Soul Train and BET wouldn’t do any business together in the 1980s and 1990s. It just meant the founders of these two kindred black institutions didn’t necessarily see the value of a close business relationship, and they acted accordingly.
Meanwhile, in the wider world of American media there was much to be excited about vis-à-vis the black image. In September 1980, Eddie Murphy joined the cast of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, becoming an instant pop star with his chameleonlike impressions, pop-culture references, and youthful exuberance. He’d quickly make the transition to movies (48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop) and become Hollywood’s biggest black star since Sidney Poitier in the 1960s. Longtime sports announcer Bryant Gumbel debuted as coanchor of the Today show in 1982, putting an energetic black presence on the nation’s number one morning show. Oprah Winfrey began her incredible run of success when she was named cohost of AM Chicago in 1984, which would be the launching pad for an unprecedented media empire. Even before the premiere of The Cosby Show in September 1984, comedian Bill Cosby was already the leading commercial spokesperson in America, having successfully hawked everything from banks to Jell-O prior to his hit TV sitcom. He’d go on to rival President Ronald Reagan as 1980s America’s favorite surrogate father.
In music, black recording superstars would emerge of a magnitude unimaginable when Don Cornelius started broadcasting from a small Chicago studio in 1969. My first interview as Record World’s black music editor in January 1981 was with one of these future superstars—a young man known as Prince—prior to the release of his landmark third album, Dirty Mind, a record that was a harbinger of the future, full of tracks with new-wave rock flavor and sexually explicit lyrics (referencing orgies and incest) sung in a high-pitched voice in the R&B love-man tradition but with rock ’n’ roll abandon. Musically, it would be hugely influential because of its innovative use of keyboards, drum machines, and vocal arrangements; its lyrics expressed a sexual frankness that would embolden and anticipate a new direction in songwriting (which, during our interview, Prince called his “real reality”) that would titillate his generation and alienate many old heads, including Cornelius.
Prince’s record pushed the boundaries of black music while maintaining connections to its traditions. It was a balancing act he would maintain throughout his brilliant career. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city with a small black population, Prince was always very conscious of leaping over the barriers that constrained most artists of color. The buzzword for Prince, as well as for Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, Tina Turner, and many others was crossover, a strategy for growing your music-buying audience from a black audience to a larger white one. It was the obsession of the major record labels, since their goal was not just to go platinum (one million or so records, most likely at first to black audiences) but multiplatinum, which usually meant reaching regular white record buyers and, eventually, casual fans who only purchased recordings by big, mainstream pop stars.
Which is probably why Prince would never perform on Soul Train during his commercial peak in the eighties. It wasn’t until the 1993–94 season, after he was fading as a record seller and his Artist Formerly Known as Prince phase, that he appeared on the broadcast. Soul Train did run a video by Prince on episode #416 in the 1982–83 season, and acts he produced, such as the Time (episode #375, 1981–82) and Vanity 6 (episode #410, 1982–83), graced Don’s stage. But one of the premier blacks stars of the eighties never was on the show, something unthinkable a decade earlier.
It’s worth noting that Lionel Richie, who’d appeared on Soul Train regularly as a member of the Commodores, never performed on the show during his long run of solo hits, and Whitney Houston, the dominant female vocalist of the era, appeared only once (episode #476, in the 1984–85 season) to promote her record-setting debut album. Once the diva broke pop, Houston never came back. No one was more aware of these omissions and what they meant, both for his show and for the black music business in general, than Don.
In 1982, I moved from Record World magazine to the industry’s number one trade publication, Billboard, where I would cover black music through 1989. On April 6, 1985, I wrote a column that addressed the vexing question of crossover that featured comments from Soul Train’s founder. The column was titled “Don Cornelius Speaks Out on the Crossover Issue” and was sparked by Los Angeles R&B radio station KACE’s boycott of all records released by Warner Bros. artists after the label failed to put as many promotional dollars into black radio as it had pop radio to support a Prince show at the Forum. KAC
E’s management cited this as an example of how crossover by a black star could have a negative economic effect on black businesses.
In response to this, Cornelius sent an open letter to eleven major black radio program directors. He had no problem with any individual act or label, but wrote “to express my concern over the ever developing ‘he’s (she’s) not black’ syndrome in referring to black crossover artists . . . For record companies, this unfortunate approach is a rather insidious form of pragmatism in that it is widely used to deter lesser known black artists and managers from requesting the services being provided to crossover artists. In being denied the full services they see preferred artists receive, the artist and his representative are simply told, ‘But he’s not black.’ Not what you’d call the fairest way to compare one artist to another.
“In my view, the most damaging effect by far is seen in the attitudes of the artists who are being told they are ‘not black.’ Their response, almost without exception, has been a de-emphasis of the importance of black radio, black attendance at concerts, and embarrassingly I admit, Soul Train appearances.”
Later in the letter Don wrote, “The original intent of the ‘he’s (she’s) not black’ syndrome may very well have been the removal of distinctions by color which I believe everyone, including myself, would welcome. If indeed this is our goal, I say our goal has been perverted somewhere along the line, for that clearly is what is taking place. Those of us who labor in this industry are all naturally very proud whenever an artist crosses over, since we were usually there in the beginning. The problem we’re facing now is something akin to amnesia. It is my hope that eventually black crossover artists come to understand that as important as pop exposure may be, it is not necessary to avoid communication or contact with the black audience or media to hold on to it.”
While Don’s words were strong, reflecting the concerns of so many involved with black music at the time, some in the business felt that Don was being a bit hypocritical, since Soul Train itself had employed its own “crossover” strategy from 1983 to 1985. These years were probably the most polarizing in Soul Train’s history as Don and the show’s production team struggled to adapt (and attempted to co-opt) the music-video-driven energy generated by MTV. Music videos were made part of the programming mix and white artists, most not soulful or connected to black traditions, found their way onto the Soul Train stage.
Some longtime fans of the show speculate that during his recovery from brain surgery, Don decided to revamp the show. Whether the changes occurred as fallout from his surgery or not, Don clearly rethought Soul Train’s mission during the 1983–85 period. The MTV-ization of Soul Train went so far that at some point he even stopped the “love, peace, and soul” sign-off. For hard-core soul music fans, with the introduction of videos and so many white fans, the new show was difficult to take. Meanwhile, younger white pop viewers, many of whose localities were not yet wired for cable, were now attracted to the show. It was a calculated trade-off that started with episode #438 in the middle of the 1983–84 season and ran to episode #506 near the end of 1985–86. Twenty-one white performers appeared on the show either in cameos, videos, or studio performances during that stretch. That’s the highest number for any period in Soul Train history. Some of these bookings made perfect sense: Teena Marie, Culture Club, Hall & Oates, the Tom Tom Club, and Sheena Easton either made overtly R&B music or compatible dance music. All of them also had a strong cultural identification with black culture, either because they’d been played regularly on black radio, had expressed their admiration for it in song or interviews, or had been “sponsored” by a black star (for instance, Easton had been produced by Prince).
Ex-Eagle (and county-rock icon) Don Henley, soap opera heartthrob Jack Wagner, and Weird Al (represented by his “Eat It” video) were curious enough bookings, but someone on the programming team had a real weakness for new-wave bands. The Romantics, Spandau Ballet, Howard Jones, Berlin, A-ha, the Thompson Twins, Animotion: even if you decide to give Soul Train’s bookers the benefit of the doubt with the Pet Shop Boys, that’s still a lineup more appropriate for a show hosted by Downtown Julie Brown than Don Cornelius.
While Duran Duran would appear on episode #531 in the 1986–87 season and ABC on episode #553 in 1987–88, Soul Train’s new-wave fetish ended as quickly as it appeared. While a lot of viewers had problems with these bookings, some considering it a betrayal of Soul Train’s commitment to black culture, the Roots’ Amir Thompson argues that it opened up black viewers to a universe of music they’d have otherwise ignored.
Thompson: You know, I know there was a lot of controversy over the sort of pop period of Soul Train. But I didn’t know who the Police were. I saw them on Soul Train. That was one of the most controversial things. It was, like, on the Teena Marie episode of 1984. “And now for a video—here’s the Police and ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger.’ ” Everyone in the house is like, What the hell? The Police on Soul Train. Great. That was my first introduction to a lot of things I didn’t get to see. Without that, I don’t think I would be as obsessed with music as I am, or as immersed in music as I am.
DANCER PROFILE: Louie “Ski” Carr
Louie “Ski” Carr had the slang, the style, and the steps to make him a significant fixture on the show in the 1980s. Like earlier Soul Train dancer stars, being on the show led him to a long career as a choreographer and style muse. Raised in Inglewood, California, not far from the Great Western Forum, home of the Los Angeles Lakers, Carr was a six-foot-five-inch Blaxican, or black Mexican, teen who spent a lot of his time on the local basketball courts at Rogers Park. Ballin’ one afternoon in the 1980s, Carr ran into a group of young men who called themselves Cuttys. Since this was LA in the 1980s, you’d expect the Cuttys to be gang, but unlike the Bloods or Crips, they were a social group, not a criminal enterprise. “Cuttys,” Carr said, “means like brothers that stick together. They made me a Cutty, and I took that and just made it a whole Cutty vibe experience.”
For Carr, this identification with the Cutty mack ethos defined his life. “Everything is Cutty mack,” he said. “If you see one of your other Cuttys over there, and it’s crowded, and he can’t hear you, you just throw the Cutty finger, and he knows you’re there. All our dances had names. There was the go dida. You had the Cutty finger. You had the ski slide. Everything was named. Everything had a movement.”
Cuttys were flamboyant dressers, and Carr was well-known for his hats, glasses (actual glass optional), and a variety of flashy, flowing suits. The dancers Carr admired had a strong fashion sense: Elvis Presley, James Brown, and Michael Jackson. Some of Jackson’s signature moves, such as pointing at his socks, were incorporated into Carr’s dancing.
Carr was a Soul Train fan and, using the access of his friend George Chambers’s girlfriend, a dancer on the show, Carr schemed to gain entry. “I used to say, ‘Hey, George, you got to get your girl on there. I got to get on the Train. I’ll do anything, you know, to get on that show.’ So she took me on. I had to make a first impression, so I went and bought a black tux.” Sadly, that tux was no magic ticket. Carr was turned down the first and second times he tried to get into a Saturday taping. “I’m saying to myself, I’m dressed, I got a tux on, you know, what’s wrong?” On his third attempt, Carr was finally granted entry. “As soon as I went in, I went straight to the stage because there’s like a riser that the good dancers get to dance on, and I figured I’m six five, I’m gonna dance right there and make it seem like I’m onstage with them.”
Carr: So I’m doing all that, my crazy antics—sticking my finger up like I’m on top of the stage, et cetera. I see Don talking to the same guy that let me in, whispering something, and [he] pointed over there to me. I think, “Oh, I’m in trouble now. I’m about to be kicked out or something.” Boom. After the song he comes to me says, “Don wants you to dance on top of the riser like the other dancers.” So for me that was a start, and now I’m up there with the girl with the long hair. I’m up there doing my
thing. They position you up there with a partner. The partner kind of got mad because I never stayed. I always had to keep moving and doing my Elvis moves, James Brown moves, and my whole style.
Carr’s stature and style made him an immediate viewer favorite. “I have this, you know, certain Cutty mack style,” said Carr, “which is just doing whatever you can to the music, however it moves you. If it’s whispering in the girl’s ear—I’m really whispering. When the camera comes by, tell me so I could be ready with the move. Here comes the camera: boom, I’m pointing and nobody’s even over there. I was, like, never formally trained in dance, but I think just that style.”
New Edition, a quintet of vocalists from Boston, brought a hip-hop energy to the traditional black vocal group, mixing street dance moves with old-fashioned vocal choreography. For folks being raised on hip-hop’s emerging aesthetics in the early 1980s, Bobby Brown, Michael Bivins, Ricky DeVoe, Ralph Tresvant, and Ronnie Bell were the new Temptations. But to the quintet’s members, Carr was the real star. When the group made their first Soul Train appearance (episode #451, at the start of the 1983–84 season), they were the ones looking for an introduction.
Carr: This girl says these young cats, New Edition from Boston, want to meet you. I was like, Cool. I’m sitting with my Cutty macks. They roll with me. New Edition are all sitting in their chairs looking at me . . . They was like, “Man, we like your style. How you do all your things and, like, you jumping from one stage to the next like you was, like, skiing? So, you know, we want you to be onstage with us. We’re going to sing this song, ‘Candy Girl.’ Please just come on do your thing, point to your socks, do it with the finger and the shouting and the kicks.” I was like, “Okay, look, don’t tell Don, because Don will not give it a go. Let’s just do it. I got you. Don’t worry about it.”
The Hippest Trip in America Page 13