by Greg Prato
Black Artists and MTV
CHUCK D: They tried to run away from black music as fast as possible. The only thing black on MTV at that time was JJ Jackson, who was a VJ. They even said no to Michael Jackson.
BOB GIRALDI: I don't know if I'd say there weren't that many [black artists played on MTV]. There weren't any. No matter what you're being told by anybody, it was a racist station. A different point of view, they had a different philosophy, it was being played and marketed to white teenagers in the suburbs, and there was no place in their mind for what was pop-soul music. And Michael [Jackson], as always, bridged the gap. Made the change. Led the way.
STEVE BARRON: There was a weird moment where MTV saw the video ["Billie Jean"], and they said, "It's not really our demographic." And the head of CBS, Walter Yetnikoff, just went nuts. He said, "You're kidding me? This is a fantastic pop song and a really striking video, and you're MTV." They felt their audience was very "Midwest" — from what I remember — and that this would be not their demographic. And there was a couple of weeks where they weren't going to play it. Of course, the irony that turned that all around is Michael Jackson became the driving force behind MTV for many years. But there was a moment where there was a clash of demographics.
ALAN HUNTER: I remember hearing the news that Michael Jackson had this video, "Billie Jean," that was just blowing everybody away. We got the tape of it down at the studio. I think Mark and I were watching it as soon as it came to MTV. There was some debate early on I remember. The debate was still raging whether or not we were going to show it. But it didn't last long. There was not a whole long hand-wringing over that one. It was, "You know what? We've got to show this. It's too extraordinary." The video was unbelievably great. It was Michael Jackson, it's a great song, [and] it just made sense. So it wasn't a painful decision on anybody's part. I remember being very excited. Mark and I were talking about how cool this was, how much it was going to change things and open up the doors. Everybody had that feeling. It was the first big premiere of its kind. That was another first for MTV, to premiere a video like that. The kind of promotion we put behind it weeks in advance. We'd get memos. "You've got to say this; you've got to do every break." After, we thought the doors were wide open.
BOB GIRALDI: I met with Bob [Pittman], and we had plenty of arguments. I think that history shows that they made a choice, and they were pressured to change the choice. And that was the right thing to do. Nobody bought as many records as they did Thriller. You can talk all you want about white bands, but it was the black artists that were selling most at that time. History was changed, and history was made. There's nobody to point fingers at. It's just the way it happened. And it was the right thing. It wasn't like it was a mistake, and history went with it. It was the right thing. Lionel came out with Can't Slow Down, Stevie Wonder had his, Ray Charles had his, Diana Ross had hers. Everybody had their moment. It was the time in history when the music business was the most glorious.
BOB PITTMAN: It started with Rick James. We had a review committee, and he didn't pass it for "Super Freak," which, by the way, today would be extraordinarily tame. So it didn't pass, and we wouldn't play it. He got in the press and said, "They're not playing any black artists." Which, of course, wasn't true. We were playing black artists. But just like white artists, there were a whole lot of black artists that didn't have videos, and there were a whole lot of white artists that didn't have videos. But the charge stuck. At first, our reaction was, "Of course, everybody will look at the channel and know that's not true." But they didn't look at the channel. They just wrote it. And this thing built up some momentum.
LES GARLAND: I took it quite personally — specifically, Mr. Rick James. He was the guy that I had the biggest problem with. He flat-out used my name one day. The guy had never even met me and accused me of being a racist. I lost my mind. And for people who knew me, knew that was absolutely not true. And then, finally, the confrontation with him came. It was a bit of a face-off, and I said, "Look, you don't even know me. You need to make some calls before you go around making statements about people." I was pissed. About a week later, he called and asked if he could come down and see me. He did and said, "Garland, I owe you an apology." I accepted it, we hugged, and became friends. I knew him — not a dear buddy, not a guy I hung out with — but we made our way through that. That guy made a mistake making statements like that, and he stood up like a man and admitted it. It got personal. The Michael Jackson story that flies around — that never happened. There were people of color on MTV. There just wasn't much selection of music videos coming from the music companies.
BOB PITTMAN: It's probably the reason Michael Jackson got so much attention. We started going out to black artists and saying proactively, "You've got to produce a video." Tina Turner was really big for us and Michael Jackson. And, actually, Quincy Jones is my son's godfather, as a result of Quincy and I becoming great friends through that process, because I began spending a lot of time with Quincy, saying, "Look, we've got to get this done. We've got to get Michael on the air." And, of course, they had "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," which were great videos.
LES GARLAND: It's become a part of Internet folklore, I guess. By the way, one of the guys that fuels it is one of my dear friends, Mr. Walter Yetnikoff. Walter Yetnikoff was the head of CBS back in the day, the most powerful music company in the world. And they had Michael Jackson. The story somehow got told that we said no to Michael Jackson. That MTV said, "No, we were not going to play the Michael Jackson video." Which couldn't have been further from the truth. I was the first person at MTV to see it, and I'll never forget putting it in my 3/4-inch machine, hitting the start button, hearing the bass beat to "Billie Jean" start up, and going, "Holy shit...are you kidding me?!" I called everybody in and said, "You've got to see this. This is the best video of its time!" Pittman was on the west coast. I phoned him and said, "Bob, wait until you see 'Billie Jean.' It's going to blow your mind." We put it on mid-week. It wasn't even a Tuesday add. But, somehow, this whole story erupted that we denied it, we weren't going to play it, and there were threats made by CBS that, if we didn't play it, they were going to pull all their music videos. This story just started gathering steam. Why? I don't know. Publicity? I don't know. I've got my theories. But it never happened, and I've dispelled this hundreds of times. It just never happened like that.
GERALD CASALE: It was absolutely true. Those stories are true. When MTV tries to refute the way that went down...no, it's absolutely the way it went down. Walter Yetnikoff basically forced the situation, forced them to play Michael Jackson, by holding some other stuff over their heads, since they had such a huge label with other artists. MTV was never hip. They were always the last to the table on anything. But, of course, when you control that media like that, you rewrite history. You get credit where credit wasn't due.
VERDINE WHITE: It was true. I think with MTV at the time, because the program dynamically wanted to appeal to rock audiences, I don't think we really saw a lot of African American videos until BET did hip-hop and things like that. And I think Walter Yetnikoff at the time really put his foot down on MTV to even play Michael Jackson, because at first, I'm not sure if MTV was going to play him. Because the first ads on MTV was "I want my MTV!” and the ads were the Police and more the pop groups, not the African American groups.
DAVE MARSH: They didn't play black artists until they were coerced into it by Walter Yetnikoff is exactly what happened. Pittman may deny it — he did at the time — but the fact is that Walter threatened to pull all the rest of the CBS videos if Michael's Thriller record didn't get played. That was it. Typically, there was resistance, and then when they finally broke the resistance — I can't tell you how much I love this — it became one of the biggest videos they ever would have, because it was the "Billie Jean" video. And to reject the "Billie Jean" video — which is what they were rejecting — they must have seen it. Because the performer was black, that isn't even a close call about whether it's Ku Klux Klan-le
vel racism. There was no other reason ever advanced why they didn't play that video, except the race of the artist. I mean, maybe they used some codified lip service about musical genre or something. And I don't think they even did that. I just think they said, "We don't play black records." And, of course, the same thing went down with hip-hop. That was the next thing that got banned. And when they finally broke their own ban on it, it became the driving force of a whole sub-generation...I don't know if it was a whole generation, but several years worth of MTV viewers were lured there more by hip-hop than anything else.
CHUCK D: They were being typically racist. And the white artists at that time that took all their riffs and covered a lot of black artists before that. So there was no reason for it to have apartheid in music, and they just felt that was the music they knew, and the companies that were actually experimenting with video were experimenting with all their "rock moneymakers." So I think the genre of rock music has really been structured and organized. But there had been black videos at that particular time. "Give It to Me Baby" was done by Rick James, and "Super Freak." You had black artists doing videos as early as '78/'79. White programmers were afraid that if they played black music, that white people would not subscribe to cable or look at that program. So it was just paranoia.
DAVE WAKELING: They didn't play any black artists early on, did they? I remember them making a huge fuss about when they were going to put our "I Confess" video on. It was like, "Oh, look, there are loads of black people. Loads of you." The way they made such a fuss about it kind of made you know that it hadn't of been accidental, but then you can't really blame them, because it had already been determined that radio had been segregated. And so pop music fans in America had sadly already been trained to expect segregated entertainment. So I wasn't surprised, although I suppose it looks more obvious when you can see there are no black people. I remember it being a big fuss, and we were told that we were going to be one of the beneficiaries of it, "I Confess." They were going to play it all the more. In fact, I even said, "I could get more black people in the next one if it would help." Anything to help, that's me! [Laughs] So we dressed one as the Pope. Our security man, John, was dressed as the Pope. Just wandered around, blessing everybody, for no reason at all. We just had him walking across the scenes arbitrarily. And every time he did it, we were like, "Oh...there you go again, another black person on MTV, courtesy of the English Beat."