MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  JOHN OATES: I think the parallel was it was very similar to radio. It was segregated the way radio programming was segregated. You had FM-kind of rock stations playing basically white rock music. And then you had top 40 stations, and then you had R&B stations and urban stations. They weren't called "urban" in those days; they were called "R&B" or "soul." And you had stations that only played disco. You remember "disco wars" and all that crap that was going on? I think that MTV followed that pattern. They viewed themselves as a niche for rock and pop music. Whether they were racially biased or not, I kind of doubt. I think they just saw it as that was the most viable way of getting on TV and having the major labels jump on board.

  DARYL HALL: This all came out of the radio format, and I think MTV thought of themselves at that time as a visual arm of radio — pop radio, rock radio, whatever you want to call it. Which was to some degree still...I won't say completely segregated, but it was. It's hard to remember what it was like and how "weird" we were in those days, because we had hits on black radio and white radio. There weren't that many people like that. So I think they tended to format themselves in that direction, the way radio was formatting themselves in those days. It was wrong, but it's what it was. I remember championing people. I remember bringing August Darnell of Kid Creole and the Coconuts on the show to be a guest VJ with me, because I knew he was a great musician, and I wanted to introduce him to the MTV audience. I did my little part to try and desegregate MTV in the very early days. And, eventually, they saw the light, of course.

  GEORGE THOROGOOD: They played the black artists that were available. Mostly, of older black artists, artists that were already established. Smokey Robinson. That's all there was. And the movement of the era of Michael Jackson had yet to come. The era of Prince had yet to come. I think those two artists, more than anything, were foremost in breaking contemporary black music at that time. If you look at MTV, it's been around since 1981, so if Michael Jackson or Prince got in there in '85, that's relatively new. It wasn't like they were passed over. It's just that they weren't emerging yet. But once they did, they were on there. You saw them.

  LES GARLAND: The racism bullshit — I'm so over talking about it. We've talked about it until we're blue, y'know? It didn't exist. It was nonexistent. It was trumped up in the press. It was trumped up by other people making statements. It starts with who's making the music videos, and I remind everybody, the number of videos being submitted to us by the music company side by artists of color were very, very minimal. As much as we encouraged making music videos for all their artists. We had visions of launching other channels one day. Maybe it would be urban-based. Maybe it would be country. We were smart enough to know that we had to land our audience first, and either grow that audience or launch other channels and acquire new audiences. We weren't stupid people. We were award-winning radio programmers, who were artists with a bit of a scientific mind. Because I understood the science of ratings and television and appealing to people. Because I had gone through all that, and I had learned all that in my radio years. It's science meets art, but let's let art outweigh the science just enough. And you've got that "artistic/creative edge," if you will. MTV was that. It never had anything to do with the color of people's skin. To think that people said these things about us was a very painful time.

  ALAN HUNTER: JJ Jackson — the one black guy in the troupe here — was a great defender, although in an interview, Mark Goodman was interviewing David Bowie one time, and David leveled Mark and said, "Why don't you play any black artists?" And JJ, I remember him saying [he] wished that he could have had a conversation with David to set him straight somewhat. We were playing black artists. There was Garland Jeffreys, Gary U.S. Bonds, Joan Armatrading, but they played more mainstream rock n' roll. Michael Jackson represented the "pop world," and that just wasn't in the parameters. There was certainly no overt racism about the thing. It was just what their idea of the music that we were going to play was. But Michael was definitely a turning point. Did that mean that we were going to be playing R&B? Were we going to be playing Lionel Richie? It opened up everything at that point, which, of course, was great. That was what MTV was all about, this total mishmash of heavy metal up against Howard Jones up against the Commodores up against Sting. It was all over the place, and that's what people liked about it.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: Bottom line — if you go back and you listen to rock radio at that exact period of time, you are not going to hear a lot of black artists. And initially, MTV started — as hard as it is to believe now — its initial intention was as an AOR music channel. More rock n' roll. So it was not a case of the color of your skin or racism. It was the genre of music. If there was some behind-the-scenes racism going on, I was not aware of that, because we did have Garland Jeffreys, Phil Lynott, Joan Armatrading, Jon Butcher Axis. I used to feel that I don't need to sit here naming the black artists that we play, because I never felt it was a racist thing at all. I mean, we had JJ for crying out loud. Come on! And then, when the whole Michael Jackson thing...again, I was not in on the acquisition meetings. I have read several books that are supposedly in-depth about what was going on behind-the-scenes, and it was "Billie Jean" that they didn't want to play. I don't know if that was racist motivation behind that, but that was just plain stupid, because the song was great. For whatever reason they were reluctant to play that was just plain dumb, because the song itself was a genre that crossed over pop and rock. It was so tremendous a piece of music that it could be played on any channel. I mean, I'm sure if Jimi Hendrix had a video in 1981, we would have been playing it.

  ORAN "JUICE" JONES: Looking at it from both sides, it's like, yes, they didn't play a lot of black artists...it wasn't really a movement like that. I think it was incumbent upon artists to step their game up. To have a record and the music — the audio part — that's one thing. You can get away with that. You can look any kind of way. You can act any kind of way, when you put the music out. But when it comes to the visual aspect of it, you've got to step your game up. I think for MTV from their perspective, they were just waiting for artists — particularly black artists — to just step their game up and create a visual that was worthy of showing the world. I would prefer to think of that than, "We just don't want to let you in."

  BOOTSY COLLINS: Just look at what they played. I am not mad about that, but they were going for a certain market, which I think in the end, was a perfect set up for rap music and rap's independence, because white people began to rise up and got tired of the "Brady Bunch punch."

  JELLO BIAFRA: That helped harden my attitude toward MTV in a very big way. I read an article — I think it was actually in the Sunday entertainment section of the San Francisco Chronicle — where an MTV executive named Bob Pittman came right out and said the reason they didn't play black artists, country artists, or even women at the time, was quote, "We don't want to cater to fringe groups." As if your skin color suddenly made you a member of a certain fringe group. And I was outraged by that, and so were a lot of other people. I'm not your best evidence on that either. I don't know if you've spoke to Dave Marsh yet or not. I highly recommend that, because he's tracked Pittman over the years. because that's not the only thing like that that Pittman has done. It's almost like having to track people who fail upwards, like Lawrence Summers, when he was cleared back at the World Bank, and the IMF said that, "Africa is vastly under-polluted and that we need to measure where to put toxic waste by the value of the local future earning stream." And that, "The toxic waste dumps in Africa is impeccable." And then Bill Clinton made him Treasury Secretary and Obama even made him his economic guru...and now look what's happened! People like that need to be hammered with the horrible things they did in the past, before they knew enough not to say that when a microphone was on. If I recall, Pittman cited Olivia Newton-John as an example of why women shouldn't be on MTV, because that was a previous generation's music, and he was trying to get the next generation of consumer, who theoretically would be embodied by something like
Journey instead at the time.

  DAVE MARSH: I did an article for The Record. Pretty much what I said in that article is what I said to you. I talked about the falsification of history, because to create an all-white past for the music was disastrously dishonest, as far as I was concerned. And I talked about the ban on black performers.

  BOB GIRALDI: They should be on the air, black artists. The quality of Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles should be on the air. That this new thing is showing this new medium, this new phenomenon, this new art, then why wouldn't they be on the air? Because their music is just as good, or better. But it was always about, "Well, it's not the kind of music we're talking about." I used to think, "It's not the kind of music...it's the kind of audience you're talking about." It was really about the audience. Why don't you say it and admit it? You're talking to a white audience. "Oh no, we only play white bands." No, you're talking to white kids in the suburb. You know what? White kids in the suburb are going to like that music, anyway. And it was proven quickly, as soon as Thriller came out, and "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" simultaneously hit the airwaves and hit the video-waves, it just changed the phenomenon. And then all of a sudden, Pittman changed his mind. "Oh yeah, you're right."

  DAVE MARSH: I think it was slow [MTV playing other black artists after Michael Jackson's success]. There were kinds of black artists...you weren't going to see Teddy Pendergrass there or whoever the big ballad singers were. So it was still segregated, but it was less segregated. And that changed very slowly, and it's probably to this day. They're still more comfortable with Justin Timberlake than [who] Justin Timberlake is working with.

  JELLO BIAFRA: But who invented rock n' roll in the first place? It's still an outrageously racist statement. Does that mean that he would refuse to play Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, Sly and the Family Stone, or James Brown? Yeah, let's go back to that very side of the racially segregated, right wing, McCarthy-ite '50s culture that he was trying to bring back. Remember when they wouldn't play Little Richard or Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley or Fats Domino or even Nat King Cole on white radio stations, because it was some kind of "fringe group," and the term for their music at the time was "race music"? But then if Pat Boone sang some horribly sanitized version of "Tutti Frutti," that got on commercial radio instead. And that is the culture that Bob Pittman came from and major labels and MTV executives were trying to bring back. The tragedy of that was when the spirit of rock n' roll was brought back through punk. It was almost all white people. I mean, the Bad Brains or Pure Hell were African American, or the Zeros who were Chicanos and whatnot. That was a rare exception. And then by the time hardcore hit, it was even more segregated. So a Latino band like the Undertakers in L.A. was barely even on the radar screen. I never even got to see them. They never even put out a record. And that should never have happened, because look at the rich contribution of people like Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Question Mark and the Mysterians, or Santana for that matter. Is that somehow a fringe group that we shouldn't have to listen to?

  DAVE MARSH: MTV, almost all of its greatest successes in running music videos came from kinds of music it didn't want to play. That's actually one of the single most important aspects of it, in the early years.

  JOE ELLIOTT: Thank God Michael Jackson blew all that away. Had it not been for that, we had not got to see some really good rap stuff. Like all music forms, rap has got its bad stuff, just like rock has its bad rock bands. But we got the Run-DMC hybrid with Aerosmith. All these things were very important parts of music moving into a new era. I think urban music really got a great lift out of MTV finally dropping their almost racist policy.

  Michael Jackson

  ALAN HUNTER: "Beat It" came down the pike pretty quickly thereafter ["Billie Jean"], and then it almost became "The Michael Jackson Channel."

  "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: A lot of people credit MTV — and specifically, Michael Jackson's presence on MTV — for single-handedly resurrecting the entire industry.

  CHUCK D: [Michael's videos] were as good as the records. They took the records to a further place.

  BOOTSY COLLINS: Michael was our savior. When it came down to crossing over, you could not assemble any better talent than that. Thank God for Michael. Michael brought a new threshold for MTV to live up to. It's just like when they started to let blacks play in major league sports. When that happened, the game changed, and there was a different level of flair, style, and a new way the music is played and observed. Blacks have always been able to do a lot with a little, just because we grew up with very little and learned how to make more out of what we had. It's not magic; it's just fact.

  RICK SPRINGFIELD: He showed us what you should be doing with videos, basically. Before him, it was just a bunch of hair bands pouting, pulling faces, and trying to look hot. That's when I really disliked the whole "poser aspect" of it, which musicians don't need to be encouraged to do. They're automatically freakin' posers. So when Michael Jackson came along and suddenly turned MTV on its ear, everyone said, "Ohhh, that's what you're supposed to do with it."

  TODD RUNDGREN: "Billie Jean" set a new bar in terms of staging and choreography. It brought two things that soon came to characterize all of Michael Jackson's videos and then anyone who wanted to compete on the same level. First of all, you had to hire Paula Abdul or somebody like that to choreograph the video. Videos suddenly became all dancing, and also, very high production, a la Gene Kelly MGM dance routines. The production level as well. This had a great effect on anyone that was capable of dancing, suddenly. And some people probably weren't capable of dancing but had to do their best, because the kind of music that they were doing fell into the same category as Michael Jackson...I don't know what to call it, but I would call it a sort of "mocha-fied pop music." It's pop music made more funky and slightly more black, as opposed to black music being made more pop. And that became to characterize music, until Prince came out. Then it got more funky and black again.

  ANN WILSON: Well, obviously, Michael Jackson brought his dancing — his body, his movement. There was nobody that danced like him. And all of a sudden, it wasn't just a band in different sets lip-synching their song and looking a certain way, poised to look beautiful. It was somebody who was just all over the screen. It was a whole new, miraculous thing that had occurred in Michael Jackson. And, of course, he was influenced by the dancing in West Side Story, when he brought that influence to MTV, then ever-after, you saw dance videos influenced by West Side Story...influenced by Michael Jackson!

  TONI BASIL: He's one of the greatest street dancers ever. And certainly as a pop star, probably the greatest, in his youth. He did take his inspiration from...I mean, if you look at "Bad," that's taken straight out of West Side Story. If you interview any of those choreographers, you'll see that Michael looked at West Side Story over and over and over again. If you put the song "Cool" from West Side Story up against that, you'll see hunks taken. Not that it wasn't great, but just the only thing about Michael is he would never say where he was inspired from. He studied with a lot of different street dancers that would come in and coach him and work with him. And he never really gave them credit, which was unfortunate. Absolutely [in response to if Toni thinks Michael got "the moonwalk" from street dancers]. It is really called "the backslide" in the street dance community. The media decided to name it "the moonwalk," because the moonwalk is a different step, actually. The moonwalk...if you take the backslide and you did that type of almost skiing and skating effect, but you did it in a circle rather than straight back. Straight back, it's called the backslide. If you move in a circle, with that that similar kind of footwork, it's called the moonwalk.

  DARYL HALL: Of all of us, he was a dancer as much as a singer. And when you're dealing with a visual thing like a rock video, if you're an unbelievable dancer — a Fred Astaire-caliber dancer — then you're going to draw eyes to your movements, as well as your music. And I think he legitimately did that. And of all these people with these "overblown videos,
" his were sort of relevant and valid because of that. Nobody needs to see Pat Benatar flying around in a million-dollar airplane through the clouds or see John Oates swimming through the clouds. The music was important, but when you see Michael Jackson dancing, that was equally important.

  GEDDY LEE: He brought Broadway to the small screen. He melded and drew upon all those influences and all those people that he had access to, to create these hugely entertaining mini-musicals. And I think he was the first guy to successfully do that. Very few people have done it that successfully since, really. Maybe Eminem, in his own way.

  JOHN OATES: He embraced the medium. Living in L.A., he had the infrastructure to do whatever he wanted, and he had the budget to do whatever he wanted...and he did whatever he wanted. His videos set a certain benchmark. If you think about it, so many of the contemporary music performers, their live performances now are based on Michael Jackson's videos, if you really distill it to its essential elements. It's a singer, or a group of singers, with dancers and choreography. Michael Jackson basically invented that. Madonna and Michael Jackson invented that whole style of which, to this day, pretty much every contemporary pop act does in a certain way. Unless you're a rootsy sort of band. So really, I think they set the standard for that.