The first Black video on MTV
“There seem to be a lot of Black artists making very good music videos that I’m surprised aren’t on MTV,” said David Bowie in 1983. He was criticising MTV’s Mark Goodman directly to his face, asking for insight into the broadcaster’s choice to exclude Black faces from their scheduling. His response? MTV had a responsibility to showcase what the average American wanted. In other words, perpetuating systemic racism was important to MTV’s brand reputation.
Almost as soon as MTV launched in 1981, it faced criticisms about its lack of diversity. At the time, they had one Black person on their team of video jockeys, J.J. Jackson, who remained there for a number of years. Viewers quickly picked up on another thing, however: very few Black artists were ever featured on the music channel. According to MTV, this was a genre-specific choice, not racism.
“MTV was originally designed to be a rock music channel,” MTV’s former director of music programming, Buzz Brindle, said in 2006 to Jet magazine. “It was difficult for MTV to find African American artists whose music fit the channel’s format that leaned toward rock at the outset.”
It’s probably not difficult to believe that this is largely regarded as a complete fabrication, as indicated by Goodwin’s excuses during the conversation with Bowie, where he insisted: “We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate but also Poughkeepsie or Midwest.” Institutionalised racism in America was as prevalent as ever, as it is in many spaces of the entertainment industry now, but the simple fact was that MTV set out to celebrate whiteness only.
A turning point came in early 1983 when they started playing Musical Youth’s ‘Pass The Dutchie’ on heavy rotation, marking the first Black artist to feature on the broadcasting channel. Comprising five young boys of Jamaican descent, Musical Youth found an instant hit in ‘Pass The Dutchie’, especially in the UK, where it sold 100,000 copies on the first day it was released. Its inclusion in MTV’s broadcasting schedule superseded Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’ by a few weeks.
The reason why MTV deemed Musical Youth’s video “appropriate” enough for audiences remains a mystery. According to Don Letts, it all came down to perception. “I guess it was because it was a kids group, nobody was more than about four foot tall, and they spoke with Brummie accents,” he explained. “So, I guess from the American’s point of view, they were non-threatening. They were almost not Black. They were almost seen as cartoon-like figures.”
That said, it was no easy feat to convince MTV to air ‘Billie Jean’. The single eventually dominated the Billboard 100 chart for seven weeks. However, it’s said that Walter Yetnikoff, president of CBS Records Group, had to resort to threatening to pull all other CBS videos from MTV before the network finally caved and agreed to air the music video.
