A Tale of Two Videos
Prior to “Billy Jean” a major concern for the network was quality control, according to Jeff Ayeroff, former creative director of Warner Bros. Records, “Part of the problem was the quality of videos. If you look at the Michael Jackson videos before ‘Billie Jean,’ even those were just him backlit by lasers” (Tannenbaum and Marks 139). But, in the case of Michael Jackson’s promotional clips for Off the Wall amongst others, these videos were in existence when MTV first went on the air, a time everyone from the network uniformly remembers as being devoid of content. Bob Pittman recalls, “I think there were 250 videos in existence”, while Gale Sparrow, former director of talent and artist relations at MTV, claims, “To be honest, we’d play pretty much anyone with a video” (Tannenbaum and Marks 44). Apparently anyone except a black person. Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman estimate
As Starr and Waterman note, Michael Jackson and Rick James had both gone platinum by 1982 and both had high quality music videos attached to a big single, Jackson’s “Billie Jean”and James’s “Super Freak”. Both videos were submitted to MTV and both were rejected, though “Billie Jean” eventually got through. In order to understand how Rick James became MTV’s biggest critic instead of its first major black artist we need to take a look at MTV’s development of a star system within the music industry as well as each performer’s particular image.Out of more than 750 videos shown on MTV during the channel’s first eighteen months, only about twenty featured black musicians (a figure that includes racially mixed bands). At a time when black artists such as Michael Jackson and Rick James were making multiplatinum LPs, they could not break into MTV, which put Phil Collins’s cover version of the Supremes’ ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ into heavy rotation but played no videos by Motown artists themselves. (452)
