Among the tributes being shared online to David Bowie, many are praising the late glam rock singer for challenging MTV for refusing to play music by black people in 1982.
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David Bowie, 69, died on Sunday after an 18-month secret battle with cancer.
“We have to try and do what we think not only NY and Los Angles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or Midwest-pick some town in the Midwest-that would be scared to death by Prince, which we’re playing, or a string of other black faces and black music”, Goodman said. “It’s got a lot going for it. I’m just floored by the fact that there’s so few black artists featured on it. Why is that?” An unparalled polymath, Bowie will be remembered as many things: as a music and pop culture icon, as a man who was as fearlessly creative, and for those of us who were kids in the ’80s, as the bad guy from The Labyrinth.
“When I started watching the cable music channel, MTV, I found the racism extraordinarily blatant”, Bowie told Penthouse magazine in 1983, noting that his friend Nile Rodgers – who he’d just hired to produce and co-write his album, Let’s Dance – had first alerted him to the network’s policy on black artists.
Check out the full clip in the video player above.
So, who was the person or persons who made their way up the street light to install the David Bowie signage? “This confrontation with Mark Goodman isn’t an outlier in Bowie’s career”.
“We have to play the music that we think the entire country is going to like”, Goodman said. “The company is thinking in terms of narrowcasting”.
We all know David Bowie the legendary, boundary pushing artist.
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An unimpressed David Bowie pressed on. Bowie asked: ‘Don’t you think it’s a frightening predicament to be in?’ The intimidated veejay resorted to the radio analogy, ‘Yeah, but no less so here than in radio’. To which Goodman replied, “Yeah, but no less so here than in radio”. Now, if I were the interviewer, I would be…thrown off to say the least.
