NOT QUITE JACKIE ROBINSON, BUT CLOSER THAN YOU MIGHT THINK

There was a point when "Billie Jean" was #1 on the charts for week after week -- and yet MTV didn't want anything to do with it. It was immensely popular but it was, y'know, black. No, sorry -- it was "black music." It wasn't in a racial category, it was in a market segment. And that, MTV insisted, was the point. Cable TV was part of the brave-new-world "new media" of the early 1980s (especially this channel that played strange things called music videos), and cable was all about market segmentation. That was all there was to MTV's shunning of "Billie Jean." Really. The song just wasn't what its target demographic would want to hear.

It's hard to remember now, but this felt political at the time. Ronald Reagan seemed to be mythologizing an America full of sandy-haired Norman Rockwell families and greed-is-good zillionaires; MTV was giving us Duran Duran on a yacht. Melanin was missing from both of these pictures.

I don't want to lay MTV's original thinking entirely at the feet of the right. Even though MTV was mostly a pop-music channel, it was following the lead of those artifacts of the rock counterculture, album-rock radio and the punk/post-punk/New Wave movements, which thought of themselves as politically left-leaning but were virtually all-white clubs. White people -- white males in particular -- were assumed not to want to have anything to do with black music or music that was in any way danceable, especially after disco hit.

It was rumored that CBS Records threatened to pull all its videos from MTV if MTV refused to play Michael Jackson's next video. The next video was "Beat It." It had guitar solos played by a famous white guy. It got played. And now, if you didn't live through that, if you only remember what came after, you think that MTV was always the best friend ever to Michael Jackson -- and to the R&B and hip-hop artists it would go on to champion, the ones it had stupidly thought its audience wasn't interested in.

The floodgates were opening quickly, on MTV and elsewhere. Prince; Wynton Marsalis; The Cosby Show; Eddie Murphy's movie career; the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson; rap; and on and on. A lot of these people were reaching out to us whites -- Jesse Jackson taking his campaign to white farmers and union workers, Run-D.M.C. recording with the guys from Aerosmith (from the beginning, hip-hop DJs had always sampled a fair number of white artists). Blacks knew we were in their world; it took a while for us to stop ignoring them. But the change did happen, and Michael Jackson was a big part of it. And he's gone now.

*****

UPDATE: Phil Nugent has a very different take on the politics of Michael Jackson, and it popurs a bit of cold water on what I just wrote:

...the scale of his success made people want to see him as more than a mere entertainer, as being symbolic of something. For a lot of people, including liberal rock critics looking for a sign of hope in the Reagan era, that something was the news that a black man was the most popular star in the world. But others--including the Reagans themselves, who welcomed him to the White House--must have taken stock of his old-school show business chops and all-embracing niceness and found him very reassuring.

Jackson was never under any obligation to make political statements or pick sides, but at some point, his stardom became so much a reflection of what was ugliest about the '80s that it was sort of distasteful. He was the greatest of all time and the biggest star in the world because he moved the most units. At the same time, he was, like Reagan, celebrated because of the supposedly magical quality of his seeming...not quite there.

True. Phil has a lot more to say, about Jackson's talent and the possible reasons for his decline, and about the celebration and rejection of Jackson's "Boo Radleyisms." His post is well worth a read.