We continue our discussion of MTV and it's rise by taking a look at what the initial audience was for MTV. MTV determined that their audience was going to be mostly Middle class, Midwestern white kids. it's because this is where they knew they had cable access, where they had, they were like any kind of radio station, they kind of understood the opportunities of the demographic that was available to them. And that's the demographic early on that was available to them. So if you think, for example, of the movie Wayne's World. And, and what that whole sort of cultural set of values in music and all of that. You get a pretty good idea of what the early cable. TV audience was, so you got lots of mainstream rock, with emphasis on the kind of aggressive, guitar-based kinds of groups, almost no black music of any kind. And not too much music that was that was sort of highly fashionable, or challenged sort of, you know male you know, traditional heterosexual male values very much. I mean it was, pretty much, a traditional mainstream white rock environment where a group like Foreigner or The Cars or Boston would be very comfortable. So, what starts to happen with MTV is that Michael Jackson makes a video for Billie Jean. Now, we'll come to a talk about Michael Jackson a little bit later but, for now the importance is this video of Billie Jean. The video for Billie Jean, MTV did not want to play this video. MTV would argue that they knew their demographic and they knew that most of their demographic or they thought they knew that most of their demographic would not be interested in music by Michael Jackson and in most black artists. And to a certain extent, there's a basis in fact because we talked about it in the previous lectures last week and before. This, the division in the 70s, between black rock, black pop and white rock through the decade. So, they were really going, basing it on, on market trends and the way people were buying records and the way radio stations were formatted. But CBS Records and especially their, their, their CEO Walter Yetnikoff, really wanted the Michael Jackson video on MTV. Because who would be better to take advantage of the video possibilities of MTV than Michael Jackson? A fantastic and very engaging dancer. And so the story goes, and it's contested by others, that Walter Yetnikoff pounded the table and said, if you don't play this video by Michael Jackson, this Billy Jean video, I will pull every video by every one of my artists. And of course, CBS was, of course, a big label, this was a time when MTV was really hurting for good videos. And so, they relented and put the Michael Jackson video, Billy Jean, on the air. Now, again, this is a story that is contested so take that into account. A lot of people have got stories to tell. You'll find that all through the history of rock music when people are telling stories of themselves and the business. Never the less, there was a controversy there, artists have said. That they felt like MTV did not want to play black artists because there was a kind of racist, or certainly a racial motivation behind it all, and there were artists who have stories to tell about that. Nevertheless, Billie Jean was played. It was aired, first aired on March 10, 1983. And it became such a popular video, people felt like they had to see the Billie Jean video on MTV, that people went out and got cable, just so they could get MTV, so they could see the Michael Jackson Billie Jean video. In many ways, you could say that the popularity of Michael Jackson. And the videos he produced, and some of the artists, other artists that we'll talk about who were producing videos that you could see on MTV. that, the popularity of those artists actually pulled MTV up. Because of course, you could hear Billy Jean on the radio But to see the video. To see Michael Jackson doing everything that he did in, in terms of his dance and a, nobody had really ever seen anything quite like that before. And so in many ways, this Billie Jean video, even though MTV sort of went to viewing and it went into programming up, kicking and screaming ended up being what the best thing that ever happened to MTV. Lets talk a little bit now as we talk about the growth of MTV over the course of the, a decade, we'll come back to this at the end of this series of lectures talk a little bit about the pros and cons associated with the rise of MTV. Because there has been a lot of debate and a lot of, certainly a lot of controversy during the day, with musicians and critics about MTV as it, as it started to gain dominance, as it started to really challenge radio as a venue for being able to support, to support, the continuing career of established artists and break new artists as this, they started to get that power, people started arguing, or at least debating the value of MTV. On the plus side, a lot of people would say that MTV opened up new approaches to music and video, at least eventually. after they got past the just sort of playing the record. And just sort of flopping and dancing around with no particular reason to it. People starting thinking, well if we could do something with a video part of it that would make it interesting. That would tell a story on it's own. Some of the first stories had nothing to do with the stories the lyrics were telling, that was a little bit disconcerting. But others really started to grab this idea of making the video and the music a kind of integrated thing that became a, sort of, video experience that was better in many ways. some people would say, than just hearing the music by itself. and so, music becomes a kind of multimedia experience and it isn't totally it is in some ways keeping with the history of rock music. After all, images on album covers had always played a role in understanding the music. We talked about that when we talked about music of the 70s going all the way back to Sgt Pepper's and that album cover and before. For and the idea of using images on stage shows. I mean, think about Pink Floyd, you know, and the flying pigs, and the crashing airplanes, and the various kinds of images and things that had been used and live shows. Alice Cooper, Kiss, all of those kind of things, to put, to make part of the music visual, so that you had to see something in order to see something in order to understand it. It's not new with MTV, it's just new that these videos are available on a cable TV and you can see them 24/7. the knock against MTV is that having the videos available in that way makes your interpretation and your understanding of the music too literal. One of the great things these people would say, about music, is that without, without everything being stated so literally, in this case they would be thinking visually, without it being stated so literally it leaves the listener's imagination open to create a meaning in the music that's all their own, that's individual. And when you have that laid out for you, literally in front of you in a video, it sort of shuts that down. They're sort of giving you a visualization of the music itself, and that's the one that is seen as authoritative, and whatever one you may develop in your head Is somehow secondary or just your own personal thing. And so the idea is that MTV sort of, shuts down that imagining. The other, would be, that because these videos are visual, they tend to prefer people who are. Photogenic, good looking, look, you know, look, look good to the camera right? And so, what that means is that to a certain extent success could be dependent, on, how good somebody looks as opposed to. How good they sound, and the, the criticism that MTV videos were too dependent on looks and image and not dependent on enough on the music, that you know, this, this was the kind of music that if you listened to the music by itself, it seemed very boring but if you know, attractive people were on the video, all of a sudden it was much more interesting. the question would be is that true? And secondly if it's true, what's wrong with that? What's the problem? Anyway, that's, that would be the criticisms that were leveled at it. So, let's now talk about what the spread of MTV how it became clear that MTV could challenge radio in breaking new artists and promoting established ones. What we want to do is we want to look at the artists that not only rose to fame, With, with the help of MTV and with, with it, with the coverage that it eventually was able to provide. But also how MTV helped support the careers of established artists and even mainstream artists who might otherwise have, have, have, have, have not particularly needed extra bolstering had there not been an MTV. So, let's turn to the next video. to the music of Michael Jackson and Madonna, two stars that really helped define the early years of MTV.
