MTV News
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4:40 · 5M views · Jan 11, 2016
A 1983 interview clip in which David Bowie questions MTV VJ Mark Goodman about why the channel played so few videos by black artists.
Cited as a famous, pointed example of Bowie challenging MTV's exclusion of black music, in threads on media gatekeeping.
4 comments from Hacker News
You wrote: <<<MTV hardly played black artists.>>> I saw this interview recently: <<<David Bowie Criticizes MTV for Not Playing Videos by Black Artists | MTV News>> this video It blew me away. He is so on point!
No black singers or bands you'll notice... Worth watching: "David Bowie Criticizes MTV for Not Playing Videos by Black Artists | MTV News" this video
You can see MTV’s “string of black faces” rationalizing in the Bowie interview: this video Wikipedia’s article whitewashes the actual history. We were watching MTV and smoking weed in those Reagan’s America days. — In fairness the US music industry had the race music chart which became the R&B chart to keep black musicians off the pop chart and Elvis’s controversy was singing black music…and consequently being played on white radio stations to white kids.
>Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia. Case in point: MTV of the 80s would play little to no black music. There's a famous 1983 interview bit of David Bowie where he asked the MTV VJ why they play no black music, and the VJ waffles a bit on the white suburban market. That does not sound very subversive to me. Here's the excerpt: this video