David Bowie once challenged MTV over its refusal to play black music

MTV “I understand your point of view”, Bowie said at the end of the interview. “I’m just floored that by the fact that there’s so few black artists featured on it. Why is that?”

Mark Goodman:Yeah, but no less so here than in radio.

As their cringe-worthy exchange sputtered forward to discuss the channel’s business model and target audiences, the rock icon mused, “There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t used on MTV”. MTV even shared a video from 1983 that made itself look bad-but showed just how comfortable Bowie was speaking truth to power. “The only few black artists one does see are on at about 2:30 in the morning till about 6; very few are featured predominantly during the day…”, he casually asked MTV VJ Mark Goodman.

“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.’ Bowie pressed on.

“I had no say over what MTV played…” “Pick some town in the Midwest which would be scared to death by… a string of other black faces, or black music”.

“The exchange got hotter”.

“The British singer pounced on the reply: ‘Don’t say, “Well, it’s not me, it’s them”.

Michael Jackson’s name wasn’t brought up a single time in this interview, but this was the year he released videos for “Thriller” and “Billie Jean“. And their support is coming from some unlikely places – like the city officials in Austin, who are totally cool with a street sign that was altered to pay tribute to the late legend overnight.

Bowie told CBS’ 60 Minutes: “I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing”.

“So when Bowie started in with me, I tried to explain the rock format idea”.