There's the issue of musical memetics (that is, the cultural genetics of music, herein seen meme as a form of musical genealogy), which is an interesting subject in and of itself, but takes on a new dimension when we look at it's impact on MTV's refusal to play black music.
To dig into this, lets consider the memetic genealogy of a given song, with black influences in bold.
Another One Bites The Dust
- Queen's biggest inspirations in general are The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.
- John Deacon, Queen's bassist and writer of this song, however, was inspired heavily by disco band Chic, whose song "Goodtimes" would have it's riff adapted into Queen's Another One Bites The Dust as well as into Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight later on.
- Chic also inspired Duran Duran's song Rio. Themselves, they were inspired by Ben E King, Arethra Franklin, and Parliament Funkadelic.
- Those three artists track back to Otis Redding, and Chuck Berry.
- The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are born of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, respectively.
The point being that most music that MTV was perfectly fine with playing and representing is, in a memetic-genealogical sense, far more black than white. Yet MTV didn't want to represent black music on their network? It seems as if the real issue that MTV had was in representing black artists as equal to white artists. When they did support a black artist in Micheal Jackson, it was after he left his Motown roots behind to create pop music with Quincy Jones. The threat of Jackson's blackness was subdued by a music with mass market appeal. Jackson's physical features were softer, less tough than Rick James. He was, in essence, white washed. Which begs the question of whether the industry desire to make him seem less black is culpable for his plastic surgery later in life.
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