That passionate verse about former You Got The Silver subject Christopher Cross comes from The Assassin, a character featured on FX’s series The Beauty, which aired earlier this year and is basically Ryan Murphy’s shitty television version of The Substance (with none of the brilliance that makes The Substance such an incredible film). The Assassin delivers that speech to Jeremy (a young man roped into the plot) after he shows no interest in joining a yacht rock sing-a-long. In about a minute and a half, The Assassin cites the thing everybody points to regarding Cross’ time in the spotlight coming to such a quick end: he had the music, but wasn’t attractive to look at. When people talk about the beginning of MTV, this is often the first thing that gets talked about.
When I covered Cross’ career after “Ride Like the Wind,” I left out discussion about MTV and how that affected his career, mostly because I knew MTV was going to get its own little post at some point during the early parts of this project. Cross is the person everyone tends to point to when talking about MTV negatively impacting careers. If not him, then it’s Billy Squier (for different reasons). Here’s my hot take with Christopher Cross in relation to MTV: Everyone focuses on Cross not being attractive enough for MTV so hard that they tend to disregard the other major reason his career fizzled out. The Assassin is the only person I’ve seen in recent times bring it up: “he got really popular really fast.”
Consider this: Cross’ debut album comes out at the very end of 1979 (December 27th) and for most of 1980, “Ride Like the Wind” and “Sailing” are songs that climb up to the top of the charts, meaning that if you are around during that time and listen to a Top 40 radio station, you most likely hear those songs a good amount. Also consider that the album is selling by the truckload, to the point where you eventually start hearing two other singles: “Never Be the Same” (peaked at #15) and “Say You’ll Be Mine” (peaked at #20). Then, less than a year after the album enjoys four hit singles, Cross is on a big soundtrack hit that becomes a number one (“Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” and you also have to probably hear that a bunch. Then, if that’s not enough, he wins big at the 1981 Grammys, winning Album of the Year, Record of the Year (“Sailing”), Song of the Year (“Sailing”), and Best New Artist, a historic feat that will not happen again until Billie Eilish comes along forty years later. What I’m saying is this: that’s a lot of Christopher Cross in a short amount of time and it was probably easy to get sick of him, especially if you already didn’t like the guy before getting a good look at him.
Also consider: Cross wasn’t alone. The whole yacht rock scene died out alongside him. Steely Dan broke up and disappeared for the entire eighties. Michael McDonald had some successes after the Doobies broke up in the early eighties by showing up on songs like Toto’s “I’ll Be Over You” and dueting with Patti LaBelle on “On My Own,” but he struggled for a good chunk of the decade. Kenny Loggins survived, but he had to become the flashy movie soundtrack king in order to do that. Every other yacht rocker either moved on to something else or faded away into memory. It was a moment. Something was always going to kill it.
One final thing regarding Cross that I’ve thought about is his resistance to change, another thing that nobody ever seems to want to bring up when talking about MTV and the new world it played a big role in ushering. We think image and music only started dancing with each other during the MTV generation, but conveniently forget that Elvis Presley wasn’t beloved for just the music, nor were the Beatles, who were known for several distinct looks across their entire career. Those guys had specific looks that attracted the eye beyond the music. The Rolling Stones had a look that was specifically engineered to be the opposite of the Beatles as a way to sell them. A Buddy Holly costume isn’t complete without the big glasses. You get the idea. Yes, Christopher Cross wasn’t the world’s most attractive guy, but neither was Phil Collins and that guy couldn’t have been a bigger deal in the eighties. Like Cross, Phil was balding (though rocking a sick mullet at one point) and Phil also had the issue of being a short king who looked like an oddball everyman, yet still managed to be a video star. Billy Joel was also a short and kinda weird looking guy who managed to make the medium of music video work for him rather than against him. The biggest difference is that Collins and Joel also kept evolving musically throughout the decade, while Cross did not. The Phil on Genesis’ Duke doesn’t sound like the Phil on …But Seriously and the Billy Joel that started the decade with Glass Houses was a completely different man than the one who made Storm Front. Meanwhile, Cross was stuck and out of step with the two markets–pop and adult contemporary–that made him a star. Even if MTV wasn’t the thing that changed the game, something would’ve come along and changed things. That’s the way it goes.
I’ve thought a lot about the beginning of MTV, both the good and the bad, as I’ve written about the sixteen artists that make up Part 1 of this project. For the first eleven entries, MTV wasn’t a thing yet, but music videos started accompanying songs as early as the entry on Leo Sayer’s “More Than I Can Say.” If you want to include television performance clips and Neil Diamond’s “Love On the Rocks” being a scene from a movie, then music videos and imagery accompanying a song was a thing from the very beginning.
I think about Cross being tossed aside for not being attractive enough and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve thought that Cross’ career misfortunes in the wake of MTV may have been oversimplified. It was entirely possible to adjust and get good at playing along with the medium of music video. I think we saw that as we got into the number two hits of 1981. I think of the Pointer Sisters, who began their career cosplaying as women trapped in the forties who eventually did a complete overhaul on both their sound and their image, transforming into video stars during the first half of the eighties. I think of Mick Jagger, who had already been making music video clips with the Rolling Stones for a decade before “Start Me Up” and already knew how to work in front of a camera. He left his shame at the door and just did the damn thing, which was kinda necessary in order to make music videos, and got rewarded for it. I think of Juice Newton, who emphasized silliness and cheap visuals to create something fun and endearing to watch. Arena rock bands like Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, and Styx may not have been great at making music videos, but they still played the game to the best of their ability and tried to figure it out. In the earliest days, MTV was an unexplored frontier. There were no rules and the things we look back on as embarrassing or awful didn’t look that way at the time. Nobody could have predicted MTV would become the cultural titan and music industry power player it was.
“You were either on MTV and hip, or you weren’t on MTV and you didn’t even fucking exist. When you were their darling, it was great. When you weren’t, you were fucked. We developed a love/hate relationship with them.”
(Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon, as quoted in I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, by Rob Tenenbaum and Craig Marks)
We talk about MTV’s launch on August 1st, 1981 and speak about it now as if everything completely changed overnight, but that isn’t right at all. In fact, MTV’s first broadcast–which you can see the first two hours of on Youtube–is kinda sloppy as far as quality is concerned. Their music news reporting sounds like high schoolers delivering the morning announcements. People long before me have poked fun at how painfully awkward VJ (“video jockey”) Alan Hunter was when introducing himself (he’s aware and he’s laughed at himself when reflecting back on it). There were all kinds of mistakes and technical hiccups, one of my personal favorites being when they air a live video of REO Speedwagon playing “Take It On the Run,” but the video cuts out after ten seconds and they just move on to the next segment. It does not look very revolutionary when watching it in 2026. When people talk about MTV as a force that changed things, they are looking at the era from 1983-1987, the era I’ve argued is the time frame of all eighties romanticizing.
In its earliest years, MTV scrounged and looked for any video they could get their hands on and play in order to fill air time. They only denied your video if it was really bad or if you were Black. Considering some of the bullshit they accepted during those early days–“Fish Heads,” Blotto’s “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard,” and anything Rod Stewart made–really the only thing that barred you from getting on MTV in the beginning was being Black. It was not a secret and it was not something that was suddenly discovered when we all looked back on MTV’s history years later and finally realized.
MTV’s history of racism in its early years needs to be discussed, because it’s important to recognize what MTV’s earliest years truly looked like. Notably, David Bowie noticed what was getting on MTV as early as 1983. There’s the infamous interview with VJ Mark Goodman where Bowie just flat out asks him why he doesn’t see Black artists on MTV. Goodman looks like a clown in the clip, mostly because of him acting as a yes man for the channel and giving really stupid answers to questions he wasn’t prepared to be asked that day. The responses he gives are really dumb, especially the “We’re worried about kids in the midwest” line in regards to Prince being shown on the channel, as if Prince wasn’t from fucking Minneapolis and Michael Jackson wasn’t from Indiana. It’s a shitshow and you can delight in Bowie’s meme-worthy smirk during the moments when he knows Goodman can’t come up with an argument that justifies the obvious in any way.
That interview was not an isolated incident and MTV’s racism is incredibly evident when examining their early years. Funk icon Rick James was the most notable victim of this practice when his video for “Super Freak” was famously blocked by the channel when Carolyn Baker, MTV’s original Head of Talent and Acquisitions, refused to allow it. Her reasoning, which she gave in Rob Tenenbaum and Craig Marks’ excellent book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, is worth sharing here:
It wasn’t MTV that turned down “Super Freak.” It was me. I turned it down. You know why? Because there were half naked women in it, and it was a piece of crap. As a Black woman, I did not want that representing my people as the first Black video on MTV.
Personally, these are extremely flimsy excuses to me and she’s not the only one that comes up with dumb excuses for why Black artists were denied entry into the music video revolution. None of the women in the “Super Freak” video are half naked or even scantily clad, unless there’s another version that isn’t publicly available to me. James doesn’t even do anything super freaky in the video besides get felt up by some women in the back seat of a limo. That’s it. Plus, I don’t think anyone who worked for MTV in the beginning can claim a video was “a piece of crap” when they were the same channel that had no issue playing shit like “Fish Heads” or “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard” or an onslaught of Rod Stewart and Pat Benatar videos. They were never a channel with high standards.
MTV’s original VP of Programming and one of my favorite liars in music, Les Garland, defended the policies surrounding what did and did not get played on the air. In I Want My MTV, he offers a laughable defense of the channel’s practices and also outright lies with statements that can be easily debunked. Here’s Garland:
The worst thing was that “racism” bullshit. There were artists of color on MTV: Joan Armatrading, Eddy Grant, the Bus Boys, even Prince. But there were hardly any videos being made by Black artists. Record companies weren’t funding them. They never got accused of racism. Rick James singled me out in an interview, and it pissed me off. The mistake he made was calling me a racist and not knowing me. “Super Freak” was a booty video in a swimming pool. We couldn’t play that shit.
He’s right that Armatrading, the Bus Boys, and Prince were all shown on MTV, but those videos were usually shown late at night (read: when everyone was asleep and not watching MTV). Eddy Grant was famously not on MTV until Michael Jackson’s video for “Billie Jean” made major waves and brought about programming changes. The statement “there were hardly any videos being made by Black artists” is complete and utter bullshit. Plenty of Black artists were making videos that never made it into heavy rotation on MTV. Here’s a short list: Pointer Sisters’ “Slow Hand,” Raydio’s “A Woman Needs Love *Just Like You Do),” Champaign’ “How ‘Bout Us,” Earth, Wind, & Fire’s “Let’s Groove,” the Commodores’ “Lady,” Al Jarreau’s “We’re In This Love Together” and “Roof Garden,” anything Rick James made. All of these were available by the time MTV launched. Garland’s accusation that “Super Freak” was “a booty video in a swimming pool” is also another lie. He’s thinking of the music video to “Give It To Me Baby” and even then, it’s far from what anyone would call “a booty video.” Rick James swims and seduces a woman in a pool, but there’s nothing in it that would be out of place in a PG-13 movie on basic cable. “We couldn’t play that shit” is a lie because Rick James putting the playboy charms on a Black woman in a pool is too hot for MTV, but Olivia Newton-John showering is completely fine. Garland is one of my favorite liars in music because everything he says is such obvious bullshit to the point where it’s honestly kinda funny. He’s so fucking easy to debunk. I love it. James eventually had a personal vendetta against MTV and who the hell could blame him? Reading into his story regarding being blocked by the channel, it was complete bullshit. I would have been extremely pissed off too.
Garland has spent decades denying that MTV has ever had a history of racism. One of his tactics of denial is to point to jazz fusion legend Herbie Hancock’s video for the song “Rockit.” In a 2017 article from Digital Music News, Garland argues, “Simple fact-checking would reveal that Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ was a huge award winning song AND music video recognized with five MTV video music awards along with a Grammy. Another thing, my friend Rick James did NOT sue MTV.” He’s correct that Rick James did not sue MTV (that’s a rumor that kept getting spread over time) but that particular video is the worst example you could point to if you wanted to argue MTV was offering equal representation. The “Rockit” video is really cool! Though you won’t see Hancock in it much, as he’s relegated to being briefly shown on a small television for only a few seconds at a time while robots and animatronics are the real stars of the video. Having Herbie on that little television allows you to see him without really seeing him. It’s a protective wall and it reeks of bullshit.
While MTV revolutionized music video and gave artists new avenues for creativity and promotion, the racist practices of MTV’s early years have become one of the defining traits as well. In the modern day, it’s incredibly easy to see what kind of party they were hosting and what kinds of artists weren’t invited. The channel wouldn’t begin to break out of this until Michael Jackson became the biggest star on the planet, pretty much forcing themselves to bend towards becoming a pop channel instead of the white rock station MTV co-founder Bob Pittman originally imagined. It should be noted that this change did not come about because they suddenly saw the error of their ways and wanted to right their wrongs. This change was because CBS president Walter Yetnikoff threatened to pull every single video the company was giving them (for free, I might add! MTV didn’t pay for the videos they showed) and threatened to cut ties with MTV if they didn’t let Jackson’s videos air. MTV was not a pillar of progressiveness and do not let anybody tell you they were. When people say “MTV was actually kinda shitty and they always fucking sucked,” they have plenty of good reasons for thinking that.
This post cannot hope to cover everything about the early years of the channel, so I cannot recommend I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution enough to people. Really fantastic oral history that details every aspect of MTV’s golden age, warts and all. You can learn all about what made MTV a cultural juggernaut, while also seeing the darker parts (racism, sexism, fatphobia, and homophobia) within their history, especially in the chapters “That Racism Bullshit” and “Girls Belong in Cages” (named after a real quote that music video director David Mallet gives in the book).
I fear I’ve focused too much on the bad parts. There were plenty of bad parts about MTV and those need to be talked about, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any positives, nor does that mean there weren’t people fighting for change within MTV. In I Want My MTV, plenty of people that worked at the channel knew about the lack of Black artists and kept urging the network to start changing. Blondie in particular used their popularity to bring Black faces (namely Jean Michel Basquiat) to music videos and early rap to the channel with the video for “Rapture,” which beautifully captures a fantastical looking version of NYC in the early eighties. Later in the decade, a spark was eventually lit when Yo! MTV Raps debuted and brought more representation. It wasn’t all bad. When the internet eventually made MTV obsolete, artists could cut out the middle man and find avenues for themselves for a while.
If MTV’s earliest days brought any significant and immediate change, it was through building the bridge for any new wave weirdos or British musicians who wanted to plant their flag in the ground and stage a takeover on American shores. Some artists ended up having love/hate relationships with MTV, but it will probably not shock you to learn that groups like Devo, Talking Heads, and The B-52’s liked making music videos because it allowed them to let their eccentricities shine through a visual medium. British artists had no problem with MTV because our neighbors across the pond had already grown up and lived with music videos and images through programs like Top of the Pops, so they already had videos they could send to MTV. Another significant change was through the way young directors could break into the industry. Guys like Steve Barron, Russell Mulcahy, David Fincher, Michael Bay, and more all got their start with music videos. Excluding Bay, we’ll see work from Barron, Mulcahy, and Fincher as the project moves deeper into the music video generation. They all did great work and helped shape MTV’s early visual aesthetics. Some major songs really did benefit from having specific imagery attached.
The early days of MTV are the most fascinating to me because it represents an experimental time. It brought a lot of changes and shake-ups to an industry that was searching for the next big moment in the story of pop music. Music videos became that next big moment and that moment lasted for about a decade. The first months of the eighties didn’t know what the hell was going on. Just looking at the number two hits, you see a time and space that was stuck in the past. It didn’t know how to really move forward. Once MTV lands and the Moon Person plants their flag into the ground, the eighties begins to move towards the decade everybody wears rose-tinted glasses for.
Starting with Part 2 of this project, you will see the transition from the old world we’ve explored to the new one that was just beginning to take shape. The music videos that accompany the number two hits will become a major talking point, not because I necessarily want them to, but because they have to. You will see music videos become an integral part of the songs and sometimes it will even play a significant role in why a song becomes a hit. You will see artists who did not adapt to the MTV generation, artists who did, and an artist who was not initially welcomed to the party until there were systemic changes made to MTV’s programming. We’re entering a brave new world.
“Starting now, you’ll never look at music the same way again.”
(The slogan used numerous times during MTV’s first broadcast on August 1st, 1981)
You Got The Silver 
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