And a choreographer; she did the dance routines for several of Janet’s (and her brothers’) videos, prior to getting her solo record deal.
Yeah, that’s right! She first hired her to help with her own dancing. I forgot that.
That seems like a good way to get into the music industry.
I think that what MTV, and the prevalence of music videos, did was make it easier to become a hit performer or group if you were attractive.
It’s not like we didn’t have attractive young men with modest musical talent who became pop stars before MTV: see the Bay City Rollers, Leif Garrett, Shaun Cassidy, etc. But, MTV certainly created an atmosphere in which looks could more easily sell: Duran Duran, Culture Club, Adam Ant, Madonna, etc. likely would not have been so immediately popular without the benefit of looking sexy or cute in frequently-repeated music videos.
I agree, Tom Petty was not handsome, but he quickly learned how to make entertaining videos which did get heavy MTV airplay (including the two you mention, as well as “You Got Lucky”). The prog-rock band Yes had two of their biggest hits (“Owner of a Lonely Heart” and “Leave It”) thanks to their unusual videos, which MTV loved, despite the fact that four of the five of them were average-looking guys in their late 30s.
As a counter-counter example, we have Christopher Cross, who had five top-20 songs from 1979-83, and by '83, he had five Grammys and a best-song Oscar; after 1983, and MTV going national, he never had another top 40 hit. Part of that is probably that his light rock (which, decades later, would be labeled “yacht rock”) fell out of favor, but it undoubtedly did not help him that he was a pudgy, moon-faced guy, with a receding hairline, who didn’t look good in music videos:
Funny enough, he looks remarkably similar to Jack Black to me.
But Black is more of a comedian than musician AFAIK, and looks matter less in that industry.
I am going to go out on a limb and guess that Cross didn’t have a great stand-up comedy set.
This actually became half of a meme a few years ago:
Too late to edit: I was looking at the wrong column (Canada) in Cross’s discography and chart performance on Wikipedia. In the U.S., he had seven top-20 songs from 1979-83, and never again cracked the top 40 after then.