Whatever… as a personal anecdote, I’ve been to the USA heaps of times. Over a 30 year period. I was in the USA in 1983 in a bike race sponsored by Donald Trump. I can remember hearing “Men at Work” on heavy rotation and thinking to myself… “Jesus, of all the Australian bands you COULD be listening to, you’re listening to those idiots? Your taste is in your ass, America.”
And most of my Aussie team mates felt the same way.
Your interpretation of my original post, and mine, clearly are vastly different. My original post referred to the reintroduction of payola under the table to flout existing paid content laws in 1983.
My views on that subject go to the heart of the thread. MTV went rhough the roof because videos weren’t covered by the same laws that applied to commercial radio with regards to paid content rotation.
I don’t understand the reference. Does that mean he (Joe) sucked or that he stole the show?
Australians weren’t listening to Men at Work? They didn’t have two No. 1 albums in Australia?
Nope. They’d had a minor hit with “Who can it be now?” and the song “Down Under” had run it’s course in 1982 or thereabouts. Down here at the time we had other bands and artists who were getting more airtime and sales.
By 1983 “Men at Work” were largely off the radar as far as most of us Aussies were concerned. Come and gone. When the word started coming back that they’d cracked it big in the USA most of us were saying “Really? Those idiots?” And I use the words “idiots” because it was obvious they were in on the joke, if you know what I mean. They knew how to work the machine.
Needless to say it’s now part of folklore that the 1983 America’s Cup Campaign appropriated the tune “Down Under” as an unofficial national anthem, so the band has earnt a place now in sporting folklore. But overall, we had a slew of other artists who were much edgier and in keeping with what most Aussies were into at the time.
You won’t have heard of any of them and nor should you.
What’s important is this… you might not be able to remember how a song sounds, but you can always remember how a song made you feel.
We had our tapestry at the time, just like Canada did, and Thailand did, and Mongolia did… you can’t go back to it of course. But MTV was a marketing arm which flouted payola laws, and the corporate machine that was “The Big Labels” at the time paid MTV shitloads to play certain content, and that content was permeated through the rest of the globe, with very little two-way exchange.
All of those threads are dwarfed by the football and baseball discussion from just the last few days. I don’t think they help your case.
That said, if video killed the radio star, the radio star has recovered nicely. Look at Adele, The Decemberists, Mumford & Sons, and even Lil Wayne (yeah he’s buff, but dude is UGG-LEE). None of them are what you’d call good looking and yet they’re all huge stars.
Curious … were these artists idiots?
INXS
Midnight Oil
Icehouse
Crowded House
Olivia Newton John
Air Supply
The logical fallacy I’m seeing here is that MTV is an American TV channel, and only an American TV channel. You are aware, are you not, that there is an MTV Europe, and there was MTV Australia, and the franchise was disseminated all over the world?
If your position is that this is an American messageboard, and that differing views don’t count because (a) they’re not American and (b) those views aren’t supported by weight of numbers, that merely confirms my earlier assertion - this thread confrims how insular North Americans can be on occasion. Not always, but when it comes to sport and popular culture? Often enough for it be like banging a head on a brick wall.
Straw Man.
Your post addresses nothing to do with the OP, nor does it address anything I’ve alluded to thus far in this thread.
Arguing about opinions on the internet is like trying to draw a smell, and I’ve said that a hundred times before and it always bears repeating.
So I’ll confine myself to the the facts. It is a fact that MTV was not constrained by the payola laws which constrained commercial radio, and as such, it provided a new merketing tool for “The Big Labels” in the 1980’s. It is not a public service. It is a commercial enterprise which answers to it’s shareholders.
MTV is a visual/aural medium whilst Radio is purely an aural medium. They aren’t apples and oranges. Comparisons are spurious, at best. **The OP, in this instance, posits a premise which is flawed - namely, that if they weren’t a Radio Star to begin with, then they don’t count even if they did become a Radio Star in spite of MTV. **
That, right there, is the flaw in the OP.
In order to insist upon the correctness of your argument, you’re ignoring other’s point and my own: that the OP is about changes in American culture between 1979-1984. To insist that the US was somehow musically insular compared to other countries (because Men at Work hit #1 in the US a whole 9 months after they hit #1 in Australia for the very same song (an argument that makes anybody 
)) is irrelevant to the OP.
And nobody has taken the position you describe in the second paragraph, but if it makes you feel better to think we have, by all means, feel free to believe so. Just be quiet or take the accusation somewhere else.
I say nothing about radio stars that came out after the advent of MTV because they are irrelevant to the discussion. The OP specifically states an example of an American artist who was popular in America before MTV then lost that American popularity within a couple of years of MTV’s debut and (a) posits this may be because Mr. Cross didn’t translate well to the video form (at least to Americans), and (b) asks if there are other examples.
This is something that has historic precedence (though on a more broad level) with the coming of sound in motion pictures. Some made the cut, others didn’t.
I was enjoying this thread and the insights offered into tne US music scene. Boo Boo Foo you’re ruining it with what I perceive to be a nasty, meaningless diversion.
I’ll fuel the flames though but many, many foreign acts did and do everything that they can to break into the US. The Beatles assault on America was as planned as D-Day.
Further, how exactly was your average teen in the early 80’s supposed to discover indie Aussie rock or experimental Afro-Carribean jazz fussion? I grew up in Ireland in the 80’s and I knew SFA about anything outside of the Uk and MTV. Guess I’m a troglodyte.
I completely agree with this statement 100%. However, I don’t see what it has to do with the discussion in this thread.
You’re certainly welcome to your opinion. I would never question your right to have a different viewpoint than mine. I welcome different viewpoints on a wide variety of subjects. Your complaints about this topic being American-centric, however, strikes me as thread crapping.
Going slightly off topic, Men Without Hats have a lousy song called “Telepathy” with lyrics that extend the concept to:
“Internet killed the video star / But telepathy killed the internet star”
Is it irony that The Buggles were a British band…? Or is that the misuse of irony?..I get confused.
When I think of “the prototypical music video on MTV from my high school years” its a-ha’s Take On Me. That damn thing was on every time I turned on MTV (which granted, wasn’t often).
I think that premise of the thread is that with the advent of MTV in the 80s, it became very difficult in the U.S. to have a radio career in American pop music without having a simultaneous video career on MTV. Stretching it beyond these constraints, it is a false premise. Country music - as a large example of American music - was sold without the reliance on video. Punk survived without it (although how many U.S. markets had punk stations beyond college radio?). There wasn’t a lot of metal on early MTV. I’d disagree that Christopher Cross was every really pop music of the type MTV made its career on. MTV didn’t do Easy Listening - although there was a ton of it in the late 70s and early 80s on the radio. But within these constraints, its an interesting thought. The question is, are the constraints so restrictive that it becomes “No True Scotsman.”
It certainly shows that Boo Boo Foo knows not about that which he talks about.
I imagine MTV played the song as a semi-humourous mission statement as their first song, without greatly worrying about the content, which is vague to say the least.
Stole the show. Todd can put on an amazing show show with other musicians, but solo he gets lazy. That particular show in St. Louis, MO was downright embarrassing. Joe Jackson was a consummate pro and did an amazing job.
Night Flight. They had a lot of time to fill, and they played a shockingly wide range of stuff.
Many people say that the video for “I Want to Break Free” significantly damaged Queen’s popularity in the US as it showed the band cross-dressing (plus the video was a spoof of a British tv show, which Americans didn’t likely know). I’m not really convinced that people decided not to buy A Kind of Magic just because they didn’t like the video for one of the songs from The Works, but it seems to be a commonly-held belief.
“Ice Ice Baby” was also originally the B side of a failed single, which became popular after a DJ promoted it, so I don’t think that possibility ended in the early 80s.
I feel like if Darwin was still alive he could really nail this topic. Video did not kill the radio star, but it provided a new (and important) area in which the radio star could be outcompeted.
Billy Idol was perfectly adapted for this new environment. His songs were short enough, not like those noodly 70’s songs that ate up commericial time, The videos were weird and memorable, and he was “Visually Acceptable”*
Madonna became the Apex Predator, mastering the form and monopolizing the airtime.
It wasn’t video that killed the radio star. It was natural selection.