David Bowie Glorified For Unearthed Interview 5 Years After His Death [Watch]
Nearly five years after his death, singer David Bowie is making headlines for a decades-old interview. An unearthed clip of the performer went viral on social media on Monday for his comments slamming MTV's lack of diversity in its programming.
The clip features Bowie during a sitdown interview with MTV in 1983. In it, he calls the network out for not showing enough black artist music videos.
“I’m just flawed by the fact that there are so few black artists featured on it [MTV]. Why is that?” Bowie asked.
“I think we’re trying to move in that direction. We want to play artists that seem to be doing music that fits into what we want to play for MTV. The company is thinking in terms of narrowcasting,” the MTV interviewer responded.
Bowie goes on to explain that while MTV does show few black artists, it’s usually in the early morning hours when very few are awake.
Fans and those who respect Bowie have been commending the late singer on social media since the interview's reemergence.
Near the end of the video, the MTV interviewer eludes that mid-westerners would be scared to see Prince on their television if they were to play his music videos.
“That’s very interesting,” Bowie simply responded.
Bowie’s second wife, Iman, is Somalian and they wed in 1992, almost a decade after this historic interview.
Bowie, a songwriter and performer best known for his hit 1969 single “Space Oddity” and for his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, died in 2016, just days after he turned 69. He had been fighting cancer for almost two years prior to his death.
During his career, he consistently worked with black artists, whether it be on a song or writing a song for them, which opened up a new world in the music realm.
“David Bowie, and many other British musicians, arrived on American shores with a deep passion for R&B and Gospel music,” DJ Sir Daniel from Atlanta told NBCBLK in 2016. “In particular, David would make his ‘glam-rock’ music, but would also jam with Vandross, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner and others to edify his love of Black American music.”
He often appeared on the network BET, which was rare at the time. He would tell Donnie Simpson, a black American DJ, that he saw the value black artists and the community had, according to NBC.
"He helped the world accept different. Dude was different from all of his personas," Simpson said.
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