About midway by “Michael,” the brand new blockbuster biopic of Michael Jackson, there’s a scene wherein Jackson (performed by his nephew Jafaar) and his lawyer, John Branca (Miles Teller), are sitting with the president of his file label. It’s early in Jackson’s “Thriller” album cycle, as “Billie Jean” has been launched as a single, and the “Thriller” video has been filmed, setting the scene someday in 1983.
Seated in entrance of a number of gold information, CBS Information’ head honcho Walter Yetnikoff (performed underneath heavy make-up by Mike Myers) congratulates Jackson on his breakout second and asks what he can do for him. Jackson and Branca inform Yetnikoff they need only one factor: for Jackson to be featured on MTV, then a brand-new station broadcasting music movies.
Yetnikoff tells them that it’s “not potential” as a result of MTV hardly ever performs Black artists. Jackson retorts that he’s a “proud Black artist” who makes his music for everybody, and that he “gained’t be shoved to the again of any bus by MTV or anybody.”
Yetnikoff says he has tried, and Jackson tells him, “Please strive more durable.” So Yetnikoff asks his secretary to get MTV founder and government Bob Pittman on the telephone.
The manager is then heard on the telephone threatening, in colorfully profane phrases, to drag all of CBS’s artists from the community except Pittman agrees to run “Billie Jean” within the subsequent 10 minutes and, subsequently, put the music video in heavy rotation.
Within the subsequent scene, it’s clear that the menace labored. Jackson would stay an MTV staple for a few years after that.
So who was Walter Yetnikoff? And did issues actually go down the way in which “Michael” says they did?
Yetnikoff was one of many music trade’s most colourful figures. Born right into a Jewish household in New York in 1933, Yetnikoff turned president and CEO of CBS Information in 1975, after spending the primary half of the Nineteen Seventies operating CBS’s worldwide division.
Conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein and American music trade government Walter Yetnikoff speak and shake palms through the twenty seventh Grammy Awards after get together on Feb. 26, 1985 in Los Angeles. (Lester Cohen/Getty Photos)
Operating CBS throughout a pivotal time for the music enterprise, he shepherded artists resembling Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen and Gloria Estefan, along with Jackson, with whom he started working at first of his solo profession within the late Nineteen Seventies. Yetnikoff wasn’t identified for having an incredible ear for music, however he excelled on the enterprise aspect of the music trade and at advocating for his artists.
Yetnikoff was the topic of two well-known books: Frederic Dannen’s “Hit Males: Energy Brokers and Quick Cash Contained in the Music,” revealed in 1990, and his 2004 memoir, “Howling on the Moon: The True Story of the Mad Genius of the Music World,” written with David Ritz. Additionally, a 1980 film known as “One Trick Pony,” which starred Paul Simon, had actor Rip Torn taking part in a fictionalized model of Yetnikoff named “Walter Fox.”
The “Michael” model of Yetnicoff is heard calling the MTV government “that schmuck” — a Yiddish time period in step with what each books about Yetnikoff clarify: his Jewish identification was entrance and heart.
“The center of Yetnikoff’s persona was his Brooklyn Jewishness. An outsized variety of label bosses have been Jews from Brooklyn, however Walter wore his ethnicity like a gabardine,” Dannen wrote in “Hit Males.”
Later, Dannen wrote, “He would keep late into the evening, banging away on the telephone, screaming in Yiddish. He shattered glassware, spewed a combination of Yiddish and barnyard epithets, and had individuals bodily ejected from the constructing.”
A profile in New York journal in 1990, after Yetnikoff had fallen out of favor within the music world and given up the exhausting consuming that had precipitated him issues at dwelling and at work, cited an array of Jewish antecedents to color his image.
“To chop an applicable determine within the loud-and-dirty rock world, the shy Brooklyn Jew common an indelible caricature for himself — the Orchard Avenue discounter as music-biz superman, a little bit Mel Brooks combined with a whole lot of Jackie Mason, and dashes of Meir Kahane and Captain Lou Albano,” mentioned the profile, by Eric Pooley. “He might be a mensch — heat, caring, beneficiant — however he is also a monster.”
So, did Yetnikoff actually convey this well-known rage to breaking the race barrier at MTV? And did it occur the way in which the film “Michael” depicts?
Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson in “Michael.” (Photograph by Kevin Mazur for Lionsgate)
By Yetnikoff’s personal account, the reply is sure.
In “Howling on the Moon,” he wrote that “I screamed bloody homicide when MTV refused to air [Michael Jackson’s] movies. They argued that their format, white rock, excluded Michael’s music. I argued they have been racist assholes — and I’d trumpet it to the world in the event that they didn’t relent.”
He goes on to say that, “with added stress from Quincy Jones, they caved in, and in doing so, the MTV colour line got here crashing down.” (Whereas Jones, the famed producer, seems elsewhere in “Michael,” he’s not a part of the scene wherein Yetnikoff calls MTV.)
Elsewhere within the e book, Yetnikoff quotes Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was making an attempt to get him to write down his e book together with her at Doubleday, as calling him “the man who acquired MTV to interrupt the colour barrier and play movies by Black artists.”
“Don’t actually know if Walter was bragging or correct,” David Ritz, his co-author on “Howling on the Moon,” advised JTA. “I’ve a sense he was being correct, however I can’t show it.”
The Jackson household and property, it’s clear, give Yetnikoff credit score for getting Jackson’s music on MTV.
“It’s troublesome as we speak to think about the extent of cultural apartheid on the music channels in 1983 when MTV refused to play Michael Jackson’s quick movie ‘Billie Jean.’ However Yetnikoff was ferocious on Michael’s behalf and didn’t hesitate to play company hen with the highly effective music channel,” the Jackson property mentioned in a media assertion after Yetnikoff’s dying at age 87 in 2021.
“In brief order, ‘Billie Jean’ was added to MTV in heavy rotation, opening the floodgates for Michael’s extraordinary success and likewise for an entire technology of black artists. Walter pressured that to occur, and with that call, the wall got here tumbling down.”
The household and property have been closely concerned within the film’s manufacturing. However there doesn’t appear to be a lot proof for the precise circumstances of the scene within the film — Yetnikoff making that telephone name to MTV, with Jackson and Branca sitting in his workplace in New York.
Dannen advised JTA in an interview that, as advised within the film, “the story sounds fishy to me,” though he did bear in mind an incident — included in “Howling on the Moon” — when Yetnikoff “needed to coerce Jann Wenner into placing Jackson on the quilt” of Rolling Stone, one other music trade establishment that hadn’t at all times given honest weight to Black artists.
Some on the MTV aspect have disputed the account. “It by no means occurred,” Les Garland, then an MTV government, has mentioned, in line with the New York Instances. “Folklore, man, folklore.”
Garland, in a 2017 letter to Digital Music Information, acknowledged that “No, MTV did NOT refuse to air black musicians.” And certainly, the community had performed a handful of Black artists, although not prominently, in its early years. However Jackson was not the one artist to push for extra racial inclusion on MTV.
“Superfreak” singer Rick James had been pushing for movies by Black artists, declaring in an early-’80s interview, “MTV don’t play Rick James, they don’t play Michael Jackson, they don’t play the Commodores, they don’t play Earth, Wind, and Hearth, they don’t play Stevie Marvel,” happening to even use the identical “again of the bus” metaphor that Jackson used within the film.
David Bowie famously known as out MTV, dwell on its air, over the identical difficulty, additionally in 1983 — yielding an unconvincing response from Mark Goodman, a Jewish VJ, about how the community was making an attempt to “do what we expect not solely New York or Los Angeles will respect, but additionally Poughkeepsie or some city within the Midwest that may be scared to dying by Prince, which we’re taking part in, or a string of different Black faces and Black music. We now have to play the music that we expect a complete nation goes to love.”
Bob Pittman, the then-MTV government named within the film because the recipient of Yetnikoff’s telephone name, didn’t reply to an e-mail from JTA requesting remark.
Arts industries are crammed with historic examples of Jewish executives and creators going to bat for Black inclusion. George Gershwin, for instance, insisted that the characters in “Porgy and Bess” be performed by Black actors slightly than white actors in blackface, whereas the Jewish sitcom creator Norman Lear was chargeable for one of many first reveals to deal with a Black household, “The Jeffersons.” Each males tied their advocacy to their experiences and values as Jews.
If Yetnikoff was motivated by his Jewish identification or a way of justice to campaign for Jackson, the books about him, together with his personal, don’t say so. Dannen famous that Yetnikoff strongly pushed for all of his artists, together with Jackson.
“On the Grammys, when Jackson gained the Grammy for… Album of the 12 months, he took Yetnikoff up on stage with him, which was a giant deal.” Dannen advised JTA. Yetnikoff’s Guardian obituary famous that at these Grammys, Jackson had known as the label boss “the very best president of any file firm.”
Jackson went on to work with different Jewish producers and executives all through his profession. He carried out in Israel through the “Harmful” tour in 1993, visiting an Israeli military base and even donning an IDF uniform.
In 1995, he drew allegations of antisemitism after releasing the music “They Don’t Care About Us,” which included the lyrics “Jew me, sue me, all people do me/ Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.” Below hearth, he denied any antisemitism and agreed to vary the lyrics. He additionally partook within the early 2000s fad of non-Jewish celebrities embracing Kabbalah, even sporting a crimson string throughout his 2005 prison trial.
Yetnikoff, too, had a religious aspect. In his biography, he ceaselessly wrote about God, whom he known as “Heshie.” Why?
“I’m not precisely positive why. Possibly as a result of Heshie is a well-known Jewish title that I may simply say,” he wrote. ‘‘When a rabbi identified to me that maybe I wished to say Hashem, I puzzled whether or not my unconscious was taking part in video games with me. Both approach, I used to be making an attempt to attach.’’
The biography was meant as a little bit of a mea culpa after a profession characterised by the form of rage proven in that scene in “Michael.” And certainly, Yetnikoff made enemies alongside the way in which. However Dannen mentioned the film’s depiction, which shattered worldwide box-office information for a music biopic throughout its opening weekend, pointed to a quieter affect as nicely.
He famous that Jackson’s first solo album, “Off the Wall,” was nominated for an award within the R&B class, regardless of not likely being an R&B file — a dynamic he mentioned “reveals kind of the residual racism of the music enterprise” that assumed any Black artist was making historically Black music. However by the point “Thriller” got here out, Jackson was being ranked within the pop class.
“I wish to imagine that Yetnikoff exerted some affect in that space,” Dannon mentioned. Certainly, within the “Michael” scene, Yetnikoff says that “Thriller” is dominating the charts — each R&B and pop.
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