Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
I was watching “The Greatest Night in Pop” the other night.
It’s a Netflix documentary about the 1985 recording of “We Are The World” — that song many of us Gen X kids sang at middle and high school graduations in 1986 because the song was everywhere and you couldn’t escape it.
The story of how that song came together and everything they went through to record it on the same night many of the stars had attended the American Music Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles is very interesting, and I highly recommend you watch the documentary, but I’m bringing it up for a specific reason.
There’s a part in the doc where they are talking about Lionel Richie not only being the host of the American Music Awards that night, but he performed twice and he won six awards as well. The documentary then showed a clip from the actual award show, and in it, Lionel Richie is seen winning the award for “Favorite Black Male.”
I did a double-take and immediately hit rewind on my television because surely I read that wrong. Did that award really say Favorite Black Male?
It did in fact say Favorite Black Male, and that sent me down a rabbit hole to find out why.
It turns out that in 1985, the American Music Awards sought to find another way to “other” Black artists because of what happened in 1984 when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” dominated the “R&B/Soul” category. Many argued that “Thriller” was actually a pop album (I would posit that “Thriller” has a mix of both pop and R&B hits, but I’m not a music expert), and to prevent someone else from running the category again — while also keeping Black people out of “pop” category (because clearly that was only for white people, lol), they made new…
Read the full article here
