How One Whitney Houston Music Video Changed MTV Forever

Music Michael Jackson famously broke the color barrier for Black men on the network. For women, it was a different story. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos from “How Will I Know” music video and Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. MTV launched at midnight on Saturday, Aug. 1, 1981. And the key word there is launched.In the space-themed commercial touting the event, the channel’s creator, John Lack, announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock ’n’ roll,” over launch footage from the Apollo 11 spaceflight in 1969, and from the Columbia space shuttle earlier in 1981. This imagery made perfect sense: MTV was venturing into unmapped territory, ushering in “the world’s first 24-hour stereo-video music channel,” as Mark Goodman, one of MTV’s early video jockeys, described it in 1981. Fittingly, the first clip to play on the channel in the United States was “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the 1979 hit by the British new wave band the Buggles. It’s tough to overstate just how seismic MTV’s impact was, even within the first few years of its debut. Not only did it turn music videos into a savvy marketing mechanism, but it also elevated these videos into an art form all their own. Some performers even feared that videos might eclipse the very artistry they were intended to amplify. “It’s great to have hit records and make videos, but in the end, nothing can replace the thrill of going out on stage and showing that you can also do it live,” Jody Watley, whose smashes include 1987’s “Don’t You Want Me,” told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. As hyperbolic as the space imagery might seem to people today—now that the mere mention of MTV tends to prompt a wry, Remember when it used to play videos?—the channel genuinely reshaped the music industry, giving artists the power to fuse sound and image in ways that were previously unimaginable. At least, that was the case for some artists. Despite the undeniable excitement around the channel, not everything was blissful.Maybe most obviously, MTV began as lily-white. Pat Benatar. Duran Duran. The Who. Phil Collins. Spandau Ballet. In those early days, white rock ’n’ rollers and synth-pop bands reigned supreme on the channel, which frequently ignored genres like hip-hop and freestyle that had been picking up momentum for years and passed over Black artists it believed that its white viewers had no desire to see performing on their screens. In a 2005 retrospective, Blender magazine described this era of MTV as a moment when a “color line” and “racial apartheid” prevailed. At the time, music distribution was structured around what one could plausibly describe as Jim Crow–level segregation. The corporatization of FM radio’s business model in the preceding years had ushered in demographic narrowcasting—industry jargon for a strategy that targets a specific audience rather than the masses. Radio stations became sharply divided, with many rock stations relegating Black artists to overbroad “soul” stations that cloistered all Black talent together. For Black performers seeking crossover success, there was a gauntlet to run. First, they had to prove their worth on Black stations. Record labels operated under a similar caste system, with “pop music” departments perched above lower-rung “Black music” divisions. In a trenchant 1987 report on the exclusion of Black artists that took 18 months to produce, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People found that “at every level of the industry, barriers exist that severely limit opportunities for blacks” and that “no other industry in America so openly classifies its operations on a racial basis.” It wasn’t until Michael Jackson came along in 1983, crooning about Billie Jean and her looks like a beauty queen, that doors began to open for more Black men seeking to appear on the channel. (CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff reportedly threatened to “go public” and say that “you don’t want to play music by a black guy”; MTV promptly changed its mind about airing Jackson’s music, at least in Yetnikoff’s telling.) And it wasn’t until Whitney Houston—the gospel-rooted vocal prodigy born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1963—that Black women would truly get a shot at superstardom on MTV. Despite the system’s manifold hurdles, Houston saw a way forward. She didn’t try to take over the pop music world all at once. Instead, her label, Arista Records, established her credibility with Black audiences before using that success to catapult her into the white mainstream. Her first two official singles were “You Give Good Love” and “Saving All My Love for You,” both from 1985. Each song reached No. 1 on the Hot Black Singles chart (yes, that’s really what it was called at the time), while “You Give Good Love” climbed to No. 3 on the Hot 100. “Saving All My Love for You” reached the very top, beating out powerhouses including Stevie Wonder (“Part-Time Lover”), A-ha (“Take On Me”), Jan Hammer (“Miami Vice Theme”), and Tears for Fears (“Head Over Heels”). Houston hadn’t only secured a devoted Black audience—she had demonstrated carefully engineered crossover power. Though Black women artists such as Tina Turner and Sade had already appeared on MTV, Houston helped to push that representation further through her dominant presence on the channel. MTV at first balked at airing the video for “You Give Good Love” and only placed “Saving All My Love for You” into rotation after it proved itself on the charts. But Houston’s really radical breakthrough came with the next single, “How Will I Know,” which in just a few weeks secured “heavy” rotation status on MTV—alongside work by Heart, Elton John, and other juggernauts—and maintained this prominence for months, according to tracking by Billboard magazine. It also helped to pave the way for the ascent of Watley, Anita Baker, and other Black women artists who soon made a splash on MTV. “Because of what Whitney and Sade did, there was an opening for me,” Baker told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “For black women singers,” the Times observed, “[Houston] is the Messiah.” During a 2001 conversation with MTV, an interviewer asked Houston, “What are your earliest memories of MTV?” The superstar didn’t miss a beat. With a smirk, she replied, “I do remember the hassle of introducing Black artists to MTV because—let’s face it—it was solely for white artists at that point.” What was it about the “How Will I Know” video that made it resonate with viewers? For starters, the outfits. It takes almost a full 30 seconds before we see Houston’s face. Our first glimpse of her is a view of her back. Wearing a silver mesh dress and a massive silver bow, she sashays through what I can only describe as a tie-dye maze. Meanwhile, backup dancers in black outfits—some with vivid makeup—roll around on the ground and strike poses. It’s very 1980s. Which is to say: It’s a lot. Houston spends the rest of the video dancing through the labyrinth, a symbol of her search for the answer to her anxious question: “How will I know if he really loves me?” Houston’s family friend and musical foremother Aretha Franklin makes a cameo toward the end of the video, seemingly anointing Houston as music’s next great institution. Directed by Brian Grant, who would return to helm the video for 1987’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “How Will I Know” was a sensation. It nabbed two nominations at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, one for Best New Artist and the other for Best Female Video, and won the latter. The headline of a 1986 New York Times story about Houston’s rise distilled the cultural force that had been unleashed into the world: “Whitney Houston—Pop’s New Queen.” Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support. From I’m Your Baby Tonight by Brandon Tensley, published by Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. Copyright © 2026 by Brandon Tensley. Get the best of culture Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more. Gender History Music Race TV Black Americans