It was Whitney Houston that was booed at the Soul Train Awards one year though, not Mike. In Living Color had a parody skit about Whitney called Rhythmless Nation (set to Janet's Rhythm Nation). How was he dropped by the Black community when Get It the duet with Stevie Wonder made the Top 5 on the R&B chart, but only #80 on the Hot 100 (pop) chart? Plus R&B radio played non-single songs like Why You Wanna Trip On Me, Can't Let Her Get Away, & She Drives Me Wild. R&B stations did mostly ignore songs like Heal The World. Probably because it did not fit the hip hop & New Jack Swing era tracks of the time. Mike also got positive features in Ebony, Jet, Right On! & other Black publications when the white ones like Rolling Stone was saying he had the worst comeback. As far as the "white" part of your comment, R&B radio was playing George Michael, Teena Marie, Jane Child, Sheena Easton, Hall & Oates, Nu Shooz, Taylor Dayne, Pet Shop Boys, Dino, Falco, Beastie Boys, Tara Kemp, etc. plus Latino acts like Exposé, The Cover Girls, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, Gloria Estefan. In the mid 1980s, Soul Train was even playing songs like Jump by Van Halen & BET was showing Huey Lewis & The News music videos.
Some Black people did feel that Mike & others like Tina Turner, Prince, Lionel Richie, Billy Ocean, Whitney Houston, etc, watered down their music to get the mainstream (code for white) sales. But that had to do with their music, not their looks. Even then they still got R&B airplay, well maybe not Tina so much. Back in the 1960s Motown was accused of the same thing & other labels like Stax & Chess were considered more Black sounding. What the Black audience in general did abandon was blues & jazz music, starting in the 1960s. It was the white British Invasion acts that would have the blues artists open for them and their careers were resurrected and got a new younger white hippy audience.
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