I'll never forget attending a white community meeting in the mid eighties and the discussion of whether to support Diana Ross came up . I was shocked when the "nays" barely won out .
It was a raucous debate though !!!
Group speak
bah!
Seriously though , besides the obvious handful , Whitney , Michael,etc. , who did equally well on both charts ... find me the black artists during the eighties who didn't generally chart better on the black charts than on the pop charts?... especially the legends continuing from the sixties and seventies ... and especially the Motown legends from then, like Diana.
Black radio was in big trouble in the eighties and was having a hard time defining itself. A lot of those stations began calling themselves Urban Contemporary, and their focus was on the upbeat stuff and not as ethnic specific . Some went rap. To counter that , some became "quite storm" formatted, playing the sleepier jazzier tunes.
The few that tried to be purists as far as being black/soul formatted, found their music choices to be of slimmer pickings, thus some of these artists' less than stellar releases charted, including Diana Ross'.
Can many of us sing the lyrics to many of the songs that artists like Stevie and Smokey and Gladys were charting with on the black chart at that time? Do we hear them anymore?
KDIA in the SF bay area, was that primary market's premiere black radio station all through the sixties and seventies . In 1984 it suddenly switched to talk radio. I was listening the day it happened. They let the music DJs rant in protest over the airwaves, their last time on the air, and then the next day, they were gone.
Today it is Radio Punjab , playing to Hindu Punjabi listeners.
You can read about it yourself in a watered down account:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KMKY_[[AM)
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