Rock Paper Scissors - LinkTV, World Music Programming

View Additional Info

Link TV Bios

-Steven Lawrence, director of music and cultural programming

Getting fired from MTV was one of the best things that ever happened to Steven Lawrence. “I had already decided that I couldn’t fit into the corporate media world and they made it easy for me to get out,” says Lawrence, director of music and cultural programming at Link TV. It was Lawrence—one of the first people hired by MTV who helped train the original VJs—and had the idea of bringing together world music videos and documentaries as one of the key programming strands for Link TV, the first nationwide channel dedicated to providing Americans with global perspectives on news, events, and culture.

As a child, Lawrence was interested in music; he remembers one of the first albums that his world-traveling parents exposed him to was the bouzouki-driven soundtrack to a Greek film called “Never on Sunday.” “That’s my first recollection of foreign music having energies, timbres, and instrumentation that were a lot more exciting than what I was hearing on local radio or the Mickey Mouse Club,” recalls Lawrence. “I was probably 7 or 8.”

As a teenager, he became more interested in media and filmmaking, and after developing Manhattan’s public access cable TV channels, producing video art projects, and directing a video series about the emerging punk music scene at CBGB’s, he was recommended for a job at MTV. He worked there for five years, during which time he became the senior producer/director of documentaries and specials. “It wasn’t too long into my MTV experience that I got a little tired of what the corporate priorities were for the music. MTV priorities were determined by who was hot at the moment and who had power in the music business,” says Lawrence.

Lawrence produced a magazine series called “Liner Notes,” which he used as a Trojan Horse to introduce MTV viewers to rappers like Run-DMC, and international artists Fela Kuti and Ruben Blades. But he wanted to get beyond doing ten-minute pieces snuck onto a program.

Around 1985, Lawrence became aware of the underground rock scene in the Soviet Union. “Any music not approved by the government was illegal,” Lawrence says. “Of course, this was the music with guts, integrity, and poetry, and therefore considered subversive. The musicians could not perform publicly or sell their albums. So the only way to hear the music was at concerts in people’s homes, and cassettes passed hand-to-hand. It intrigued me because it was the opposite of what the musical culture was here in America. The music meant so much to people, they were willing to go to jail for it.”

The story resonated with Lawrence’s deepest instincts but it took him over two years to convince MTV management to let him make a film about it. He received financing when Billy Joel conducted the first Soviet Union tour by a major American rock star. These were the early days of glasnost and perestroika. Lawrence took a crew to Moscow and Leningrad and created Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock in Russia, the first serious long-form documentary that MTV had ever done. “It was the first film they made there not because a label or artist wanted it made,” Lawrence explains, “but because a producer felt it was an important story to tell.” In spite of critical praise for the documentary, within a couple of weeks of airing, Lawrence was fired for being too independent-minded. “What’s ironic is that some of the things I was trying to do—presenting rap and making serious documentaries—became prominent on MTV soon after I left,” says Lawrence. “When you’re a bit ahead of your time, you run into resistance, but I was ready for a change. Now I joke that I was fired for doing world music.”

Lawrence formed his own production company and produced The Long Way Home, a film about underground Russian rock legend Boris Grebenshikov’s bittersweet odyssey to the West, directed by Michael Apted. He also produced Age 7 In The USSR for Granada TV, the innovative Vis à Vis series for PBS, based on digital video dialogues between people in different countries, and Married In America, a longitudinal study of nine diverse American couples for A&E.

“The thread that runs through my work is connecting Americans with other cultures. When we were developing Link in `99, I realized it could be the perfect home for all the world music MTV and other channels wouldn’t play. We launched with 65 videos in our library; today it’s over 750, and we’ve aired more than 85 music and cultural documentaries. It’s tremendously satisfying to know we’re introducing thousands to music that leads them to explore beyond their own borders. There’s a whole generation that has grown up wired globally through the Internet. For them information has no geographical boundaries. It’s time for TV to catch up with that.”

-Michal Shapiro associate director of music programming

“The filmmaker is the musician’s best friend.” says Michal Shapiro, the person who probably watches more world music videos than anyone else on the planet. ”They have the ability to make something that cuts across demographics; something that reaches a lot of people. Ralph Stanley got his first Grammy for his work in O Brother Where Art Thou, yet those songs were not played on the radio. But their use in that movie gained him an audience he would never have reached.”

Watching so many of the planet’s videos puts Shapiro in a unique role. She screens all of the videos that come in for broadcast on Link TV, America’s only national TV outlet for world music videos. Shapiro’s own background is a diverse set of experiences that unwittingly prepared her for this nexus of sonic and visual synergy. She is best-known as a compilation producer for Ellipsis Arts, for whom she produced seven albums such as Planet Squeezebox, a three-CD collection of the world’s accordion traditions, and Dancing with the Dead: The Music of Global Death Rites, which includes a Southern Baptist eulogy, a Tibetan Buddhist sheng-guan performance, and a Balinese gamelan orchestra. Ellipsis is known for its lushly packaged “coffee table” productions; rich with text, photos, and artwork, that Shapiro as a producer was responsible for providing. “It was a great gig—I used my ears to find and sequence the music, and my eyes for finding photos and working with the graphics department…and I wrote most of the liner notes, so I was using my writing skills as well. But working in television really satisfies me—I get to work with journalists, film makers, videographers and animators, as well as musicians and industry people.”

Shapiro has gone back and forth between painting and fine art, which she studied at Queens College, and music (she received her AFTRA card at the age of nine). She was the lead singer for The Elephant’s Memory, a band that appears in the soundtrack for the academy award-winning movie “Midnight Cowboy” and eventually became John Lennon’s back up band (after her departure). In more recent years, she has released her own recording as a vocalist, and frequently sings with New York area bluegrass bands. “Don’t ask me why, but Bluegrass just really speaks to me. I’ve been singing it since I was twelve.”

“Growing up in the ’60s was very helpful for broadening anybody’s ideas of what music could be made from. So I was always very open to new sounds, and I have an extremely eclectic, open ear.” Shapiro says. “There are times when I have to push to air things that I think are important to show, since sometimes great music is not that accessible. But a little bit of contextual information can really change all that. And a good video can solve that problem immediately. It’s also a shame that so many musicians feel that they must sound Western in order to succeed.   I fear they forget that their strength is where they come from.”

Additional Info

Link TV Delivers World Music Nationwide To More Than 30 ...

Growing the Audience for World Music: Link TV Finds New Fans Among L....