Tag Archives: mtv

I Had My MTV

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I’ll freely admit that I’m firmly on the Gen-Xer side of ‘remembering MTV back when it played music videos’. We’re talking the early 80s here, back when my family signed up for cable TV via Warner Amex. I’d heard about the channel via its mention in music magazines like Rolling Stone and its occasional “I want my MTV” commercial showing up here and there. The first videos I remember seeing on the channel was .38 Special’s “Hold On Loosely” and The Police’s “Spirits in the Material World”. It was sometime in 1982, and I was already well entrenched in rock radio and American Top 40, even at eleven years old. I was completely hooked.

I think what appealed to me, even as a preteen, was the fact that the channel tried so hard to be at the forefront of music culture, yet also felt like one of those low-budget community access channels where the production teams and the on-air hosts really didn’t know what the hell they were doing half the time. That was part of its charm! They knew enough to replay all the music videos that got a positive reaction from its viewers, but they weren’t afraid to insert weird things like Blotto’s “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard” or Yello’s “The Evening’s Young” to keep us on our toes. Hell, I even loved those one or two minute bumper fillers that were basically public domain films set to nameless instrumentals.

I bring this up following the recent news that the channel has chosen to shut down all of its UK channels by the end of the year, with the possibility of more channels in other countries going the way of the buffalo as well. Not that anyone is surprised these days, considering that the original channel plays reality shows and the tertiary smaller channels are mostly available via cable TV packages.

Most music videos show up on YouTube and TikTok these days, and that might be a good thing when you want to watch the new Taylor Swift video now instead of waiting for it to show up at some point in the next hour or so. But what we miss, just like streaming versus terrestrial radio, is two-fold: we miss out on the slow anticipation that our favorite band or singer will show up like some kind of mini-event, and we miss out on the potential discovery of music we might otherwise not have noticed on the way there.

I don’t necessarily miss those MTV days of yore. I’ve got a lot of great memories, and I’m glad I was there to witness the world premieres and the unscripted moments and the holiday countdowns. I’m thrilled that I was part of the era that got to see all those amazing bands and singers grow and evolve into world-dominating celebrities. I’m especially thankful that it played an extremely influential part in my life when I discovered 120 Minutes.

It was a specific point in time, just slightly ahead of the curve and unafraid to take chances. It was an era of two completely different iterations of pop music — the US and the UK — crashing into each other, influencing each side of the Atlantic and reaching out into the cosmos with something new and fascinating. It influenced the sound of rock and pop for decades to come, allowing it to evolve in unexpected directions.

Now that we have instant gratification at our internet fingertips, having that kind of cable channel doesn’t quite have the power and the reach that it once did. Sure, had they the budget and the creativity and less of the stakeholder influence, MTV itself could have evolved into something unique. Instead, it slowly faded away into yet another benchwarmer channel playing innocuous reality shows and viral videos of people doing stupid things.

That’s the one thing I wish had been different about the channel as it got older and less influential: it could have gone out on a high note rather than limping along well past its lifespan.

Flashback: long-form Duran Duran videos

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For completely random reasons, I was thinking the other day about those super extended Duran Duran videos of the day. You know the ones, where Simon would do some completely random quoting of Shakespeare, extras would be acting out some weird interpretive dance, not-quite hints of softcore porn, or something like that. So very 80s. So very Russell Mulcahy.

The seventeen-plus minute version of “New Moon on Monday” is great in that it’s just like French New Wave cinema: full of attitude, and itself. Not entirely sure what it’s about other than some vague Cold War-ish anti-authoritarian protesting? I think? It’s a bit sluggish in places but it’s definitely an experience.

“Night Boat” on the other hand contains Simon’s quoting of Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet…while the band members slowly turn into zombies? Sure, why not?

Then there’s the wonderfully bonkers “Wild Boys” that makes absolutely no sense at all other than its slight nod towards Mad Max and Barbarella.

And oh yes! I’d completely forgotten there was an extended version of “Election Day” (their Arcadia side project, of course). Oh dear lord THE HAIR.

See, this is what happens when you’re a Gen-Xer and a first-gen MTV viewer, you remember all the fever-dream stuff like this.

Early 80s MTV, post-punk and new wave

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Gloria Vanderbit’s passing yesterday got me thinking about the classic Robert Hazard one-hit-wonder “Escalator of Life” that came out in 1982. It was one of those odd new-wavey hits that didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense lyrically (or in this case, took a metaphor and stretched it to its breaking point), but it was certainly one hell of a cool song at the time.

I often talk about the late 80s here at Walk in Silence, but I don’t think I give nearly enough love to the early 80s, which were just as influential to me as a kid. I listened to just as much radio and watched as much MTV then as I did later on, and my tastes were just as varied. I could be listening to the hard rock of WAAF in the morning as I got ready for school, but I could be listening to the classic rock of WAQY on the weekend, and watching the then-freeform stylings of early era MTV. I liked A Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran and Pat Benatar just as much as I liked Led Zep, Eagles, and that little quirky southern band WAQY liked called REM.

As commercial as some of these stations and channels were, they weren’t averse to playing the occasional obscurity like The Stranglers’ “Golden Brown” or Yello’s “The Evening’s Young”. They’d sneak in gems like The Jam’s “Town Called Malice” or Bow Wow Wow’s “Baby Oh No”. They were quirky but had crossover potential.

I remember a lot of these obscurities — the ones you remember from the era that don’t show up on those Just Can’t Get Enough compilations or those 80s Retro internet stations — because my mixtape-making actually started around this time, in late 1982. I’d made quasi-mixtapes before then, of course..mainly dubbing songs off the radio and from MTV (holding our cassette recorder close to the tv speaker, of course), but they didn’t contain that many songs. It wasn’t until November 1982 that I’d gathered a handful of used blank tapes and went wild. This first collection lasted six tapes and contained everything from A Flock of Seagulls to Led Zeppelin to Donnie Iris to Chilliwack to Thomas Dolby. It’s quite a manic and haphazard mix, created over the length of maybe two or three months.

I also started cataloging my mixtapes around then, first on index cards I would stick to the tapes with rubber bands, then a few years later with a steno notebook. Most all of those early tapes are long gone, having either gotten broken or tangled, taped over by something more important, or just faded back into white noise. But I kept these catalogs — mainly because I was a packrat — and much, much later (in 2007 or so) I started recreating them digitally using copied mp3s.

It’s kind of wild to see these mixtape track lists so many decades later; on the one hand, I’m not at all surprised that I was that obsessed over pop and rock music by the time I was twelve. There was just so much more out there coming out, and I just wanted to hear all of it! Sure, I had my questionable selections, but we all did around then. We’d gone from AM radio to the commercial FM radio to early MTV within the span of maybe four or five years. Some of us were just going to ride that particular avalanche and have fun while it happened.