Today MTV turns 40. Yes, four decades ago, a hip new cable television channel went from SMTPE color bars to the Apollo 11 launch and moon landing to a montage of the soon-to-be-famous MTV logo where the moon-spiked stars 'n' bars used to be.
Many trivia nerds like me have known for some time that the first video to air on MTV ever was the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," cleverly. The second? I'll give you a hint: it was by an artist whose hairstyle was copied by not one but three students at Ridgemont High.
Here are the first two hours of MTV's first transmission. We first see the VJ's at 8:45 (all of them, including rob's crush Martha Quinn), followed by some sweet-assed 1981 ads. An amusing stroll.
MTV launched shortly before my 11th birthday. It was free to cable subscribers, and we had just gone from rabbit ears to cable that spring. Several years later they started to charge, at which point I missed out for a few years. But by my high school years it was back to fee-free, just in time for hair metal, an onslaught of U2, and Debbie Gibson vs Tiffany. (There's a clear winner in that battle, mind you.)
Somewhere in our midst, MTV stopped being Music Television and began airing reality show marathons, stupid cartoons (that I watched when I was 23), and other dreck that aren't videos. You know which "special character" on your keyboard is responsible for this, but it remains lame. Anyway, MTV used to be fun and actually relevant in a simpler time, but every rose has its thorn.
What early memories do the GTB staff have of MTV, if any? Add a video or a quick blurb below.
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TR: I never thought Pat Benatar was attractive. Or Madonna. I was all in on Belinda Carlisle. I had an older sister who usually controlled the remote, so my childhood was basically 69% Duran Duran videos. I hated it at the time. I like it now, and can see how cocaine could make Duran Duran tunes really fun. I used to love Friday Night Video Fights.
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rob: 120 Minutes, man. That was the shit. The author of this post and I saw this song late at night during a Williamsburg summer and were blown the fuck away. Got up the next morning and drove to the mall in Virginia Beach (I think?) to buy the CD, which got worn out that summer. And Martha Quinn was all that.
Ed. Note: It was Patrick Henry Mall in Newport News. Which is, amazingly, still standing.
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7 comments:
The first band MTV turned me onto was The Fixx playing “Stand or Fall”. I was 9 years old sitting in a hotel room on a ski vacation.
The last band was Daft Punk playing “Da Funk”. I was 24, sitting in mymom’s de , drunk at 1:00 am. I couldn’t remember the name of the act the next morning and called MTV to find out who it was. The person I spoke to was unhelpful.
In between, My teenage music influences came from Yo! MTV Raps, Headbanger’s Ball, and 120 Minutes.
The non-music content in the later years was almost always terrible. One exception was The Young Ones, which requires a certain apprexiation for British humor. Another was the first season of The Real World, which I was mostly interested in because it was filmed in my father’s neighborhood in NYC.
My two teenage kids do not watch MTV. I don’t know who watches it now.
Coincidentally, there is an interesting documentary on Woodstock ‘99 now running on HBO. MTV is featured prominently. You can see that it’s cultural relevance was declining at the end of last century.
I remember putting a couple of Fixx albums onto one handy cassette back in the day.
I liked The Young Ones, and was probably last interested in anything on MTV sometime in the late 90s.
I was living in Arlington with most of the band River, who were a fairly regular W&M staple during my time there. Chris Keup was the singer/writer, and he had a cameo on The Real World. He wrote a song with a girl named Rebecca, who was dating Agents of Good Roots' frontman at the time. He came back bummed, cause he was sure he came off like a guy who was trying to steal his buddy's girl, and wrote a crappy song to boot.
His one positive is that they recorded the song with Sir Mix-A-Lot, and during the process he once answered his phone to hear "Hey Chris - it's Mix".
I ran into Keup a few times in NYC over the years. He had a day gig working investment conferences to support his music. Last time I saw him was backstage at the Bowery Ballroom after a Josh Ritter concert (my friend is buddies w/ Josh). Probably 15 yrs ago. I was eleventeen drinks deep and probably not at my most coherent. Those River CDs were decent background music during a hook-up. Not Mazzy Star caliber, but good to set the tone.
I grew up without cable due to my family's aforementioned mix of stupidity and poverty. I urged my mother to try one of those free three-month offers of cable but she was terrified because "That's how they get you and once you have it you can't get rid of it" like an addition peddled by the dopeman, or the herpes that comes with Jeter's gift baskets. I offered to pay a portion from my own pocket but I could not penetrate her helmet of idiocy. They finally got cable in 2006 or 2007 when the HDTV signal was first broadcast in NJ because they were terrified their old TV would not be able to receive the signal, even though low-def continued to be broadcast for years. So rather than make the one-time investment in an HDTV and continue to get TV over the air for free, they finally succumbed to cable's siren song and its accompanying monthly payments.
As a result I would sit transfixed by things like Fraggle Rock and later 1st and Ten while at other kids' houses. My friend Tracy was similarly televisionally situated--I think we once watched the November Rain video ten times during an extended MTV binge in our friend Jenny's basement, sort of a Pigman situation.
With that lengthy preamble, my earliest MTV memory is Cruel Summer by Bananarama. I had heard the song on the radio many times but seeing it performed by three women in overalls at a gas station really pulled it all together. Very impactful. Walk Like an Egyptian produced a more visceral impact a few years later.
I meant to start the Walk Like an Egyptian video at 2:47 to highlight the visceral impact.
The Olympics and the gold cup final are leading to a later Sunday evening than I anticipated.
thrill of victory, agony of defeat for us soccer in a span of about 7 hours last night/this morning.
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