I Want My MTV
The Day Music Changed Forever
Image: Evolution of MTV Logos. Source: Sparklin.com.
There are four words you can say in a room filled with people from my generation and probably get at least a few smiles.
I want my MTV.
If you know, you know.
Before I start digging deeper into all the bands that entered my life as I moved from being a young person into a young adult, there is a rather large gorilla sitting in the middle of my Rock ’n’ Roll Angel story.
It's time we talked about MTV.
I say this all the time, and you're probably getting sick of hearing it.
We didn't have Spotify.
We didn't have phones.
But you know what?
We didn't have Spotify. We didn't have phones.
That matters.
Finding music required effort.
You heard a song on the radio. Somebody made you a mixtape. A friend played an album for you. You heard somebody's band playing in a backyard. You went hunting through a record store.
Music found its way into our lives through all kinds of strange little pathways.
But seeing the people who made that music?
That was different.
We had album covers.
We had magazines.
We had T-shirts.
And we had posters.
Oh, we had posters.
There were stores in the mall where you could buy nothing but posters. You flipped through those enormous racks until you found your favorite band, took the poster home and put that giant image on your bedroom wall.
That was our social media.
There was Freddie Mercury.
There was Brian May.
There was whoever you loved, staring down at you from the wall while their record played across the room.
Occasionally, you might actually see them perform.
Maybe they appeared on The Midnight Special. Maybe they showed up on Saturday Night Live. Maybe there was a late-night television performance your parents let you stay awake to watch.
But mostly?
We heard our rock stars.
We didn't live with them.
Then one day, commercials started appearing on television.
Something was coming.
MTV was coming.
We didn't really know what the hell MTV was.
But apparently we wanted it.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Rock ’n’ Roll
On August 1, 1981, MTV went on the air.
And the first video was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles.
Of course it was.
That wasn't an accident.
MTV knew it was introducing something fundamentally different.
What I don't think any of us completely understood yet was just how different.
Music videos themselves weren't new.
Artists had been filmed performing for decades. Promotional films existed. Television programs showed musicians. Queen had already created that extraordinary promotional video for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a piece of work that still looks remarkable today.
But MTV did something else.
It created a home for the form.
Twenty-four hours.
Music.
Television.
Together.
Suddenly, the people we'd been listening to weren't just voices coming through speakers anymore.
There they were.
Wait. You Guys Get MTV?
There was just one problem.
We couldn't watch it.
This is another one of those things that makes perfect sense to people who lived through early cable television and sounds ridiculous today.
You couldn't simply decide you wanted a channel and subscribe to it.
Your cable provider offered a package.
That package contained certain channels.
If your cable company didn't carry MTV?
You didn't have MTV.
Some of my friends could watch it.
I could see commercials for it.
I could hear people talking about it.
But my community didn't have it.
And MTV came up with one of the most brilliant solutions imaginable.
They recruited us.
Young people.
They essentially told us:
You want MTV?
Tell your parents.
Tell them to call the cable company.
Tell the cable company:
I WANT MY MTV.
The campaign was everywhere.
And it worked.
We wanted our MTV.
Eventually, we got it.
And music was never quite the same again.
Meet the VJ
Image: MTV VJs. Source: Biography
One of MTV's smartest ideas was taking something we already understood and giving it a television makeover.
We knew DJs.
The DJ was the person on the radio who sat with us at night, introduced songs, told us about bands and occasionally introduced us to something we'd never heard before.
MTV gave us the VJ.
Video jockeys.
They became the faces between the music.
They introduced the videos. They interviewed artists. They told us what was happening. Eventually there was MTV News.
The experience began to feel strangely personal.
These weren't anonymous people announcing the next record.
We knew them.
They were part of MTV.
And through them, the artists themselves started feeling closer too.
That changed everything.
Because suddenly we didn't merely know what our favorite musicians sounded like.
We knew what they looked like when they talked.
How they dressed.
How they moved.
What made them laugh.
What they were working on.
The distance between the fan and the rock star got a little smaller.
Then the Videos Went Crazy
At first, some music videos were pretty simple.
Here's the band.
Here's the song.
Here's somebody performing in a room.
Great.
Then everybody started figuring out what this new medium could actually do.
And things got wonderfully weird.
A music video didn't have to be a recorded performance.
It could tell a story.
It could have characters.
Costumes.
Sets.
Special effects.
Animation.
Choreography.
A three-minute song could become a tiny movie.
And once that happened, there was no going back.
Suddenly, you weren't just hearing a song.
You were seeing someone's imagination attached to it.
A-ha gave us the pencil-sketch world of “Take On Me.”
ZZ Top gave us cars, women, spinning guitars and enough swagger to power a small city.
Twisted Sister turned teenage rebellion into slapstick warfare.
Peter Gabriel made “Sledgehammer” into something that looked like somebody had handed an art student unlimited caffeine and said, “Go.”\
Duran Duran understood the assignment almost immediately.
Eurythmics gave us Annie Lennox staring straight through the television screen in “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”
Tears for Fears became part of the visual language of the decade with songs like “Shout,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and “Head Over Heels.”
And Aldo Nova?
Oh, Aldo Nova.
“Fantasy.”
If you were there, you probably just saw the video in your head.
That's the point.
Some of these songs became almost impossible to separate from their videos.
You didn't simply remember the music.
You remembered the world built around it.
MTV Changed the Hunt
Before MTV, I hunted for music.
You've heard me talk about going to Tower Records. Finding a song. Finding the album. Going backward through a band's catalog because I wanted to know what they'd done before I discovered them.
MTV changed the hunt.
Now music could come looking for me.
A VJ could appear on the screen and introduce someone I'd never heard of.
A few minutes later:
Who the hell was THAT?
And now I needed the record.
That was the pipeline.
MTV.
Holy crap.
Record store.
Album.
Repeat.
And some artists seemed almost perfectly designed for this new world.
They had the sound.
They had the look.
They had the video.
And MTV could put them into millions of living rooms.
And Then There Was Metal
Oh yes.
Now we're getting to Rock ’n’ Roll Angel territory.
I've already told you about my own journey into heavy metal and how Scorpions opened that door for me.
But MTV blew the door off its hinges.
Metal had once felt like this strange little rebellious corner of rock ’n’ roll.
Those people over there.
The leather people.
The scary people.
Then suddenly...
they were on television.
Ozzy Osbourne.
Mötley Crüe.
Metallica.
Skid Row.
Warrant.
And so many others.
Eventually MTV gave metal its own home with Headbangers Ball.
Think about what that did.
You didn't have to know someone in the scene.
You didn't have to find the right radio station.
You didn't have to stumble across the right record in the right store.
You turned on the television.
There it was.
For young people discovering heavy music, MTV wasn't merely showing us the culture.
It was giving us access to it.
The Video Became the Event
Then something else happened.
Videos themselves became premieres.
Not releases.
Events.
A major artist had a new video coming?
Friday night.
Eight o'clock.
Be there.
And we were.
Michael Jackson took the idea of the music video and essentially said, You people aren't thinking nearly big enough.
Then came “Thriller.”
That wasn't a little promotional clip for a song.
That was an event.
Queen gave us “Radio Ga Ga.”
Dire Straits gave us “Money for Nothing,” complete with that immortal declaration:
I want my MTV.
Artists weren't merely tolerating this strange little cable channel anymore.
They understood its power.
They were creating for it.
The song influenced the video.
The video influenced the song.
Fashion changed.
Marketing changed.
Careers changed.
The relationship between musicians and their audiences changed.
Music had become visual.
And MTV Became Bigger Than Videos
Eventually MTV started asking:
What else can we do?
There were interviews.
Music news.
Documentaries.
Behind-the-scenes programs.
Artist profiles.
Specials.
Concerts.
Then came the MTV Video Music Awards.
And suddenly there was another stage where artists could be recognized for something the traditional music establishment didn't necessarily know what to do with yet.
The video itself had become an art form.
Directors mattered.
Choreography mattered.
Visual design mattered.
And the awards show became part of the culture too.
You didn't just watch to see who won.
You watched because something might happen.
And frequently, something did.
We Were All Watching Together
This is the part that I think is hardest to explain now.
Today we have extraordinary access to music.
Far more than we ever had.
I can pull out my phone and listen to almost anything I want.
I can watch an artist's videos.
Follow them on social media.
Watch livestreams.
Read what they ate for breakfast if they're inclined to tell me.
Today's relationship between artist and audience can be incredibly intimate.
But MTV gave my generation something different.
We were watching together.
When something premiered, millions of us saw it.
When a video became huge, everybody knew it.
You went to school and talked about it.
There wasn't an algorithm quietly building a private universe around each of us.
For a few minutes, we were in the same room.
Not literally.
But culturally.
And that creates a particular kind of memory.
Then MTV Changed
Eventually MTV became something else.
There were fewer videos.
More programs.
More reality television.
The culture changed.
Technology changed.
We changed.
And whenever someone from my generation mentions MTV now, somebody inevitably says:
“Remember when MTV actually played music?”
Yes.
We remember.
And when the final pieces of the MTV we knew began disappearing, a lot of us shrugged.
They hadn't really been doing what we remembered for years anyway.
So what difference did it make?
But underneath the shrug?
There was something else.
A little sadness.
I felt it.
Because I realized I wasn't mourning my ability to watch music videos.
I can watch music videos anytime I want.
I was mourning something that couldn't come back.
We Grew Up Together
MTV gave me something I hadn't really had before.
I got to see the people whose music was becoming part of my life.
And then something extraordinary happened.
I kept living.
So did they.
I watched artists change.
I watched their music change.
I watched careers rise.
I watched bands break apart and sometimes come back together.
I watched young musicians become older musicians.
And now, some of those people aren't here anymore.
But I can pull up one of those old videos and suddenly there they are.
Young.
Beautiful.
Ridiculous.
Brilliant.
Wearing entirely too much hairspray.
Running through some bizarre music-video universe that made complete sense in 1984.
And I smile.
Because for three or four minutes, they're exactly as I remember them.
Maybe that's what got me a little emotional thinking about MTV this morning.
It isn't really the television channel I miss.
It's the world around it.
The record stores.
The posters.
The VJs.
The premieres.
The friends who watched with us.
The artists we were discovering.
And the young people we were when we discovered them.
I don't think our generation's experience was better than what young people have today.
It was simply ours.
They'll have their own things.
Someday they'll look back at some platform, artist, game or strange little piece of culture and try to explain to another generation why it mattered so much.
And they'll discover what I'm discovering now.
Sometimes you're not really missing the thing.
You're remembering who you were when the thing was yours.
MTV was ours.
It gave us a window into music at exactly the moment music was becoming part of who we were.
We watched those artists.
We listened to them.
We grew with them.
And somehow, they grew with us.
So if you're from a certain generation, I can probably still say four words and take you there.
Back to the television.
Back to the VJs.
Back to waiting for your favorite video.
Back to a world where somebody could come through the screen with a guitar, a ridiculous outfit and three minutes of music and completely rearrange your record collection.
You ready?
I WANT MY MTV.
Yeah.
You smiled. ❤️🤘
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or turn up an old favorite song, share it with someone who remembers too.
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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