Hey - have you heard the news? Dewey Cox died... actually, it was Mtv that died.. Today, December 31, 2025, at the tender age of 44, Mtv will cease broadcasting globally. For those of us who were there when it began (on or around) 12 pm of August 1st, 1981 we watched in awe as our TV sets first woke from the static-filled screen of electric snow and the chaotic buzzing of a billion wasps into these brilliant Bizzaro, pastel-colorized images of the 1969 moon landing, where a neon colored rainbow-tinted John Glen grounded a huge pulsating MTV flag onto the moon’s surface. It was a game changer.
If you were a teenager in the early 1980s Mtv was the shit. I was as guilty of this fascination with Mtv as any. It was late 1981 and my mother’s second husband Joe had just splurged 9 dollars a month to provide the family with cable TV. Every night Joe would pass out on the sofa with a Pabst Blue Ribbon clutched in one hand and the remote control clutched in the other, with reruns of Marty Stouffer’s Wild America flickering on the screen. Finally one night, I surgically removed the remote from Joe’s hand and started channel surfing (with only 13 cable stations available, surfing the TV waves wasn’t all that daunting) and when I clicked the channel to Mtv my jaw just dropped. The first thing I saw was a split-screen image of this spiky-haired, fair-skinned doll woman (Laurie Anderson) singing “O Superman” to the beeping sound of a digital telephone dial tone. Beep-beeep-beep-beep. I couldn’t take my eyes off it — “What is this?” But if that wasn’t baffling enough, what immediately followed was this pasty-faced, pouty-lipped Euro-dude with a blond, ice cream swirly of a hairdo (and who was dressed kinda like a pirate from outer space) who was wheezing about, surounded by funhouse mirrors in what seemed to have been the Men’s room on the Millennium Falcon, hugging himself as he sang “And I raaaaa-an, I ran so far aw-aaaay”. Spacier still was the heaven-ish, chiming, mesmerizing echo-effect guitar riff ripping up the sound space all around him. “What the hell is going on here?” Had Martians invaded the frickin planet and taken over the TV waves? Had some future race of humans found a way to transport images back in time through satellite technology?
Whatever it was, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. But, maybe to fully understand how alien Mtv was at that time, you had to have lived through the 1970's. I mean, how can you even really describe what the 70s were like to today's Gen Zers and Millenials? How can you explain how important your record collection was, or how important FM radio was?
And how do you explain Mtv in its first two years? This other-worldly window to a land where things were different — an alternative universe where things were bright and beautiful, colorful, obtuse, upbeat and just plain fucking weird where a shiny, cold war, new wave of artists from Europe with mathematically honed “post-punk” sounds were just beginning to overpopulate the pop charts in Europe and marching toward America in the next British Invasion. Their mission? To provide American teens with their soundtrack for the 80s. And Mtv was there to broadcast it.
From the summer of '81 to the summer of '83, nearly every teenager in the US of A (including those in my small town) became totally infected by the Mtv virus. In those two years, neither I nor almost any other teen across the land could take their eyes off of Mtv. What could be of greater fascination than flashy-attired pop musicians queer-dancing about under flashing, multi-colored lights in neon-tubed, disco-mirrored expressionistic sets filled with the mise en scene abstractions of futuristic sculpture and pop art designs — and all to the sweet, sugar-synthed sounds of electro-pop precision that was riddled with rhythmic dance beats that permeating the air like zig-zagging lasers shot from an arcade machine? AmeriTeens were mesmerized, hypnotized really.
But just as quickly as Mtv captured the teenage imagination, it was just as quickly swallowed up by the corporate consumer culture - and the entire pop music industry turned to complete and utter shit. After that first, New Wave Synthesizer Pop invasion, the Hair Metal invasion quickly took over. In the high schools, and in the shopping malls, at the pinball hangouts, and on the radio. There was no stopping it - but then, when it seemed that things could not get any worse, here came Michael Jackson. And just like that Mtv was ruining pop culture. Ruining it completely.
Sure, it was a brilliant light for nearly two years, but now, nobody wants their Mtv…
https://youtu.be/SGKrgJZhpzk?si=GS4DCgRSXKVukYKi
If you were a teenager in the early 1980s Mtv was the shit. I was as guilty of this fascination with Mtv as any. It was late 1981 and my mother’s second husband Joe had just splurged 9 dollars a month to provide the family with cable TV. Every night Joe would pass out on the sofa with a Pabst Blue Ribbon clutched in one hand and the remote control clutched in the other, with reruns of Marty Stouffer’s Wild America flickering on the screen. Finally one night, I surgically removed the remote from Joe’s hand and started channel surfing (with only 13 cable stations available, surfing the TV waves wasn’t all that daunting) and when I clicked the channel to Mtv my jaw just dropped. The first thing I saw was a split-screen image of this spiky-haired, fair-skinned doll woman (Laurie Anderson) singing “O Superman” to the beeping sound of a digital telephone dial tone. Beep-beeep-beep-beep. I couldn’t take my eyes off it — “What is this?” But if that wasn’t baffling enough, what immediately followed was this pasty-faced, pouty-lipped Euro-dude with a blond, ice cream swirly of a hairdo (and who was dressed kinda like a pirate from outer space) who was wheezing about, surounded by funhouse mirrors in what seemed to have been the Men’s room on the Millennium Falcon, hugging himself as he sang “And I raaaaa-an, I ran so far aw-aaaay”. Spacier still was the heaven-ish, chiming, mesmerizing echo-effect guitar riff ripping up the sound space all around him. “What the hell is going on here?” Had Martians invaded the frickin planet and taken over the TV waves? Had some future race of humans found a way to transport images back in time through satellite technology?
Whatever it was, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. But, maybe to fully understand how alien Mtv was at that time, you had to have lived through the 1970's. I mean, how can you even really describe what the 70s were like to today's Gen Zers and Millenials? How can you explain how important your record collection was, or how important FM radio was?
And how do you explain Mtv in its first two years? This other-worldly window to a land where things were different — an alternative universe where things were bright and beautiful, colorful, obtuse, upbeat and just plain fucking weird where a shiny, cold war, new wave of artists from Europe with mathematically honed “post-punk” sounds were just beginning to overpopulate the pop charts in Europe and marching toward America in the next British Invasion. Their mission? To provide American teens with their soundtrack for the 80s. And Mtv was there to broadcast it.
From the summer of '81 to the summer of '83, nearly every teenager in the US of A (including those in my small town) became totally infected by the Mtv virus. In those two years, neither I nor almost any other teen across the land could take their eyes off of Mtv. What could be of greater fascination than flashy-attired pop musicians queer-dancing about under flashing, multi-colored lights in neon-tubed, disco-mirrored expressionistic sets filled with the mise en scene abstractions of futuristic sculpture and pop art designs — and all to the sweet, sugar-synthed sounds of electro-pop precision that was riddled with rhythmic dance beats that permeating the air like zig-zagging lasers shot from an arcade machine? AmeriTeens were mesmerized, hypnotized really.
But just as quickly as Mtv captured the teenage imagination, it was just as quickly swallowed up by the corporate consumer culture - and the entire pop music industry turned to complete and utter shit. After that first, New Wave Synthesizer Pop invasion, the Hair Metal invasion quickly took over. In the high schools, and in the shopping malls, at the pinball hangouts, and on the radio. There was no stopping it - but then, when it seemed that things could not get any worse, here came Michael Jackson. And just like that Mtv was ruining pop culture. Ruining it completely.
Sure, it was a brilliant light for nearly two years, but now, nobody wants their Mtv…
https://youtu.be/SGKrgJZhpzk?si=GS4DCgRSXKVukYKi
Comments
Post a Comment