The Rise and Demise of MTV

Of Cable and Clickers

Mike spent his day arranging the loft for a mild invasion. His parents were at another house. Mike's family, we realized upon entering the loft, had some money. (His name isn't Mike, but he'll be called that to protect the guilty.) Those with packages went straight to the refrigerator.

This was a true loft. There was a room hanging over the living room that was the loft part of the loft. There were people up there immediately, clanking green bottles, hanging apelike. Most of us stayed below, and a few of us moved to the television couch with our green bottles. (We were a brown-bottle crowd, so let me say this in defense of my Frank McCourt vividness: I have the ability to recall every detail about a green-bottle day.)

Three of us, including Mike, sank into the white couch, cautiously vertical. From under a cushion Mike pulled a “clicker,” but I had spoken too soon. I offered to walk to the television and manually change the station. I may have said, turn the dial. I was laughed at. How backward I was. So I shut up and drew from my green bottle and thought of my entire family and how backward we were — remoteless, cableless, back in Queens.

Music Was Never So Easy

The rumors were true. Cable existed. More channels than I could imagine, which may have been a paltry twenty-odd at the time. Mike clicked voraciously. And he stopped decidedly on a gaunt face, youngish, demure, seductive, transparent; a brown-and-white hair-face knob, shocked forward with a pale-red lipstick. It was Martha Quinn.

I connected instantly. Quinn spoke excitedly but cool-calm. Her manner was preppy but bordering on hip. She was everywoman. And this was MTV.

A crowd formed around the couch, and I have to admit, perhaps because of the green bottles, my memory gets a little hazy here. But I can say with impunity that we watched videos by Devo, the Talking Heads, and A Flock of Seagulls, although this may not be entirely accurate. Nevertheless, I was metamorphosed. I tried to convince myself while on the couch that I had seen music videos before. But maybe not. This was a different experience. And it seemed limitless. If I sat here long enough I knew I would see every video to every modern pop song. Martha Quinn, my new best friend, would hold my hand. What a concept, I thought. Music was never so easy.

In the brown-bottle days of the '80s I craved my MTV, and got it here and there, usually on a friend's couch. Videos fell into categories: Pure Cheese (“Whip It”), More Cheese (“Centerfold”), Animated Cheese (“Take on Me”), Heady (“Once in a Lifetime”), Head Bangy (“Another Thing Coming”), They May Have Spent Too Much (“Thriller”), New Brit (“Love My Way”), Punk Brit (“Rock the Casbah”), Definition of Cool (“Gimme All Your Lovin'”), and Subtle Beauties (“Waiting on a Friend”). Between videos, the VJs did interviews and introductions. They lived up to their new title — Video Jock. We grew up on radio, and so had the VJs.

The nubile and cable-dependent MTV had some competition from the broadcast sector. Friday Night Videos was on NBC. For the cableless in college, the show was a must, but it was only a fill-in. It was apparent why America wanted its MTV — it wanted its videos.

I No Longer Want My MTV

And we consumed videos, to a point where we weren't thinking about the music any more. Or were we? We debated the question exhaustively: Is one's satisfaction of music helped or hindered by the musicians' visual image? If in hearing “X” you thought of X, but in seeing the video you realized it was about Y, were you lessened or bettered for the visual correction? We never decided, although we knew that the song, post-video, was changed forever.

I finally got my MTV in the late '80s when I moved to Manhattan. We had more bottles by then, not only the brown ones in the refrigerator, but the clear ones behind the bar. We were growing up, and caring less about the current music, and its offspring — the music video. But we got our MTV, just in time perhaps. These were the Guns 'n Roses years — “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Patience,” etc. The VJs were different, and more out front. They seemed to have become trappings, rather than VJs. And across MTV, there were suddenly more trappings than videos.

All of this seems fully, and sadly, nostalgic now, because you know the rest of the story. By the 1990s, MTV had broadened its original content at the expense of the video. The aging MTVers cried “I want my MTV back” and then “I no longer want my MTV.” The laments continued in the more rusty corners up through last week, the 20th anniversary party-week for the station, which was akin to celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Elvis, an occasion he'll never attend. Yes, you hear of things called MTV2, or M2 — the all-video, all-the-time offshoot that is harder to get than the original MTV. But you care even less when it's no longer your music, or your scene. No, there was once upon a time a cable station called MTV, and it was very unique to itself.

Saying all this, I feel like the old man remembering nickel Cokes, and how the caramel nectar would fall from red machines in clear, cold, glass bottles. I have chosen my bottle, and have drunk nostalgically. Such is the remedy when recalling the defunct.


(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)

Subscribe to CE
(It's free)

Go to Catholic Exchange homepage

MENU