I Want My MTV

MTV used to be relevant.

The network, which launched 30 years ago today with the apt “Video Killed the Radio Star,” helped usher in changes in the way visual arts were produced while also breaking cultural barriers in the music business.

I remember watching it shortly after it launched here in Central Jersey – South Brunswick did not get cable until 1982 or 1983, so MTV was already established by the time we watched it for the first time in Annie’s living room in Kendall Park.

We went out of our way to watch it back then. It was new and we were see videos from bands that were not on the radio – mostly because the new bands were smart enough to make videos at a time when the established bands were not. MTV needed to play something, so Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance” was in heavy rotation, rising to No. 3 on the Billboard pop charts, and former punkers like Billy Idol used their image to take mediocre New Wave to the top spot on the charts.

Watching it today is a bit different. While there are multiple channels devoted to music and other programming, its larger impact has been muted. Like Rolling Stone magazine, another youth-culture icon, it has become little more than cultural wallpaper.

It wasn’t always the case, however. Its influence – cultural and political – ran pretty deep:

It helped turn New Wave music into Classic Rock. Without MTV, bands like the Cars, Blondie and the British hair-synth bands would have had a much more difficult hill to climb to radio respectability. In some cases, to be honest, that would have been a good thing (ABC, anyone?). But the overall impact was to elevate bands like The Pretenders and the Talking Heads from their cult status to broader acceptability.

It sold hip-hop to white, suburban teens. Hip-hop was not being played on mainstream radio in the 1980s, but Run DMC, Dr. Dre and Tupac were being played on MTV. What was striking about this was that the music station (yes, MTV used to stand for Music Television) made a conscious decision at the beginning not to play music by black artists (no Rick James, though the American version of “Der Kommissar,” which echoed James’ “Super Freak” was a staple of the channel) until Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” exploded MTV’s color line.

Rock the Vote, one of its efforts to engage young adults politically, registered millions, though I find it difficult to call the campaign a success because most of those newly registered voters failed to vote.

It launched reality television’s rebirth in the modern television era. While reality TV has a long history reaching back to TV’s inception, the modern version got its start with MTV’s “Real World.,” which showed TV producers that American audiences were just as shallow as their British counterparts and the full wave of vacuous TV nonsense that we have been subjected to over the last decade.

And, as I mentioned earlier, it changed the way we looked at advertising, movies, TV and even political campaigns, which took on the production ethos of rock videos, with jump cuts, montages and frenetic pacing.

A 2006 Boston Globe piece, for instance, bemoans the “chaotic, rat-tat-tat style of assembly” that has been cropping up not just in the big-money action flicks but in the softest of romantic comedies.

A shift occurred at some point and MTV, like Rolling Stone before it, lost its cultural cache and found itself following the culture rather than helping to set the cultural agenda. Maybe it was the success of “The Real World,” which spawned further reality programming and crowded out music videos. Maybe it was the disarray in which the music business finds itself.

Or maybe, it’s technology. Michael Stipe, of R.E.M.,  says You Tube has taken over for MTV when it comes to promoting  bands – which makes sense. I know few people who go to cable television to find new music, but who get caught up in the viral possibilities of a You Tube video.

For me, podcasts have replaced radio and MTV as a way of finding new music.

MTV, it appears, may just be a victim of the changing technology – which is appropriate, I guess, given that it owed its former prominence to the changing technology of its heyday. Cable television allowed niche channels like MTV to prosper – because they could get by with a smaller audience than the bigfoot TV stations. The smaller audience requirements meant that MTV did not have to follow the major media outlets and could pave its own way.

YouTube and its technological brethren are only the logical extension of this, more democratic in a choose-for-yourself way. PCs, laptops, handheld devices and cheap video and audio equipment mean that anyone can record a song or create a video and YouTube allows these homemade efforts to be distributed without cost. As for audience, that has become irrelevant. Produce the video, post it and move on. If it catches on, you may get rich and famous. If it doesn’t, you make another video.

MTV may have been able to get by with smaller audiences than the networks, but it still needed an audience to attract advertisers and make money. And audience of one just wouldn’t cut it.

So, MTV turns 30 today and rather than celebrating a vibrant and necessary component of the media landscape, we are left to wax nostalgic, to ask “where were you when MTV made its first appearance on cable?”