MTV

Ah, yes, MTV is 30.

Which means it came on the air the summer I was 12.

I had a TV in my room as a teen. It was an old TV and it was in color. One of my older brothers had a black and white TV in his room. I didn't watch it all the time...we didn't have 200 channels back then and programming was a lot more limited. Which just made MTV and, later, VH1 that much cooler. Nowadays we have entire channels devoted to mystery shows or shopping shows or eco-friendly shows. Back when MTV came on, CNN was a year old, the first 24-hour news network. CNN really didn't impact me much at age 12, but I do vividly remember the coverage when I was in high school of when Baby Jessica fell down the well and the Challenger exploded. Then in college my friends and I watched coverage from Baghdad as the First Gulf War began, knowing that it would be people we knew, from our generation who would fight this war.

But back to MTV.

Many of the early music videos consisted of the band playing music with a few state-of-the-art-at-that-time graphics or limited storytelling scenarios.





And who could forget:



In college, MTV kept me company late at night after I switched to an art major. I pulled a lot of all-nighters sitting at my drafting table drawing perspectives (I majored in interior design for two years). Videos would play over and over hour after hour. I saw this one a few hundred times:


Billy Idol - Cradle of Love by Discodandan

and the Video Vixen was born:



I mean, really, would any of us have ever heard of Tawny Kitaen without that?

And would this song have been nearly as popular without this video and Bobbi Brown?




Bobbi made the rounds. Groupies had something new to aspire to.



Video was made for 80's hair bands, wasn't it? Or were 80's hair bands made for video?

It's been a while since I've watched much MTV, although now I am much more likely to tune into MTV Classic, where they do still play the occasional music video from back in the day, usually with pop ups.

The internet seems to have killed the MTV Video Age. If the Buggles are still around, they should work on a new single: "reality TV killed the video star". Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?