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Although MTV’s “content” focus has been reality TV and other adjacent schlock for many years now, those who remember it as the place to go for new music and groundbreaking videos by artists who once invested the time, effort and money into making them have been saddened to learn of the official loss of the “M” in MTV (formerly Music Television, but now, one supposes, just “Television”). That is to say, the music has been booted in an authoritative capacity, with Paramount, MTV’s parent company (and itself presently “A Skydance Corporation”), opting to jettison five of MTV’s “offshoot” channels—the ones that actually play videos—in the UK: MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live. While this doesn’t include the “plain” version of the channel in the US, where MTV was birthed, it still signals a larger indication of just how far the channel has fallen from its proverbial heyday.
When it hit the airwaves for the first time on August 1, 1981 (at 12:01 a.m.), the inaugural video was The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” A pointed statement to make as the world was on the brink of an entirely new kind of “modernism” when it came to pop culture. The music video was beyond radio, TV and film—mixing all of those elements to form an entirely new—and ultimately far more powerful and influential—entity. An entity that would shape the next few generations. Not just their style and taste, but the way in which they “absorbed” media. Because if parents thought attention spans of the youth were “short” then, they could never have imagined what was coming with the likes of TikTok, ultimate mind flayer. But before that total bastardization of what it would mean to “consume content,” MTV laid the groundwork. Seeing a void to be filled for a generation that was clearly hankering for something like this (but didn’t yet know how to put it into words), there were already one hundred and sixteen music videos to be broadcast in the first day of the channel’s airing.
And that was just the beginning. Because two years later, in 1983, a veritable dam had opened, unleashing the music video prowess that seemed innate to both Madonna and Michael Jackson. For both 1958-born pop music icons (still billed, to this day, as the Queen and King of Pop) would have some dominating videos on MTV in ‘83. Of course, it was Jackson’s year for churning out the “blockbuster” videos of the Thriller album: “Billie Jean,” “Beat It” and, the biggest of all, “Thriller.”
Even so, Madonna’s output in ‘83 was not to be discounted, with “Everybody” (filmed in December of ‘82) and “Burning Up” in rotation frequently enough to dispel the average listener’s initial belief that Madonna was a Black artist. A misconception that was probably a compliment to her, but, at the same time, M was aware that being white would better serve her money-making/commercial possibilities. By 1984, Madonna’s self-titled debut, released the year prior, was really starting to gain traction thanks to the next duo of music videos from Madonna released that year: “Lucky Star” and “Borderline.”
However, it was during the final months of 1984 that Madonna would truly become a household name thanks to the part MTV played in promoting the eponymous lead single from her sophomore record, Like A Virgin. Even before the video was out or the song was an official single release, Madonna decided to debut “Like A Virgin” in a big way during the First Annual MTV Video Music Awards. It was on that night of September 14, 1984 that the long-bubbling symbiosis between Madonna and MTV was crystallized. And forever etched into the public consciousness thanks to Madonna descending from the top of a giant, three-tiered wedding cake all dressed in white as she ironically sang about how she was made to feel “shiny and new” and “like a virgin, touched for the very first time” thanks to her new love. And her new love, ultimately, was MTV. Though it wasn’t always a love that cut both ways. Something Madonna addressed in honor of the network’s tenth anniversary in 1991, when she made a special tribute video during which she said the following (while dressed in her Greta Garbo-chic hair, makeup and attire and filmed in black and white), shot in a manner that makes abrupt cuts to her next “non sequitur” (but ultimately all related) train of thought:
“I’m here because I wanted to talk to you about…us. And all that we’ve been through. I wanted to talk about me and you. I remember when we first met. You didn’t know who you were yet. I didn’t know who I was. We grew up together. So ten years, what’s the big deal, huh? I’m not one of those people that wears clothes just because somebody gave it to me for free. Although I do like this diamond. Are diamonds really a ten-year anniversary present? You think you can make me forget everything just by giving me this? You expect me to come running back to you every time you give me a present? When will you understand that I am a person and not a thing? That I deserve to be treated like a person and not a thing! I turn my back—for one minute—and you find somebody else. You’ve been hanging out with tramps with cheap clothes and bad songs to sing. I’ve got a tattoo on my behind too, you think you’re gonna see it? I know why you spend time with her: because she’s not threatening… She doesn’t make you laugh, she doesn’t make you cry… I won’t even go into the men you’ve been hanging around with… You’ve never had more fun with anyone else—and you know it.”
That was and is still the truth when it comes to MTV and its most iconic moments. For even the Britney Spears ones are rooted in “Madonna-ness” (most especially the 2003 VMAs). But, more than that, the speech would touch on a number of apropos and foreshadowing points regarding the direction MTV had taken in its then still germinal period. It was like a harbinger of how the network would continue to mutate as the 90s went on. For, only a year after Madonna’s immortalized “love letter,” the network would premiere its first reality show (for some, arguably, the first “proper” reality show), The Real World, in 1992. Granted, before that, House of Style was one of MTV’s earliest deviations from focusing on music as it decided that taking to “the streets” to give the hoi polloi a snapshot of the latest fashion trends, as well as the lives of supermodels (still an ever-burgeoning concept that OG House of Style host Cindy Crawford helped solidify), was just as important as playing music videos.
Of course, by the time the late 90s rolled around, the original “premise” of MTV was all but gone, with “content” taking over instead (though that isn’t to say some of said programming wasn’t actually brilliant [see: Daria]). Which is why Say What? started airing in 1998—because it was a show designed to do what MTV had originally been “all about”: playing music videos. The fact that the network had to make such a concerted effort to “block out time” (usually no more than an hour) to do what their unofficial mission statement had originally been was, well, not a good sign…to say the least. And then came a slew of other shows in the spirit of Say What?: 12 Angry Viewers, MTV Live, Artist’s Cut, and Total Request. It was the latter, in its Total Request Live format, that would signal the third phase of MTV and its influence on a new generation. To be sure, many tween and teenage millennials would spend their after-school hours watching TRL while “doing homework.” And yes, it was during this era when Britney Spears became the reigning queen of the network, serving as the twenty-first century edition of Madonna with her own indelible visuals, including “…Baby One More Time,” “Oops!…I Did It Again” and “Toxic.”
Reality-type shows centered on the “hottest” musicians of the day also extended into programming like Punk’d and Making the Video (Britney was a staple on both). And even the VMAs continued to offer up a steady stream of “iconic” moments up to a certain year (the Taylor and Kanye incident of 2009 being of particular note)—but probably the last major “moment” was Beyoncé doing her baby bump reveal after singing “Love On Top” at the 2011 VMAs. The lack of “memorable MTV” instances wasn’t necessarily because the network stagnated. No, instead, it just kept getting worse. But, perhaps even more than that, it had lost its core audience. Generations that no longer cared about such things (e.g., music, style, what’s “relevant” in pop culture) as they once did, having grown into the very kind of person Avril Lavigne had warned about in “Sk8r Boi” (“She sits at home/Feeding the baby, she’s all alone”). More damaging still, those generations had joined the likes of Gen Z in getting their music and pop culture fix from other internet and app-centric outlets. Even for all of MTV’s best efforts to pivot itself toward being just as available via the internet, it didn’t have the same clout.
Then came the first truly gut-punching portent of full-tilt doom: the deletion of the entire online archive of MTV News. That meant years and years of music journalism flushed into the proverbial abyss in the wake of layoffs and the shuttering of MTV News altogether. Ever since, the descent into total oblivion for MTV has been all but guaranteed. And sure, maybe it will keep the lights on, so to speak, with some of its “tentpole” offerings (like the VMAs and, in Britain, Geordie Shore), but there’s no denying that MTV will never again be the vibrant, cutting-edge network that molded culture and public taste as it once did. Yet that isn’t entirely its own fault. Indeed, perhaps it’s best to quote Madonna paraphrasing Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond when she said in the abovementioned speech, “I am big. It’s the videos that got small.” And oh, how they have—whittled down to barely thirty seconds of “content” on a petite smartphone (that oxymoron of a word).
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Genna Rivieccio
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