Reports of the death of music videos have been greatly exaggerated. But that’s only fair, because over-the-top exaggeration is what music videos are all about. Today MTV and CMT may be on fire, but no one can kill the dream of music videos. Why? They are the best star-making instrument the pop world has ever invented. The ultimate expression of rock star fantasy that has survived all the countless predictions of its demise. As one of MTV’s greatest stars of all time once asked: Isn’t that ironic? Don’t you think so?
MTV launched on August 1, 1981which means that probably on August 2nd people started complaining that MTV wasn’t playing music anymore. But MTV actually doesn’t play music anymore. And that’s nothing new. Fans still devour videos just as much as artists love producing them. They remain a phenomenally popular concept.
As Lady Gaga said in 2010 when she dominated the VMAs, “God put me on this earth for three reasons. To make loud music, to make gay videos and to cause fucking trouble.” Fifteen years later, Gaga is still making gay videos and still causing trouble. But MTV would rather be left out of this narrative.
MTV shuts down its music channels
The broadcaster made headlines around the world when it announced it would be shutting down its music channels in the UK and Europe. But meanwhile in the US, MTV continues to do what it has been doing for years: broadcasting non-stop “Catfish” and “Ridiculousness” reruns. Even though MTV just canceled Ridiculousness after an incredible 46 seasons, they have enough episodes in stock to last forever. Jersey Shore: Family Vacation is still in production – eight seasons and no end in sight, longer than the original – with no way out for these poor Guido prisoners; it is the “Hotel California” by GTL.
MTV Classic continues to broadcast music around the clock, in oldies blocks such as “I Want My Eighties”, “Nineties Nation”, “Yo! Hip Hop Mix”, “Total Request Playlist” and “Metal Mayhem”. MTVU and MTV Live show new music, MTV2 limits itself to sitcom reruns, and VH1 ensures that no one has to lie awake at night wondering what ever happened to “Nick Cannon Presents Wild N’ Out.”
The decline of music formats on television
Country network CMT just announced the end of its flagship show Hot 20 Countdown, the last surviving music program between endless reruns of “Golden Girls” and “Mama’s Family.” Like MTV, CMT is owned by Paramount, which just merged with Skydance Media. Last year, Paramount pulled the plug on the annual CMT Awards — after more than two decades. It’s a cost-cutting corporate giant that’s constantly decimating its staff and destroying its archives, like Billy Idol blasting the zombies off the roof in the “Dancing with Myself” video.
But at the same time, Spotify announced that it would launch music videos in the US and Canada after already testing them abroad. In the future, listeners will be able to decide whether they want to listen with or without video, as Spotify moves into the streaming market alongside YouTube. It’s a sign of the times – a turning point for the music video.
How MTV changed pop culture
MTV sparked the music video revolution in the ’80s and changed pop culture: Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Duran Duran in the hair decade era. Nirvana, Biggie, Alanis and Missy in the nineties. The Y2K explosion of Britney, NSync and Backstreet Boys, carried by Carson Daly and his Total Request Live fan armies. Beyoncé, Gaga, Drake and Taylor in the 2010s. What a legacy. That’s why MTV lives on in the cultural imagination – people remember it as the motherland of music videos, even though the channel has virtually stopped playing them for years.
It was pure desperation that made MTV the most innovative and adventurous phenomenon of its time. When the station went on the air in 1981, fans went crazy over the concept – 24/7 music videos. But that meant 24 hours of filling time per day and far too little content to fill it. Nobody made videos back then, nobody except weird British posers and art geeks and thirsty postpunk eccentrics, so MTV was forced to play everything.
MTV never planned to start a music revolution – they probably would have preferred to play the same generic corporate rock that was on the radio. But something strange happened: Video sluts like Duran Duran, Culture Club and Adam Ant became superstars in America’s heartland (where there was cable TV), even though radio ignored them and even though they broke all the rules. As Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes told ROLLING STONE in 1984, “Video is to us what stereo was to Pink Floyd.”
The early glory days
The early days of MTV were an anarchic culture-collision spectacle – a chaotic mix of different sounds, styles and genres. Prince was the most obvious example: the ultimate MTV star, the pure video fantasy in purple. He became obsessed with watching the Minnesota channel and made his classic 1999 under the influence of New Romantic synth bands like Spandau Ballet and the Durannies. MTV played “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” over and over again when radio didn’t dare. Everything that made Prince unacceptable to the pop world – his rebel-rebel flamboyance, his sexuality, his category-busting nature, his experimental volatility – made him a hero to MTV audiences.
David Bowie, who had already inspired all of these artists with his groundbreaking ’70s videos, became bigger than ever as he grooved to “Let’s Dance.” Van Halen made their own low-budget DIY video for “Jump” – the budget was a few hundred dollars for beer and chips – but David Lee Roth and a video camera were a match made in rock ‘n’ roll heaven. Cyndi Lauper became a feminist icon of the new generation when she paraded through the streets with her new wave parade in “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Tina Turner showed her power in “Ball of Confusion” at a time when the rest of the music world thought she was finished – the lead-in to Private Dancer and everything that followed.
MTV as a cultural temple
Any veteran could join in if they brought heart and humor – whether Donna Summer was dancing dressed as a waitress, Dean Martin was singing poolside with pastel-colored models, or Robert Plant was going through his tragically short-lived breakdancing era. Even ZZ Top, the bearded Texas blues buzzards, the proudly most unfashionable band in the world, became teen idols – just because they embraced the video craze, with white fur guitars and gender parody. “Our audience aged with us until the videos came and they got a little long-toothed,” Dusty Hill said at the time. “Then the videos came, and now we have the 16-year-old girls again. The 16-year-old girls!”
For generations, MTV was the place to watch music videos (and the place to complain that MTV didn’t play enough of them). There you saw “Yo! MTV Raps” or “Headbanger’s Ball”, “120 Minutes” or IRS’ “The Cutting Edge”, TRL or the VMAs. The channel was what pop culture wanted to be, with its own brands in news, fashion (“House of Style”), comedy (“The State”), cartoons (“Beavis & Butt-Head”), reality trash, sports, politics, Andy Dick (“The Andy Dick Show”), everything. In the ’90s, when not a single Top 40 radio station played the entire Top Ten spectrum, MTV was the country’s most diverse source of music – a 24-hour nationwide teenage riot of noise, chaos and cool. There had never been anything like this before.
MTV is leaving music
Ironically, it was this very weirdness that made MTV big – and at the same time, the channel was eager to escape it and become a normal, respectable, boring channel. They couldn’t wait to stop making videos and start broadcasting the same crappy reality shows, sitcoms, and movie reruns as every other basic cable channel.
The real turning point came in 2004 with the Superbowl halftime show and the infamous “Wardrobe Malfunction,” which led to federal censorship by Colin Powell’s son at the FCC. That’s when MTV decided that getting a foot in the music industry was more trouble than it was worth – promoting all this IP that you don’t even own, and for what? After that, the channel switched completely to non-music reality soaps – although no one would have been interested in these shows if they hadn’t been on MTV with its youth culture cachet.
For decades, MTV has remembered that it was once a star-maker for just a few hours a year – at the annual Video Music Awards. A great moment was when MTV showed “Friday After Next” over VMA weekend – not just a Friday movie, but a Friday Christmas movie, in freaking August. A very special way of signaling to anyone who happened to tune in that MTV would rather broadcast absolutely anything than music videos.
The internet liberates the music video
For many years, video was completely dependent on TV networks such as MTV, VH1, CMT, BET, TNN and The Box. (And can I get an amen for Pants-Off Dance-Off?) But the Internet liberated the art form. Fans today get their kicks from YouTube, TikTok, any social media platform that pops up. Artists can release viral moments faster than ever. If you’re Taylor Swift, you can just bring your “Fate of Ophelia” video and your Life of a Showgirl lyric visualizers to theaters for a blockbuster hit. All of the recent video obituaries are premature, just as the hand-wringing over MTV’s demise seems long overdue. Music videos are universally popular – as always – among fans and artists. Only the play formats were always shaky.
The new Paramount Skydance era
Apparently everything is different for MTV now after the Paramount-Skydance merger. Paramount was once swallowed by Gulf & Western – or as Mel Brooks called it in Silent Movie: Engulf & Devour. In August, Paramount was gobbled up by Skydance in a deal that the FCC approved only after Paramount’s CBS News gave the sitting president a $16 million cash payment. When Stephen Colbert mocked this on air – using the word “bribery” – not only was he fired, but the entire Late Show was shut down. Last year, Paramount casually deleted decades of online archives from MTV, CMT, Comedy Central and more. If you click on MTVNews.com now, you’ll land on an ad for Ridiculousness.
The gutted MTV memory
That means MTV’s legacy has less to do with the remaining channel itself than ever before. One of the best MTV moments involved Beavis and Butt-Head, two American teen idiots who sat on the couch all day and mocked the video stars they saw on MTV. (“These guys are living on the edge.” “Yeah, on the edge of Wuss Cliff!”) But when MTV rebooted the show in 2011, it was telling that they no longer found music videos for the two to watch — even though artists still produced acclaimed clips, from Gaga to Beyoncé, Robyn to Taylor and Drake. MTV just stopped playing it. Today, Beavis and Butt-Head would probably just goon – fitting, since one of their best episodes was a visit to the sperm bank.
“I’m big – it’s the pictures that have become small,” Madonna declared on MTV’s tenth anniversary special in 1991, to an audience a little too young to realize that she was quoting the faded screen diva from Sunset Boulevard. This is a perfect MTV obituary. Like Saturday Night Live, people prefer the version that existed when they were in school – and then spend their lives complaining that things aren’t the way they used to be. And that applies no matter what your personal MTV is – whether “hit me baby one more time” or “here we are now, entertain us”, whether “wubba wubba wubba” or “homeboy wore combat boots to the beach” or “you excluded from Surf and Turf night”.
MTV’s legacy is a cultural upheaval that still looms large – even as the network itself continues to shrink. It’s one of those moments when history speaks in the voice of the ancient philosopher Beavis. That sucks. Get rid of it.