I Want My MTV (2 page)

MTV gave work to young directors, producers, and executives who became power brokers in film and TV, most notably David Fincher, who received Academy Award nominations for
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
and
The Social Network
, and Michael Bay, who received no Academy Award nominations, but who made shit blow up real good in
Armageddon
and the
Transformers
series. Videos created ample work for
Playboy
playmates and for choreographers, dancers, mimes, animal trainers, pyrotechnicians, hairdressers, aesthe-ticians, dry-ice vendors, coke dealers, and midgets. (Midgets were a staple of music videos. Midget freelance work surely peaked in the '80s.) MTV did a lot for record labels, helping to revive a slumping industry, but it was the bands who benefitted most. The channel gave a platform to new acts, asking only that they be beautiful or outrageous. MTV could make stars out of Brits in eyeliner, rappers in genie pants, permed Jersey boys, even choreographers with weak singing voices. Within weeks, acts went from journeymen or unknowns to stars whose faces were familiar across the country. Their lives were transformed, sometimes ruined. The story of music videos is also the story of overnight celebrity and the experiences created by celebrity: the indulgence and decadence, the backstage sexual exploits, the drugs that were as ever-present as makeup kits and hair weaves. This is true not only for the artists but for the network executives themselves, most spirited among them former radio program director Les Garland, who partied on yachts with Rod Stewart, cameoed in videos with Eddie Murphy, and charmed centerfolds, actresses, stewardesses, and starlets, often on the same night. A history of MTV is also a history of excess that has since vanished from the music business due to dwindling sales. As Simon Le Bon, the Marlon Brando of music videos, mutters darkly, “Nobody's got any money to make videos now.” From today's frugal perspective, the stories of the video industry's invention, expansion, and domination read like the last days of the Roman Empire, if Nero had been really into dry ice and pyro.

Not all MTV content was fleeting. If an artist's peak coincided with the Golden Age of music videos, there's a good chance that artist is among the few remaining acts who can still sell out sheds, arenas, even stadiums, testament to MTV's pop-cultural dominance in its first decade. Before Xbox and Facebook, the Disney Channel and text-messaging, kids did one thing, separately but simultaneously: They watched MTV. Now those kids are parents, and when they want to relive their youth, they plunk down $250 for a ticket to see Madonna, the Police, U2, Guns N' Roses, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Bruce Springsteen, Motley Crue, George Michael, Michael Jackson (until his death), or Janet Jackson. All were synonymous with MTV's first decade, and all continued to pack enormodomes twenty and thirty years later. Oldsters, purists, clergymen, and boomers carped that MTV's corrupt value system promoted style over substance, impermanence over immortality. MTV and its viewers knew this was a false choice. Videos made songs better, not worse. They enhanced the joy of being a music fan, rather than diminishing it. Unless you were Billy Squier. Then, you were fucked. (See Chapter 21: “A Whopping, Steaming Turd.”)

As the subject of an oral history, MTV is uniquely compelling; the network identity morphs but never peters out. There's no dreary third act where the star gets old, Learns an Important Lesson, and ceases being relevant. Like Charlie Brown or Beavis and Butt-head, the passing of time does not age MTV. It is perpetually fourteen years old, about to start high school, excited, but not too smart. With vampiric persistence, the network perpetually finds new, young blood.

But for us, 1992 marks the end of MTV's Golden Era, which was brought to a close by a series of unrelated factors. Video budgets rose steeply, leading to wasteful displays; digital editing arrived, making it a snap for directors to flit between shots and angles; all the good ideas had been done; record labels increasingly interfered in video decisions; many of the best directors moved on to film; Madonna made
Body of Evidence
. It's also the year MTV debuted
The Real World
, a franchise show that sped a move away from videos, the network's founding mission, and into reality shows about kids in crisis, whether an unplanned pregnancy or how to un-marry Spencer Pratt.
The Real World
was the culmination of the network's initiative to create its own shows and was also the last time MTV could claim to be revolutionary. MTV created the video music industry, then abandoned it, leaving behind a trail of tears—disgruntled music-video fans have stamped the phrase “MTV sucks” and “Bring back music videos” all over the comments pages of YouTube.

 

MTV WAS CREATED BY WARNER AMEX SATELLITE ENTER
tainment Company (WASEC), a joint venture between two companies with little in common: Warner Communications, a fast-growing media company committed to “identifying new markets and new technologies,” and American Express, the credit-card giant, founded in 1850 as a shipping company. Warner executives believed in a future when all homes would be wired, and they invested heavily in cable TV and Atari home computers. (“The computer's emergence as a commonplace object in the home,” Warner's 1981 annual report predicted, “will, in fact, change life all over again for the American consumer.” They were right, but they were also too early to profit from their foresight.) Warner Communications envisioned cable TV as a sales tool, to deliver goods and services directly into the home, and American Express rode along in the hope that soon customers would buy the company's traveler's checks and investment services via two-way, interactive cable TV.

MTV first appeared in suburban and rural areas, where the cost per mile of digging and installing cable was far cheaper than in cities. As a result, it was seen first by teens who probably needed it the most—videos brought big-city ideas to the sticks, and terrified parents who had terrified
their
parents by listening to the Beatles. In small towns or big cities, MTV was like an early social network—when Stray Cats videos aired, showing the trio in rockabilly outfits, fans in the Midwest began coming to shows in cowboy shirts and pompadours. And Mike Score of A Flock of Seagulls, owner of early MTV's most unprecedented hair, says video exposure brought like-minded fans together at clubs where outcasts discovered they were part of a tribe.

Even if it accomplished nothing else, MTV pissed off baby boomers, in part because it signified a transition from an era when the biggest rock stars were bands that transformed public consciousness, to one where technology filled that role. Today, that transformation is complete: Apple sold 275 million iPods in the first nine years they were on the market, which is higher than the number of records sold by Elton John, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, or U2 in their careers. But MTV was the first time technology became a rock star, because—unlike calculators, CD players, or home gaming systems—it was sold at a reasonable price.

Every new technology contains a philosophy. The Walkman told consumers they should never stray far from music, nor were they required to interact with strangers. The iPhone preached permanent access to all media, while also miniaturizing the idea of status. What was the philosophy of MTV? It was best expressed in an Adam Ant song that was an early favorite on MTV: “Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.”

MTV was an invention, as many principals in the story emphasized to us. Music video was “the Wild, Wild West,” a lawless place where nerve and cunning hands were rewarded. “All the rules go away,” Bob Pittman told a reporter in 1981, and other people recall it as a time when “There were no rules.” One cinematographer proudly said, “We had a policy not just to break the rules, but to blow up the fucking rules.”

The people behind MTV had almost no TV experience, so they had no habits or allegiances to limit them—except when it came to picking videos. MTV's programmers came from radio, where the trend was “narrowcasting,” a way of targeting a specific demographic and selling your popularity within that audience to advertisers, rather than aiming for the broadest possible audience. Broadcasting was Ed Sullivan creating a show that mixed the Beatles with Topo Gigio. Narrowcasting was embodied by MTV's initial commitment to playing rock videos, which meant videos by white musicians.

MTV's narrowcasting mission was challenged by Michael Jackson, whose
Thriller
videos transformed the network from a curiosity into a fulcrum. A similar event repeated five years later with rap, a style of music MTV feared, hesitantly embraced, and then built its brand around. Once that occurred, MTV became The Singularity, the last media force that represented an encompassing view of pop culture.

 

HISTORY HAS NOT RECORDED THE DATE, LOCATION, OR
name of the first musician who was filmed playing or singing, but it's likely to have happened soon after the movie camera was invented. Musicians are not modest, and the first one who saw a camera in operation probably suggested, “Hey, why don't you point that thing at me while I play?”

Each decade had its own variation on music videos. In 1930, Warner Bros. Pictures began making “Spooney Melodies,” short performance films of popular songs, including “Just a Gigolo,” later revived by David Lee Roth. In the 1940s, thousands of black-and-white “soundies” were made with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and other suave, camera-ready jazz artists, dancers, and comedians.

Scopitones edged closer to the modern music video—the Scopitone was a coin-operated video jukebox, created in France and bigger than a refrigerator. In the 1960s, they could be found at diners and truck stops across the U.S. An article in
Variety
praised “the jet-paced editing, exceptionally vivid color and generally top-drawer production values” of Scopitone videos, many of which are catalogued on YouTube, where the editing seems, to modern eyes, more tugboat-paced. However, Scopitones were shamelessly lewd and provocative, full of cleavage, bikinis, and enough butt-shaking to match any gratuitous display seen in a Sir Mix-a-Lot or Poison video.

So MTV was the culmination of a fitful relationship that went back twenty-five years. “Since the beginning of time—1956—rock n' roll and TV have never really hit it off,” said Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, shortly after MTV appeared. “But suddenly it's like they've gotten married and can't leave each other alone.” Richards picked 1956 because it was the year of Elvis Presley's debut on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
which delivered a giant audience of 60 million.
American Bandstand
, the first regular music show on TV, arrived the next year. After the Beatles topped Elvis by luring 73 million people to their first Ed Sullivan broadcast, the short-lived musical-variety series
Shindig
and
Hullabaloo
appeared in the U.S., as well as the long-lived
Top of the Pops
in the UK.
The Monkees
was a daffy mid-'60s show about a rock band who acted out their songs in a series of comic, almost slapstick vignettes.

Music shows of the '70s centered on live performances:
The Old Grey Whistle Test
in England, and ABC's excellent
In Concert
, quickly followed by
Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
(hosted by Kirshner, who, years later, claimed credit for MTV and music videos), NBC's
The Midnight Special
(often hosted by the bland soft-pop star Helen Reddy), and PBS's more homespun
Austin City Limits
in 1976. There were even music-video programs prior to MTV: Australia had
Countdown
and
Sounds
, neighboring New Zealand had
Radio with Pictures,
the unhosted show
Video Concert Hall
began on the USA Network in 1978, and WNBC-TV in New York had
Album Tracks
, hosted by future MTV execs Bob Pittman and Lee Masters.

There were plenty of precedents for what began on August 1, 1981. And many pieces of film have been cited as “the first music video”: The Beatles made short films for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”; the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Doors, and Bob Dylan made similar films, as did TV heartthrob Rick Nelson and country star Buck Owens. Queen's 1975 clip for “Bohemian Rhapsody” dazzled forward-thinking Britons and helped the song filibuster at number one across the UK. But the term “music video” (which barely existed before MTV) now connotes a specific set of qualities—aggressive directorship, contemporary editing and FX, sexuality, vivid colors, urgent movement, nonsensical juxtapositions, provocation, frolic, all combined for maximum impact on a small screen—that were not formalized until MTV provided a delivery system. There is no such thing as “the first music video.”

What aired on MTV was so strange and unfamiliar that explaining it proved difficult. The channel's first mention in
Time
magazine contained language you might use to explain a laptop computer to a caveman: “The main ingredients in MTV's programming are ‘video records' or ‘videos': current recordings illustrated by 3- or 4-minute videotapes.” A year later,
Time
writer Jay Cocks was still struggling to familiarize the magazine's audience with MTV, referring to videos as “illustrated songs, little three- or four-minute clips” and “production numbers soaked in blotter acid.”

Even as MTV struggled financially, and employees worried the network could be shut down any day, its influence rippled across the culture, most quickly in film. In a review of the smash 1983 film
Flashdance
, Pauline Kael of the
New Yorker
wrote, “Basically, the movie is a series of rock videos.” She did not intend this as a compliment. The next year,
Flashdance
producer Jerry Bruckheimer got even more MTV-ish with
Beverly Hills Cop
, which spawned videos for the soundtrack songs “Axel F,” “Neutron Dance,” and “The Heat Is On.” “It was free promotion,” says Bruckheimer, “another platform to reach a young audience, and it helped enormously.”