I Want My MTV (89 page)

 

STEVE BARRON:
The '80s was a great decade for treading new ground. Punk had come in and chucked everything in the air, so there was this clear path. We had the freedom to decide how to combine new music with a new visual medium. It was kismet, a time that will never happen again. Some of what we created was really sweet and some was really tacky and terrible, but it was what it was.

 

ANN WILSON:
Whatever happened in the '80s, I can barely remember. But it was good.

STEVEN ADLER:
Rock n' roll ended after the '80s. I see bands on TV nowadays, and I could swear it's the same guy I just bought a Whopper from at Burger King. Nobody has a look, nobody really cares.

 

TIM NEWMAN:
I don't direct commercials anymore and have no interest in doing them. But I'd do another video at the drop of a hat. I am available, yes.

 

ADAM CURRY:
I don't get invited to the reunion shows. People at MTV hate me. I'd love to go back.

 

NICK RHODES:
The one mistake we made with MTV, without a doubt: We didn't buy shares.

 

MEIERT AVIS:
Most of the videos on MTV were really bad. Duran Duran, or silly hair band: It was all phony people doing phony shit in phony situations.

 

JOHN TAYLOR:
Call me prideful, but I think the
Duran Duran Greatest
DVD is the best video compilation there is.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
I don't think kids twenty-five years from now will be talking about a specific episode of
My Super Sweet 16
the way we remember things about Duran Duran videos. I'm sure
The Hills
got good ratings, but it weakens the brand.

 

STEVE ISAACS:
I mean, Heidi Montag and her fucking double-G breasts, and her psychopathic ex-husband—that I know this much about those people, I can only blame on MTV.

 

KAREN DUFFY:
The name of my production company is Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe. This company called me back recently to make sure my credit card was real. And they said, “You've got the same name as the girl from MTV. Is that you?' And I said, “Yeah.” And they go, “Wow, you're Duff? You must be, like, sixty.”

 

JULIE BROWN:
When my daughter and I go out together, people come up and mention my work, which makes both of us very proud. If that's all I got out of MTV, then money has nothing to do with it. Then again, that's because I'm rich. If I was broke, living in my car, I'd be like, “Up yours!”

 

CINDY CRAWFORD:
I get a lot of people tweeting, “I loved
House of Style
.”

PAULY SHORE:
The Web site Funny or Die reminds me of how MTV was when I first started: no money, but as much freedom as you want.

 

ADAM CURRY:
I believe I'm the only VJ who has been successful in business after leaving MTV. That is a badge I am often given, and I wear it with pride. I cofounded an Internet company, Think News Ideas, Inc., that sold in 1999 for $450 million, just before the Internet bubble burst. I cofounded another broadcasting company, MEVIO, and we raised almost $50 million from premier venture capital firms.

 

ALAN HUNTER:
When people see the VJs, they have a sense-memory flashback. We were in their lives every day, and we got seared into their brains. We're like a neuron that got triggered, never to be turned off. Some days, it seems like it was yesterday.

 

SUSANNA HOFFS:
The fact that the '80s are now a beloved era is shocking. I never in my life thought I'd meet a person who'd tell me, “The '80s are my favorite era for music.” My knee-jerk response, when I started hearing this, was to say, “Are you crazy? It was terrible. The '60s,
that's
the golden age.” But I realize, there is something wonderful about the lightheartedness of the decade.

 

JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO:
I thank God it's over now. I'm happy that MTV doesn't play videos. As soon as they stopped, music came back. People are making music for the pleasure of it, not to make money, because money's not there any longer. There are good videos on the Internet, done by kids with no money, that are poetic and beautiful. Videos now are better than videos were in the'80s, because they are not made as packaging.

 

DAVE GROHL:
Ten or eleven years ago, Foo Fighters played a gig at a little bar in the Valley, to warm up for a festival tour. Afterwards we had a party and I was talking to this one chick who was a porn star. She was gorgeous. And she said, “I've met you before.” I thought,
Uh-oh, what have I done?

And she said, “I was one of the cheerleaders in the ‘Teen Spirit' video.” I'm like,
Oh my god, now she's a porn star?
Talk about the arc of MTV.

 

TARSEM SINGH:
My generation of directors—me, Fincher, Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek—we ruined your visual world. We grew up on a completely visual culture, and we brought our candy video eyeballs to cinema. It'll always be looked down on, shat on, and they accuse us of being bad for the film world. There's a saying: Politicians, prostitutes, and ugly buildings all get respectable if they last long enough. The same is true for film movements. Shitty or not, in about twenty years, it will seem valid.

 

LEE RITENOUR:
MTV spawned
American Idol
and YouTube. The entertainment world is visual today because of MTV.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
Before MTV, concerts mainly consisted of artists standing onstage, looking at each other. I went to a David Bowie concert in the '70s that was considered state of the art because they had a cherry picker that lifted him up when he did “Major Tom.” But after Michael Jackson and Madonna, shows became
performances
, with spectacular choreography and light shows. MTV changed live concerts.

 

SCOTT IAN:
I couldn't be happier that it's gone. Videos were bigger than radio—that's why so many bands sucked live, because you could just make a video and never have to tour. It enabled bands to become lazy. Now, if you want to sell records, you have to be a good live band and go on tour for eighteen months, like you did before videos.

 

SEBASTIAN BACH:
It's an era that needs to be remembered, if only as a cautionary tale about the music industry and how killer it was, how fucking profitable and successful and fun. It wasn't
American Idol
, it was Americans who were fuckin' idols. We didn't do a karaoke routine to an Aretha Franklin song.

 

FRED SCHNEIDER:
We want to put B52's videos out on DVD, but who's going to buy the DVD if you can get it for free on YouTube?

 

CLIFF BURNSTEIN:
Videos are now short-lived phenomena on YouTube. I read a study that 78 percent of YouTube views come within the first ten days of a video. That shows it's totally fan-driven. You're appealing to the people who already liked you. And what good is that?

 

PAUL McGUINNESS:
MTV and Viacom's utter failure to transfer their huge, worldwide audience from cable television onto the Internet will go down in history as a disaster.

 

KARI WUHRER:
This
Jersey Shore
crap? What the fuck is that?

ADAM HOROVITZ:
I fucking love
Jersey Shore
. “You're excluded from cutlet night!” That's one of my favorite lines ever.

 

ALAN NIVEN:
Jersey Shore,
what does that perpetuate except for the most negative aspects of human behavior? It makes the old, cliché-ridden hard rock videos look tame by comparison.

 

DAVE KENDALL:
MTV was demonized by intellectuals who thought we were debasing pop culture, and by right-wing Christians who saw it as polluting America's youth. I hear the same debate now, about reality programming. It's arrogant and holier-than-thou. People like reality TV. Who am I to judge that?

 

JOHN SYKES:
If you look at MTV recently, they were belly-up, until Snooki saved the network.

 

MIKE DUGAN:
It's not my cup of tea, but God bless them. They're getting 8.0 ratings on that show. If we got a 3.0, we were dancing in the aisles.

 

JOHN TAYLOR:
I don't suppose
Punk' d
ever changed anybody's life. I can't imagine anybody watching that and going, “Hey, now I know what I'm gonna do with my life!”

 

SINEAD O'CONNOR:
MTV has quite a lot to answer for. When video came around, the business transformed, and it became important how you looked. It became more visual and more materialistic. I mean, I hold MTV entirely responsible for the bling culture. It started when they made that show
Cribs
. Now you have a whole generation of young people who've been brought up to believe that fame and material wealth is what it's all about. You don't have young people saying, “I really want to be a singer,” they say, “I really want to be famous.” Then you've created a culture of people who feel they're nothing unless they live in a huge house and have seven cars.

 

NIGEL DICK:
I often find myself defending MTV these days. MTV wanted to keep people watching for half an hour at a time. They couldn't do that by playing a Guns N' Roses video, then a Dire Straits video, then an Eddie Money video. Coke and Nike and Ford weren't going to buy ads unless they knew a viewer was going to sit through the whole program. That's how television works. You place an Apple ad in the middle of
Two and a Half Men
and you've got a guaranteed audience. End of story.

TONY DiSANTO:
Every new generation has made MTV its own. It was no longer their parents' MTV, or their older brother's—it was
their
MTV, and therefore it had to be a very different MTV than what it was before. The audience that misses the old MTV? It's time for them to move on. It's still a network for and about youth culture, whether you're talking
Jersey Shore
or a new Lady Gaga video. MTV was always about being loud and irreverent. It's a different network than when it started, but I think its soul is the same.

 

LADY GAGA:
I do miss when MTV played more music videos. However, it's important to be modern and change with the times. As MTV changes, so does the Internet, and we all change with it. It's now up to the artist to re-revolutionize what it means to put film to music.

 

MICHAEL IAN BLACK:
There's a sense of mourning for MTV among my generation, which I don't share. There are so many other outlets now to find music. The Internet is better suited for that job; within twenty minutes, you can find twenty bands you've never heard of, and see videos from bands you'd likely never hear of, even if MTV still existed in its old form. For a few years, MTV was a great place, if you were into white music. But it was also a business. And the business evolved.

 

LOU STELLATO:
Is Kurt Loder still at MTV? Is he a pile of dust?

 

ED LOVER:
Where is hip-hop on MTV? Bring it back. MTV needs to find two cool guys that love hip-hop as much as Dre and I, and bring back
Yo! MTV Raps
.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
People come up to me and say, “Fab, we wish there was
Yo! MTV Raps
.” I tell them, “So you
really
would want to see me standing there interviewing Soulja Boy?” Then it hits them. I go, “Dude it's not me, it was the music.”

 

“WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC:
I haven't really followed the programming since it became the all-reality, all-Snooki channel. But I very much miss the old MTV.

 

FLEA:
When they were great, music videos on MTV were like a short film festival for housewives in Nebraska. A couple of years ago, I was talking to the film director Milos Forman. He said, “I loved MTV. All those short little films . . . how great.” And it dawned on me how right he was. And now that it's gone, I really miss it.

STEVIE NICKS:
I just want to say,
I
want my MTV. And I'm so sad that MTV doesn't play videos all the time. It breaks my heart. I do, I want it back.

 

RIKI RACHTMAN:
You have no idea how I miss it. If they wanted me to host a rock show again, I'd probably do it for free.

 

GREG HAYMES:
If you Google “worst music videos of the '80s,” I think Blotto are in the Top 10 results. As long as they remember us, that's all we care about.

 

TREVOR HORN:
A couple of years ago, I met a very prominent politician. And he said, condescendingly, “Oh, you're that ‘Video Killed the Radio Star' chap.” And I thought,
Yes. And they'll remember me long after they've forgotten you, mate
.

Carrie Thornton thinks “Let's Dance” is the greatest video ever made and still has a videocassette copy of
The Cure Unplugged
. She was an avid champion of the book at Dutton, and a superb editor in the old-fashioned and seemingly defunct sense of the word. Her assistant, Stephanie Hitchcock, educated us on technological advancements we'd somehow missed in the past twenty years and reminded us helpfully of our production schedule and gently of our failures to be on time. PJ Mark at Janklow & Nesbit took us to lunch, let us choose the restaurant, represented our interests with maternal fervor, and never once asked nervously, “Are you guys making progress with this book, or what?”