In addition to convincing cable operators to take the station, the fledgling MTV had to sell itself to the record industry in order to get them to supply the promos free of charge. The main things that MTV had to offer were that it would be the nearest thing to a nationwide radio station that then existed in the United States and that it would serve as a tool for record companies to breakout new music, a function that radio had ceased to fulfill as it had grown more conservative in the late seventies. Unlike Britain, with its national, state-run pop station Radio One, American radio was a Balkanized welter of city-based and regional stations, further fragmented by formats that were precisely geared to please audience demographics defined by age, taste, and race. The radio stations were incredibly competitive, yet sounded extremely similar to the naked ear. This stemmed in part from the way that stations increasingly contracted their programming out to radio consultant firms, who turned playlist selection and format adjustment into a behaviorist science.
Then and now, American radio resembles a gigantic machine for ensuring that people almost never encounter any music they’re not already predisposed to like. The motor-fear of radio programmers is the fickleness of listeners, whom it’s believed will instantly flip to another channel if they hear something that offends them. Hence the emergence of the classic-rock format toward the end of the seventies, the play-it-safe selection of audience favorites spiced with a few recent hits. Overly cautious radio programming created a terrible sluggishness in the American record industry. It was one factor behind the dramatic slump in record sales that began in 1979. After all, if the radio’s mostly playing things its listeners already like and probably already own, it’s not likely to get them rushing out to the record store.
Punk and New Wave had fared badly in the United States in large part because of conservative radio programming, too. From the start, MTV focused on what the industry then called New Music. Roughly equivalent to New Pop but slightly more expansive, the category also included New Wave artists such as Elvis Costello, the Psychedelic Furs, and the Pretenders. Equally crucial was MTV’s nationwide reach. Unlike in Britain, where singles often entered the charts high (or even at number one), hits almost always built up their momentum slowly in the United States, thanks to the uneven way that radio stations across the country added records to their playlists. The national impact of a record getting into heavy rotation on MTV had a dramatic effect on what Simon Frith calls “the
velocity
of sales.”
In the first year and a half after its August 1981 launch, MTV’s national reach was limited. Many regional cable operators didn’t carry the channel, and only 25 percent of American homes were wired for cable to begin with. But wherever it was available, MTV’s impact was extraordinary. Unlikely Middle American towns suddenly experienced dramatic spikes in sales of New Music. Still, it was embarrassing for MTV that it was unavailable in either of America’s two music industry capitals, New York and Los Angeles. The channel’s solution was to appeal directly to the youth with the “I Want My MTV” campaign. Broadcast on network stations in the summer of 1982, the ads featured stars such as Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, Adam Ant, Stevie Nicks, and Pat Benatar instructing frustrated would-be MTV viewers to “call your cable operator now” and demand that they start broadcasting the channel. The campaign worked. MTV debuted in Manhattan in September 1982 and in Los Angeles a few months later.
Early MTV was a curious animal, almost inadvertently radical. Because videos from domestic major-label acts were scarce, the channel depended on promos from the U.K. and Europe, where the pop video was already well established. Artists such as Queen, David Bowie, Abba, and the Boomtown Rats had specialized in striking promo clips. London already had the beginnings of a video industry in the late seventies, including such future auteurs of the form as Russell Mulcahy, creator of the promo for the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the very first clip MTV played. This pretty much set the tone for MTV’s early programming. They only had a few hundred videos at their disposal, 75 percent of them from England. More often than not, the videos for U.K. New Pop acts were far more imaginative and entertaining than those made for established American rock acts such as REO Speedwagon. Like the original British Invasion bands, the New Pop groups were attuned to style. Many had been to art college, and even those who hadn’t usually possessed a glam-assimilated visual literacy that simply wasn’t the norm in America. Even if the bands didn’t direct or storyboard their own promos, they were already innately more videogenic than the Americans. Poseurs to the manner(ed) born, they just projected to the camera better.
A few arty Americans also benefited from this early phase of MTV. Devo already had half a dozen videos in the can when the channel launched. Gerald V. Casale remembers MTV’s programming director Bob Pittman and promotions director John Sykes courting Devo over dinner. “They pitched us the whole MTV concept and told us why we should give them our videos for free. And of course, still being idealistic artists, we really thought, ‘This is it, they understand what we’ve been trying to do.’ We were so elated and thought, now we’re going to be able to do what we want, make feature films.” Like the Residents with their aborted
Vileness Fats
movie, Devo had dreamed of making “an anticapitalist science-fiction movie” and wanted to be the first rock band to exploit the mixed-media potential of the laser disc format by making full-blown video albums.
These fantasies never quite came to fruition, but all of Devo’s singles came with impressive promos directed by Casale either on his own or in collaboration with the band’s filmmaker buddy Chuck Statler. The imagery for “Girl U Want” matched the music’s Knack-style jack-off beat with its parody of American pop TV shows. An audience of screaming teenage girls flail and jive in grotesque regimented patterns, the unlikely object of their adoration being the pasty, geeky Devo. “Freedom of Choice” featured the heavily masked Devo as nerdy aliens delivering the group’s most straightforward and unsparing critique of America’s consumer society and political system yet: “Freedom of choice is what you’ve got/Freedom from choice is what you want.” “Through Being Cool,” the lead single from Devo’s fourth album,
New Traditionalists,
was more oblique about its anti-Reaganism. It depicted the Smart Patrol, socially conscious teen misfits scooting around their hometown with laser guns, zapping brain-dead joggers and other symbols of eighties inanity.
All of Devo’s early videos garnered heavy MTV airplay, alongside a handful of similarly video-savvy American New Wave groups such as Blondie, the Cars, the Stray Cats, the Go-Go’s, and Talking Heads. The latter’s “Once in a Lifetime” was an MTV favorite (despite never being released as a single in the United States) thanks to its brilliantly strange video choreographed by Toni Basil, in which David Byrne plays a kind of postmodernist televangelist preacher. Byrne remembers the early days of MTV fondly. “You could do a vaguely experimental film thing as cheaply as you possibly could, and if it was connected to a song, MTV would play it because they needed stuff desperately in those days. So you didn’t have to tour in order to build up an audience. It was a bit like how I imagine the early days of pop singles were. You’d record something real quick, and then a month later it’d be a forty-five single in jukeboxes and it would be on the radio.”
It took most American groups longer to grasp the artistic and promotional potential of the video, and this interval was the gap through which the British infiltrated the mainstream. The first hit that owed almost everything to its video and MTV’s support was A Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran (So Far Away),” which reached the
Billboard
Top 10 in the fall of 1982. This Liverpool group came to symbolize the entire British Invasion era in the minds of its enemies on account of singer Mike Score’s impressively ludicrous hair. If you managed to listen past the flying-saucer-like pompadour, A Flock of Seagulls essentially played a sort of postpunk lite. The heavily effected guitar was as prominent as the synths and really quite pleasing, not a million miles from Alan Rankine’s style. John Peel had enthusiastically supported the band early in their career. But Score’s coiffure (being a hairdresser was his day job) made them the ultimate image-over-content band as far as American trad-rockers were concerned.
The English group that truly became synonymous with the power of MTV was Duran Duran. At the height of their success, Duran made veterans of 1977 complain that “it’s like punk never happened.” Indeed, the grievance was so widespread
Smash Hits
writer Dave Rimmer eventually used it as the title of a book about New Pop. But Duran Duran, as it happened, had come up through the same Birmingham-area scene as Swell Maps, and their initial concept was about as postpunk as imaginable: the Sex Pistols meets Chic. Soon, Duran Duran became the key figures in Birmingham’s New Romantic scene. Like their London contemporaries Visage and Spandau Ballet, they quickly made their mark by harnessing the power of video, first with “Girls on Film” (seminaked fashion models cavorting in a wrestling ring) and then with a series of glitzy promos for the singles off their second album,
Rio
. Persuading their record company to cough up funds for a working holiday in Sri Lanka, Duran flew out with director Russell Mulcahy in August 1982 and shot three videos’ worth of tropical backdrops and scantily clad models. Blending vapid exoticism with soft-core, calendar-girl eroticism, the promos went into heavy rotation on MTV. The one for “Rio,” especially, defined their new, brazenly aspirational image, with the band posing on a yacht surrounded by models that could have come straight from the covers of those classic first five Roxy Music albums. By this point Duran had traded their flouncy New Romantic look for a more Bryan Ferry–like jet-set image. By 1983, Duran Duran were global megastars. The band still entertained some higher ambitions, which leaked out in the ripe gibberish of Simon LeBon’s lyrics, the increasingly overblown videos, and the artistic affectations of keyboardist Nick Rhodes, who idolized Japan’s David Sylvian and followed his dandy-aesthete lead by dabbling in Polaroid art. But musically they shed any lingering synthpop futurist trappings in favor of straightforward catchiness, as on the Beatles-y single “Is There Something I Should Know.”
Even more than Duran Duran, the Thompson Twins were a classic example of a postpunk group who went through a drastic remodeling process to emerge as shiny New Popsters. In 1981 they were Johnny-come-lately types located somewhere between Scritti Politti and Pigbag, a seven-strong collective into percussion and personal politics. At one 1981 gig, singer Tom Bailey informed the audience that the group had been forced to cover up some sexist murals at the venue because the Thompson Twins “could never perform where such materials were on show.” Something of that earnest vibe endured even after the group shrank to a pop-oriented trio and Bailey started talking about intentionally making disposable pop. The gender and racial balance was impeccable: one white male (Bailey), one black male (Joe Leeway), one white female (Alannah Currie, who’d originally been inspired to buy a sax after seeing the Pop Group). In their cartoonish videos, the threesome’s oddly asexual charisma was redolent of the dungaree-clad hosts of some progressive seventies children’s TV program. Their ruthlessly tuneful MTV hits, such as “Hold Me Now” and “Love on Your Side,” lingered in the brain like tapeworms. By 1984’s
Into the Gap,
the Thompson Twins’ global sales made them the Burger King of pop. “A multinational corporation is exactly what we are, bigger than a lot of the companies that are quoted on the stock exchange,” said Bailey. What B.E.F. had parodied with a knowing socialist wink, the Thompson Twins had actually become.
Eurythmics were the one British Invasion group that American rock critics grudgingly acknowledged as “quality.” Maybe they somehow sensed that the duo of Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox had paid their dues and built their skills the old-fashioned way. Indeed, they were industry veterans who’d been doggedly slogging their way to fame since before punk. An accomplished guitarist and former acid casualty, Stewart had joined a band in 1969 called Longdancer, who later signed to Elton John’s Rocket label. Before forming Eurythmics, Stewart and Lennox—whose commanding vocals had more in common with Scottish blues rocker Maggie Bell than a New Popster like Clare Grogan—had briefly tasted success in a sixties-style guitar pop band called the Tourists. When that petered out, they remade themselves into an electronic duo. After briefly flirting with the experimental vanguard (the debut Eurythmics album,
In the Garden,
featured Can’s Holger Czukay and D.A.F.’s Robert Görl), they quickly latched on to New Pop. On massive MTV hits such as “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” their sound and image was a canny composite of Grace Jones (the domineering vocals, the cropped haircut, the mannish build) and Kraftwerk (the icy electronics, the cyborg aura). The video for “Who’s That Girl?” cleverly turned Bowie’s gender-bent “Boys Keep Swingin’” inside out, with Lennox playing both male and female roles. At one point, Lennox’s male and female personae kiss.
Underneath the modish patina of borrowed cool, though, Eurythmics’ success depended on the thoroughly traditional strengths of Stewart’s song craft and Lennox’s soul power. Their album
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
even featured a cover of the Sam and Dave classic “Wrap It Up.” “The music’s timeless, you see,” Stewart told
Rolling Stone
. “That’s why we don’t say we’re part of this new English pop invasion. We just say we’re in a continuum of what we’ve been doin’ for ages. That’s why on [British TV rock show]
The Whistle Test…
they couldn’t really call us a synth-pop duo, when we’re standin’ there with eight gospel singers, a grand piano and an acoustic guitar. That could have been in 1971, or it could be 1986.” In this respect, they resembled Paul Young, another music biz veteran (he’d toiled for years in the soul revival troupe Q-Tips) who passed for New Pop by daubing Japan-style fretless bass all over recordings such as his big U.S. hit “Every Time You Go Away,” the latter written by another blue-eyed soulster, Daryl Hall.