Posted on 10/15/2025 1:55:01 PM PDT by Kid Shelleen
There was a time when three letters defined cool. M-T-V.
If you grew up anywhere between the neon ’80s and the streaming 2000s, MTV wasn’t just television, it was a lifestyle. It gave us Madonna before social media, Nirvana before YouTube, and Beyoncé before Instagram. It shaped music, fashion, and the very idea of youth culture.
Now, after more than forty years of rewiring global pop culture, MTV is beginning to power down some of its most iconic music channels around the world, and for millions of fans, it feels like saying goodbye to an old friend.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.yahoo.com ...
Now look at them yo-yos....
Decades ago. They're being completely deceptive calling it a "music" channel.
MTV is a music channel? Who knew.
Empty V.
Music videos were dead long before Spotify. They were dead even before Napster.
In 1982-1983, I would go with my friends to the projection TV at the student center to watch new videos released.
When is the time they actually played “music”?
They used to be really good- at a time when not everyone had cable. Interviews, major rock starts as guest VJs, they aired the entire Live Aid concert...
But they’ve become so left wing and so idiotic its a channel you regularly pass over...
Adam Sandler got his start on “Remote Control”.
They launched the music video. Dire Straights Money for Nothing, Micheal Jackson’s Thriller, Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel amongst many others.
Video Killed the Radio Star.
Yep, it was all downhill when they started “MTV News”.
I remember at the time when music videos just came into the fore that a lot of people pointed out it would kill music because, in the past (when music was only listened to and not usually seen) music had a more personally experiential aspect to it. It formed the background of our lives and experience and created memories. Even if it were just playing in the background on some tinny little radio, it formed the soundtrack of our lives. So many of us can hear a song and have it take us back 20, 30, 50 years and immediately recall was going on in our lives at that time. Video, however, formed it's own impression as it often played out a performed story to the music which replaced the musical memory with some video producers interpretation of it. Thus, the thinking went, people weren't able as much to make music as personal and leave the impression that it once did.
I don't know a lot of young people these days of have access to their experience with today's music, but my general impression is that music overall is not the personal and cultural memory maker that it once was. I'd be glad to learn different.
David, sell MTV Networks. NFL wants it gone.
Video Killed The Radio Star
Video Killed the Radio Star and Fish Heads were the first two, IIRC.
Those were the days.
Correct.
The first song on MTV was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, which aired at the network’s launch on August 1, 1981
Didn’t know that about Sandler…
You’re right about MTV News!
What wholly ended my tuning in even once a year for the VMA’s was the Kanye West/Taylor Swift fiasco. Remember that? That and The Kardashians had just premiered on E!
All pop culture was just in free fall from there.
MTV made many musicians stars that would have come and gone without a blip.
MTV killed their own golden goose by playing reality shows and getting into leftwing politics.
Headbanger’s Ball was must-see TV in the early 90s.
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