Posted on 12/11/2025 6:29:27 PM PST by Angelino97
The trouble with nostalgia is that it appears to rewire our minds, bringing only pleasant memories to the forefront of our consciousness. It is incredibly effective at erasing the things we don’t want to think about. We remember bubblegum and video games more than malaria or third-world starvation. Our salad days are filtered through rose-tinted glasses; we assume everything was better in the past.
I was thinking about this recently after reading that MTV would be shutting down at the end of this year. As someone born in the final minutes of the 1970s, I am a member of Generation X, the so-called “MTV Generation.”
In many ways, the demise of MTV can be interpreted as part of the fading relevance of Gen X. Stuck between idealistic boomers and optimistic millennials, we’re the self-aware, Chuck Palahniuk-reading pessimists (think Fight Club) who watched every countercultural icon become just another image on t-shirts. It wasn’t that the revolution wasn’t televised; there was no revolution—just the background noise of an overpriced shopping mall and the relentless march toward middle age.
For the first half of its existence, MTV felt genuinely refreshing: It was the first channel dedicated to pumping out music videos 24 hours a day. As a hormonal teenager, I was seduced by the flashy graphics, schizo-editing, and telegenic hosts, all imbued with a youthful rebelliousness. The cable network had an anarchic energy, operating in sharp contrast to the dull, sterile world of traditional mainstream television. It felt dangerous and subversive. At least that’s what you think when you’re 13, high on testosterone and self-righteous fury. Ah, the naïveté of youth!
Upon its launch in 1981, it was a commercial disaster, accruing merely a few hundred thousand dollars in advertising revenue during its inaugural year and incurring losses exceeding $50 million. On the verge of bankruptcy, the network hired famous musicians, such as Mick Jagger, Cyndi Lauper, and David Bowie, to feature in a series of advertisements aimed at encouraging fans to contact their local cable companies with the demand, “I WANT MY MTV!”
By 1992, 60 percent of American households had access to MTV. This rapid growth led to a de facto monopoly over pop culture. The brand dictated fashion, attitudes, and musical tastes. The network employed an old radio strategy called narrowcasting to target a specific demographic within its audience to advertisers.
Mike Judge’s satirical slacker animation, Beavis and Butthead, captured the grunge-oriented aesthetic that characterized Gen X. It wasn’t so much that it had its finger on the pulse as it did on the wallets of every teenager in the Western world. Its programming was built around planned obsolescence. Every few years, a new sound or style revolution sent kids running to thrift stores in search of the latest in-group signifiers and accessories.
Success brought criticism. This was the age of moral panic. MTV, like video games, was yet another “home invader” corrupting the minds and morals of the youth. Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” video enraged cultural conservatives who saw the risqué clothing and lyrics as a symptom of Western civilization’s demise, and the left denounced the network’s unfettered commercialism, which it considered a kind of Faustian bargain, in which integrity was traded for fame. Getting on MTV was part of selling out, basically. The Dead Kennedys yelled “MTV Get Off the Air!” while Beck wrote a song called “MTV makes me wanna smoke crack.”
A remarkable aspect of capitalism is its adaptability—it has evolved to profit from dissent, rather than merely contain it. MTV demonstrated this by co-opting and transforming angst into a marketable product. In a way, it was an embryonic form of woke capitalism—painting a rainbow flag on a cruise missile no more implies that Raytheon favors the lives of transgender people than it does innocent civilians in the Middle East. A new iron law emerged: the counterculture is always commodified, and rebellion is the ultimate spectacle.
The death of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain in 1994 signaled the beginning of the end of MTV’s golden age. As ratings dropped and youngsters tuned out, it did what any struggling company does. To maintain its cultural hegemony, the network reinvented itself. It sidelined the broadcast of nonstop music videos, basically its USP (unique selling position), and in their place, reality shows about trivial teen drama, such as The Real World and Jersey Shore, began to dominate its schedule. If the network had any claims to be revolutionary, it died with the introduction of reality TV.
MTV’s tragic history reads like a laundry list of constant reinventions as it struggled to stay relevant. With its roots in the Walkman era and its growth in the digital age of CDs, MTV couldn’t compete with the internet’s technological innovations. Other media learned to adapt; MTV stuck to its guns. Its current lineup includes Catfish, Teen Mom: The Next Chapter, and Dating Naked. Mark Fisher, the cultural theorist, was right: neoliberalism leads to the “desacralization of culture.”
This is both a criticism and a lamentation. Regardless of its flaws, it drew us together. For a few brief moments, it defined the zeitgeist—every American over the age of 50 can recall where they were when Thriller was released, and Headbangers Ball encouraged a generation to form awful thrash metal bands in our parents’ garages. While it might have felt more like a connection to shopping at Hot Topic, it still brought us together. This connection has been severed, lost to an age of AI slop and doomscrolling as podcasters yell into the ether.
Whatever, never mind…
Shut the MTV Networks down, David. Sell them with selling Fake News CNN.
The only of the “mainstream” MTV channels still playing music videos is CMT, and that’s only six hours a day in the morning.
“I will probably get beat up for this, but I really think MTV destroyed real music.”
Autotune and formulaic song writing killed real music.
She may get love, but she won’t get mine…
Lots of heavy metal bands and pop-metal bands got big via MTV. Would Def Leppard have become as big as they were (and still are) if not for MTV? There's no telling. Probably not as big. Video definitely helped them along.
Martha Quinn was born in Albany, NY, on May 11, 1959, and raised in Ossining, NY. She is the daughter of David Quinn, an attorney, and Nina Pattison, a retirement counselor, and the stepdaughter of financial columnist Jane Bryant Quinn.
You tube feels more authentic. MTV always came across as contrived.
Never got much out of MTV but maybe Beavis & Butthead as a pair on “ungrateful stupes”.
MTV’s legacy is that of an activist cultural sewer during a time of American collapse.
Too bad, because MTV now just sucks and it has been this way for over 20 years.
The Beatles were one of the first groups to use videos.
Strawberry Fields
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtUH9z_Oey8
Honestly the only time I see that it’s still on is when TNT has something decent on (right next to it on our lineup). I scroll up through MTV to get there. I haven’t really stopped there since the early 1990s. And I used to run CATV marketing departments for our region.
And MTV never gave us good stuff for our annual employee golf tournament. So…no great loss.
When they started showing reality shows in the 90’s is when it really started going downhill. When they started playing a lot of rap (Yo MTV Raps) was the beginning of the end.
I would say Rap, politics, and then reality shows is what killed it. They stopped playing music for most of the time was the final end. Really, I don’t know anyone that still watches anymore.
Like someone else said, you can watch youtube now for the music videos you want, so it has no purpose anymore. And it doesn’t play music videos anyway now.
MTV killed grassroots motorsport by taking sprint car racing and grassroots Late Model racing of the Midwest off television. This hurt NASCAR, INDYCAR, and World of Outlaws that they’ve never recovered. They also committed Murder on Music Row in Nashville.
Bingo. My GenX interest was somewhere between zero and none with reality TV and rap music…. and it still is!
IF MTV was wise, they would diversified with the audience, creating unique channels on music preferences. If they did do that I must have missed it. There was that part about going to school and the workforce that became a priority, but if I knew I could watch rock music evolve on such a channel I would have.
Nesmith invented the modern style of narrative music video, and the concept of a music video tv show.
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