Posted on 07/30/2021 9:03:52 AM PDT by Eddie01
MTV turns 40 this Sunday. Did any adult child not named Lizzie Borden ever disappoint the parents more than the three-letter network?
“We’re the reason you have no attention span,” original VJ Mark Goodman quips in VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave. “And you can pin reality TV on us too. You’re welcome.”
Yet, those first years were glorious.
From “Video Killed the Radio Star” as its prophetic opening to the evangelistic “I Want My MTV” crusade to spread the good news upon recalcitrant local cable companies to its giveaways of a little pink house, a lost weekend with Van Halen, and trip to the continent Asia to see the band Asia (in which the winner allegedly joined the mile-high club with VJ Mark Goodman on the flight), MTV broadcast as the coolest thing on cable when cable was cool.
[snip]
So at what point did MTV go wrong?
When it began in the mid-1980s to pickoff, one by one, the five original VJs? When Remote Control, the first non-musically themed show on the network, premiered to open the door for Singled Out, House of Style, The Real World, Sex in the ’90s, and other mission-creep programming (some, such as Liquid Television, The State, and Beavis & Butthead, quite good)? When the Dog Brothers, Tommy Cheeseballs, Charlie and Sabrina, and various other Outer Boroughs/Garden State-types obtained their 15 Minutes but unleashed decades of MTV looking at people from areas surrounding Manhattan as Margaret Mead looked upon those Samoans? When they hired so-serious, human-buzzkill Kurt Loder? When the network so thoroughly morphed into an auxiliary of Bill Clinton Enterprises that its producers planted questions, e.g., “Is it boxers or briefs?” — on the teenage participants at its manipulated-to-look-spontaneous presidential forum?
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Too bad they don’t have any music Music TV.............
I want my OLD MTV....................
It wasn’t cool. We were young. LOL
Isn’t that that channel that played music videos in the early 80’s before they became yet a other 24/7 propaganda mouthpiece for the left?
I’m old enough to remember when MTV actually played ROCK music.
Me too and my mother yelling at us to lower it!!!!
Right there with you. I was a teen and it was amazing in the beginning up through about 1995, then it’s been a downhill slide ever since then.
My first exposure to Beavis and Butt-Head and Æon Flux.
Reality TV started with “An American Family,” on PBS in 1973.
MTV was always a 24/7 mouthpiece for the left. They just used to be more subtle about it like the “news” channels were.
when mtv 1st came out it was cool...especially the Saturday night concerts...now it is worthless
Ha! You beat me to it. I was going to post a picture of Martha Quinn. The girl next door, yes indeed.
Exactly! I also remember a time when I’d turn on MTV only to find a comedy series like Beevis & Butthead, then turning on Comedy Central to see musical acts from old SNL reruns. So much for “branding”.
Look at all those yo-yos that’s the way they do it. Play the git -tar on the mtv
What does the M stand for in MTV?
I used to know back in 1985.
It was cool when it started and was cool for a while after but when they pushed music over to VH1 and turned MTV into Reality TV it went to crap in a real hurry. I don’t think it is even worth discussing it.
In the early days the cable company had MTV sound on the FM band. Our cable company had all the FM band on cable. I was one of a very few people who had MTV in stereo on big speakers. Most people were surprised to find out that FM and MTV were on cable.
“Video Killed the Radio Star”
No truer song has ever been written. I called it the “MTV music Holocaust” because it made record execs realize that they could now sell records on sight alone rather than sound which is basically suicide when it comes to music, the quality nose dived faster Michael Avenattis legal career.. I hear people all the time say “Oh the 80s music was great” NO IT WAS NOT! It was horrendous! Freakin’ hairspray metal bands, stupid new wave crap, Kajagoogoo, Boy George, Madonna! Enough said, I couldn’t stand it, the grunge crap was even worse, mumbling morons and Jesus Christ poses.
And it’s still boring.
Internet Killed The Video Star.
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