My favorite MTV memory is Liquid Television. Weird cartoons like Aeon Flux and The Maxx and The Head
Those were all so good. Aeon Flux (even though it was American), Akira, and Ghost in the Shell got me into Anime.
That was also an incredible time for sketch comedy with The State!, Kids in The Hall, and Upright Citizens Brigade. You could just leave MTV on and always get something good.
Then they had to learn how much money they could make off reality tv with The Real World, and everything went to shit. It’s a damn shame.
Kids in The Hall
My favorite sketch show of all time, believe it or not. I'm squishing your head.
The Real World
Even the first Real World was a lot better than later years of MTV. I think one thing that MTV never gets credit for is helping to normalize homosexuality in US culture, which they did by always having a gay cast member in the show.
Mine is definitely Beavis and Butthead. That came much later, but I was just old enough to get beer and my friends and I would sit around, drinking beer watching Beavis and Butthead, and laughing our asses off. Yeah! Yeah! Cool.
I rewatched Beavis & Butthead Do America a few months back and laughed from start to finish. Mike Judge is a goddamn genius
For a long time whenever I wanted to mock creepy behavior I'd say "I see you wear braces. I wear braces too." In Butthead's seduction voice. People usually had no idea what I was referencing, but I got a kick out of it, and it was always pretty fun when someone got it.
Nirvana always gets credit for putting the nail in the coffin of hair metal, but I think it was more Beavis and Butthead's shtick of mocking 80s videos that did it.
Weren’t The Maxx and The Head part of MTV Oddities? Definitely a similar sort of vibe, but they were miniseries, rather than shorts on Liquid Television. I loved The Head. My friends and I thought it was hilarious.
Honestly kinda sad I missed the "golden years" of MTV. I didn't grow up with cable or satellite TV; so my sister and I would watch the shit out of Nickelodeon, cartoon network, discovery and animal planet when we were on vacation or at our grandparents house. However, I grew up with my parents waxing poetic about how MTV used to have the best music and they would have (supposedly) gotten a cable or satellite connection if only MTV still showed music videos.
Looking back it was obvious bullshit and they wouldn't have gotten a subscription even if MTV only played their favorite bands and music videos; but at the time it meant I was always hoping MTV would start showing music videos again so my parents would get cable and my sister and I could watch cartoons, science, nature, history and engineering shows.
Before Spotify I would find new music from MTV. Though back then I didn't know I liked techno more than anything else and I would've never found out from watching MTV
How did you find out? I realized that I really like EDM when I started going to nightclubs.
When flying back home with my family from a trip. Airplanes didnt have individual screens and the movie that was on was terrible (on the shared tvs), so I kept checking every radio station available until I heard (not 100% sure on this) Heaven from DJ Sammy and suddenly I REALLY like music for the first time in my life.
Tbh its kind of scary. When I think about how I could've spent my entire life without knowing I like that I also think of all the things I absolutely love to do but havent discovered yet. Our lives are brief and we really need to try to experience as much as possible
I was a metal head in highschool, so it was weird to me how much I enjoyed the music at the nightclubs and raves. It was especially great when the dance floor was packed, and you could feel the music in your bones, and everyone was bouncing off each other. These days EDM is my go-to music for writing code.
Though back then I didn’t know I liked techno more than anything else and I would’ve never found out from watching MTV
MTV had the show called AMP that would play very late at night. Electronic music videos during the late 90s.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBXO-yEpu7qfeUQoFVHFsZuHdHAxOW6O8
Yeah so, Im from Brazil and Im pretty sure they didnt have anything for techno here, also, I was looking for porn on tv whenever I managed to be up that late
I still prefer the MTV premier date as the line between Gen X and Millennials No specific date is going to be great at describing generations anyway, and its a fun landmark.
As a millennial I grew up a bit with MTV, but it was also not mine, if that makes sense. MTV is a Gen-X thing in my view.
I remember the first time I saw MTV.
Back in spring of 1982, traveling down the Baja California peninsula with my parents and brothers, we stayed a night at the La Pinta hotel in Guerrero Negro, a coastal town right on the state border between Baja and Baja Sur.
During dinner, I asked the man in charge if there was any chance of putting MTV on the hotel atrium television. He enthusiastically said yes, but they had to look it up, they'd never gotten such a request before, didn't know where to point the large dish out in the desert garden, which satellite MTV was in.
After dinner, I sat on the couch, a lone figure in the atrium, as hotel guests opted for the garden or their rooms. The VJs that night were JJ Jackson and Martha Quinn, played things like "Girls On Film" by Duran Duran, "China Girl" by David Bowie, "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" by Utopia, "Goodbye To You" by Scandal, "Escalator Of Life" by Robert Hazard, "Shock The Monkey" by Peter Gabriel, "Demolition Man" by The Police.
The ambiance created by this channel in this setting, was like an exciting shock of cool water, like being pulled from ancient times into a modern, more connected world. From my small-city, sheltered perspective.
This experience lasted for three or four hours, then at midnight it was lights out at the lobby and atrium, time to go to bed, and it was over.
I didn't see MTV live again for years, although 6-hour VHS taped recordings of MTV made the rounds among friends, the way tapes of recorded KROQ from LA did, our main connection to a larger world of music.
It was perfect, just enough to get my juices flowing at that age, like Harry Haller in Herman Hesse's "The Steppenwolf" - For Madmen Only, but for a teenager - but not enough for the rotation of videos to kick in and become repetitive. Right at that sweet spot that seared a mystique into my memory of the moment.
Back in spring of 1982
I think your memories are off a little date-wise. Bowie's Let's Dance was released in 1983 and Peter Gabriel's Security was released in late 1982.
Martha Quinn
I'm still in love with her.
That's true! It must have been "Ashes To Ashes" then, because I clearly remember Bowie that night.
"Shock The Monkey" must have been on the first recorded VHS tape of MTV I got my hands on, probably a year later.
My memory is all fucked up too and I have to look this shit up. I could have sworn Security came out in 1984, and it was probably my favorite album of the 80s.
Back in the 90s our school had one room with a permantently installed TV set. Class was taking part in this room once a week. When we all behaved - and we did! - we were allowed to watch MTV in this room for the last remaining 15 minutes of the lesson. It was the time where boy groups and Euro Dance music was at its peak. For us 5th or 6th-graders this was the most important thing every week.
With some brilliant directorial works from Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Chris Cunningham. It’s fucking unreal how good we had it in the 90s.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-UNeD55uORa4-rwV3dH5KFJPXbaZuEJ-
I didn’t know that! That’s the one with the firework overlays throughout the video, right?
I was surprised by this too. It looks like he was the director of photography, not the director. Robert Longo directed the video, and he directed the film Johnny Mnemonic.
But it's still pretty cool that Alton was the DP on that video.
Thanks a lot for that. Those are all really cool and this is a wonderful trip down memory lane
No problem. I still have the Directors Series DVD boxed set from these three. It was a great medium for creativity and some directors really took it to a new level. I really wish it still existed.
MTV was really great in the 80s. Sorry it went downhill so fast and so long... It's really insane that they can't just make a channel with all music videos. Call it OG MTV or something.
I found a channel recently, I think within the Roku channel, that plays nothing but old MTV videos.
It was no more than a couple weeks ago that I found it, but I'm not sure if I can find it again.
Nonetheless, it's out there somewhere.
Edit: It's in the Roku channel. Go to the music category and it'll take you to music videos galore. Some are playlists of thirty hours or so, some are live. I see seventies, eighties, nineties, and 2000s along with different genres.
Last time I had cable there were channels with music only they were like channel 674574 or some shit tho
I was born on the same day that Mtv went on the air, so I’ve grown up alongside them literally my whole life. That’s all I had really, no interesting story to go with that.
Weird, a couple of years ago, it was only 10 years. They crammed 4 years of music into two years apparently.
Well that one specifies good music. So apparently for 4 years they still had music, it was just bad music.
Too bad it doesn't still exist. Its just a empty filler channel and has been for over a decade.
My family didn't have cable TV growing up, so I had to watch MV3 which was a half-hour syndicated MTV knockoff out of Los Angeles where the videos always had a studio full of kids dancing superimposed over them. I was always self-conscious about dancing back then, but if you watch videos of 80s kids dancing you'll realize that everybody danced like shit back then.
They did give at least a solid twelve years of music. The best unplugged episodes were in the early nineties.
The early 90's is also when they started showing less and less music and more shit like The Real World, Road Trip and Beavis & Butt-Head. Even when I was a kid and saw Nirvana's Unplugged set (arguably the best episode of Unplugged), the saying that "MTV doesn't have music videos" was already a popular joke.
Music Television doesn't necessarily have to be showing videos, but showing something at least tangentially related to music would be nice. MTV is now what every channel is: put whatever is required in front of the viewer to sell ads. All channels are the same shit now.
Beavis and Butthead were riffing on music videos for almost half the show though at least. Sometimes was the best part
True. The modern ones feel weird to me with them instead riffing on The Jersey Shore or TikTok videos.
I think my favorite one was for Black Hole Sun.
"Hey, Butt-Head, what's a black hole?"
"Uhh... It's like a big bunghole in space that grinds everything up into diarrhea."
I love the series. I still regularly watch/listen to a couple of gigs.
KISS Unplugged is simply awesome. And Pearl Jam. And Alice in Chains. And... sigh good times, man.
...at least through ninety-five they still ran music videos overnight and weekly themed shows (120 minutes, headbanger's ball, MTV raps) at specific timeslots, but by the mid-nineties music videos had been relegated to graveyard-shift filler as the network increasingly focused on conventional programming...
...fourteen years is a pretty fair assessment, methinks...
